Bears, guns and pepper spray

This is a comment on this article:

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/bear-attack-not-to-worry/#comment-118114

I had a personal experience when pepper spray was catastrophically ineffective against a grizzly in Alaska. I worked for Dr. Colleen Handel's USGS NBS bird project in Alaska's Wrangell-St Elias National Park in summer 1997. We all had to carry bear -grade (2 million unit) pepper sprays. One of the assistants was attacked by a grizzly in June and she hit the bear right in the face with the spray. The bear slammed her down, she got into the tortoise position and got slammed down twice when she looked up. She finally gave up but the bear walked away after some time. Fortunately her field partner had ran off to seek help. They evac'ed her to Juneau where she had over 300 stitches and came back to the project after a month. Brave woman. Three weeks later, they found her pepper spray can completely chewed up by the angry bear. Seasoning I guess.

After this, we got trained by the Feds and a former bear poacher in a plea bargain in the use of Navy-issue shotguns with three-inch slugs. We had to keep the safety off to be ready to shoot in the dense spruce forest with little visibility.

One day I was measuring a tree with two others, the guns on the ground. I heard a rustle and looked up to see a griz charging from 20 yards away. I opened my mouth to shout "bear" but no sound came. I ran to the gun. With two colleagues around me, I decided not to load it as I was turning. I flinched in expectation of the bear slamming into me. When I turned, the bear was running away. The other biologist had shouted "Dont run" at me, which was enough to scare the bear. The whole thing was less than a second. Until that point, I was not sure if I could shoot a majestic grizzly, but I was glad to have the gun. Later that summer, I spent two weeks in Denali National Park backcountry, backpacking alone without a gun, sometimes a quarter mile away from a griz. I still think a gun is not necessary 99.99% of the time. And there is a thrill about not being the top predator out there.