Honestly, when you're dealing with the scale of the Internet, ie. billions of people, do the disgusting comments of a few dozen, hundreds or even thousands of people matter? It's not something you encounter in the "real" world, but it feels like we need to change our scales logarthimically when talking about Internet comments.
Probably a million people read about that article and 99% didn't think those horrible thoughts, but maybe less than 1% did and commented on social media. Just by sheer numbers, you're going to get a lot of terrible comments, it seems like this is the "new normal" and growing thicker skin is something we all need to deal with, unfortunately. To a regular person, a few dozen shitty comments will be hard to take from real people, but when considering the scale of the Internet, it's probably not significant and it's something we all need to learn, unfortunately.
Even in person you'll probably get a considerable number of awful comments, there are simply a large amount of insensitive people out there. It doesn't help that they feel emboldened by anonymity.
Insensitivity, I think, can be a coping mechanism for some. I was a teenager during 9/11. I remember having a good cry about it and then spending the rest of the day looking at and sharing wildly inappropriate photos (that we now call memes).
I agree. Perhaps evidenced by yourself, the people who we call insensitive or trolls today, could be the pillars of society tomorrow. We should be very careful when trying to answer the question "what do we do with these people?".
"In the aftermath, I found myself surprised and disturbed by the amount of attention the attack received. I felt intensely protective of my grieving friends and my shocked, horrified community—I wanted to shield them from the intrusive phone calls, the strangers creeping into their social-media profiles, the awful, cruel comments appended to every news story."
...so I wrote an article in Outside magazine about the other bad people writing articles about it.
Bushcraft is one of the world's oldest traditions, passed down for hundreds of thousands of years. 'Survival' is merely a skill, but Bushcraft transcends that as not just a way to thrive off the land, but as a way of life and mutual respect for nature. The ingenuity and respect some native peoples have for the land isn't just breath taking, but a living piece of prehistory!
Most western folks don't respect or understand wildlife in the same way our ancestors did. They were not taught and we replaced these skills with engineering and technology.
Like deer in headlights, we modern humans sometimes get caught in the headlights of nature as well, like happened here. A hurt and starving bear just trying to survive saw a meal and nothing more. I don't know what happened, but in a situation like that, it seems fairly easy to not make any mistakes and still get attacked.
I know this article is mainly a social critique, but I can't help but have my current opinion reaffirmed by everything I read: If you spend any time around dangerous wildlife, whether a mosquito or a bear, you NEED to be able to mitigate the danger of that wildlife or you're playing a dangerous game. Like a starving bear, some variables are unknown, uncontrollable and unmitigable except through one thing: firearms.
For what it’s worth InReach is not a satellite phone. There are no voice calls on it. It’s more like a satellite texting device, you can send and receive text messages via satellite (and also use this to share your location). It’s much cheaper than a satellite phone both for the device and the subscription itself.
It's a publication for outdoor enthusiasts (and armchair enthusiasts too) who care about such details (equipment and its capabilities). Not all satellite products work in all regions, and readers might be interested in what worked in this case, as well as what someone might choose Also, it's not a sat phone, it's a sat messenger (no voice, only text messages), as well as emergency beacon (though the article does not go into enough detail about whether he used the emergency functionality or just the texting).
Is the comment of "she should have had a gun" really that insensitive? I say this as someone who grew up in bear country and knew people that had bear spray readily accessible when outdoors. I'm sure some of them would've carried handguns if Canadian gun laws were less restrictive and not dictated by urbanite easterners out of fear.
I don't know in which bear country you grew up, but good luck killing a grizzly attacking you by surprise with most guns. Not that this is fundamentally impossible (her husband did it, after all) but not with a handgun. These guys are nothing like the black bears you may see in other parts of America...
Grew up in Alberta, but spent a lot of time as a kid in the Kootenays in British Columbia, so no stranger to grizzlies. I've seen a few while hiking as well, very scary.
I think the idea that a handgun cannot penetrate a Grizzly's skull is a myth anyways. Plenty of accounts of people shooting attacking grizzlies dead with a large calibre handgun. Bear-spray can work but what if it doesn't or what if there's wind working against you?
A large caliber handgun isn't easy to control and aim for most people. Imagine having an infant with you (even in a snugi/backpack). I'm a large man, and unless I had frequently trained with a 44 Mag or larger, I think the bear would win easily.
Sure, it is not _literally_ impossible to kill a grizzly with a handgun. But, to quote yourself:
> Handgun can work, but what if it doesn't?
The point is not that it should be forbidden to bring guns when you hike in grizzly territory, but that by experience, many people who do are also the least knowledgeable about bears (and I say it that way to stay polite). Who cares if I let meat leftovers next to the campsite, I have a gun! Who cares if I go down a trail rangers explicitly told me not to because of the bear presence, I have a gun!
Killing the bear isn't the objective, stopping it from killing you is,the same goes for legitimate self-defense against humans. And it turns out that's frequently possible, even with human self-defense handgun calibers. You might discourage the bear with a wound, pain is a great motivator and works half the time with humans, but for bears disrupting a shoulder for example works well. Here's one study of 63 cases with 95% success rate: https://www.ammoland.com/2019/03/pistols-or-handguns-used-to...
And in serious bear country, serious people carry serious long guns, a 12 gauge shotgun with slugs, or a centerfire rifle with a significant payload. And it's easier to shoot those well under stress.
Yes, I can also google "can you kill grizzly bears with a handgun" and look at the first result. And I can also google "pepper spray bear success", which tells me that:
> "Red pepper spray stopped bears’ undesirable behavior 92% of the time when used on brown bears, 90% for black bears, and 100% for polar bears.
> Of all persons carrying sprays, 98% were uninjured by bears in close-range encounters.
Which then raises the question: which deterrent is the most successful, gun or pepper spray?
> And in serious bear country, serious people carry serious long guns, a 12 gauge shotgun with slugs, or a centerfire rifle with a significant payload. And it's easier to shoot those well under stress.
Source? Sure, I guess it's "safer", but also way less practical in many situations. 99% of the time, just making noise and let the bear do its stuff without bothering him suffice to avoid any issue.
Way inside Tueller Drill range (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill), if the grizzly disabled her in the first blow her situation was indeed impossible. If not, and that's reported by some survivors, depending on what was hit and how a handgun was holstered, a handgun is a lot more ergonomic than a spray can, for example in pointing, it would have given her a better chance to strike a counter blow.
>The investigators’ reconstruction of the attack made it clear: even if, somehow, Valérie had had a loaded gun in her hand when the bear made his move, she wouldn’t have had a chance
Yes, humans can be really insensitive. Most just don't have the capability of seeing things from other perspectives, like the bear's.
That guy was starving. He was wounded. He ate a porcupine!
The humans were in his traditional territory. I'm sure he didn't like messing with them, because they're dangerous and unpredictable, but it was a desperate situation.
And anyway, there are too many of them. They're over-populating, and they have few natural predators. A cull is the best thing for both the humans and the environment.
So he ate one baby, out of literally billions on the planet. Not such a big deal when it's a matter of survival.
And anyway, that baby would have grown up to be another first world consumer, destroying huge swaths of bear habitat and belching CO2 into the air. Since we're already over 400 ppm, we really must do something right away.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 57.5 ms ] threadProbably a million people read about that article and 99% didn't think those horrible thoughts, but maybe less than 1% did and commented on social media. Just by sheer numbers, you're going to get a lot of terrible comments, it seems like this is the "new normal" and growing thicker skin is something we all need to deal with, unfortunately. To a regular person, a few dozen shitty comments will be hard to take from real people, but when considering the scale of the Internet, it's probably not significant and it's something we all need to learn, unfortunately.
...so I wrote an article in Outside magazine about the other bad people writing articles about it.
Most western folks don't respect or understand wildlife in the same way our ancestors did. They were not taught and we replaced these skills with engineering and technology.
Like deer in headlights, we modern humans sometimes get caught in the headlights of nature as well, like happened here. A hurt and starving bear just trying to survive saw a meal and nothing more. I don't know what happened, but in a situation like that, it seems fairly easy to not make any mistakes and still get attacked.
I know this article is mainly a social critique, but I can't help but have my current opinion reaffirmed by everything I read: If you spend any time around dangerous wildlife, whether a mosquito or a bear, you NEED to be able to mitigate the danger of that wildlife or you're playing a dangerous game. Like a starving bear, some variables are unknown, uncontrollable and unmitigable except through one thing: firearms.
Did this read to anyone else like an extremely odd product placement advertisement? Why not just say 'satellite phone'?
I think the idea that a handgun cannot penetrate a Grizzly's skull is a myth anyways. Plenty of accounts of people shooting attacking grizzlies dead with a large calibre handgun. Bear-spray can work but what if it doesn't or what if there's wind working against you?
> Handgun can work, but what if it doesn't?
The point is not that it should be forbidden to bring guns when you hike in grizzly territory, but that by experience, many people who do are also the least knowledgeable about bears (and I say it that way to stay polite). Who cares if I let meat leftovers next to the campsite, I have a gun! Who cares if I go down a trail rangers explicitly told me not to because of the bear presence, I have a gun!
And in serious bear country, serious people carry serious long guns, a 12 gauge shotgun with slugs, or a centerfire rifle with a significant payload. And it's easier to shoot those well under stress.
> "Red pepper spray stopped bears’ undesirable behavior 92% of the time when used on brown bears, 90% for black bears, and 100% for polar bears. > Of all persons carrying sprays, 98% were uninjured by bears in close-range encounters.
Which then raises the question: which deterrent is the most successful, gun or pepper spray?
> And in serious bear country, serious people carry serious long guns, a 12 gauge shotgun with slugs, or a centerfire rifle with a significant payload. And it's easier to shoot those well under stress.
Source? Sure, I guess it's "safer", but also way less practical in many situations. 99% of the time, just making noise and let the bear do its stuff without bothering him suffice to avoid any issue.
>The investigators’ reconstruction of the attack made it clear: even if, somehow, Valérie had had a loaded gun in her hand when the bear made his move, she wouldn’t have had a chance
Really bad luck and a tragedy either way.
That guy was starving. He was wounded. He ate a porcupine!
The humans were in his traditional territory. I'm sure he didn't like messing with them, because they're dangerous and unpredictable, but it was a desperate situation.
And anyway, there are too many of them. They're over-populating, and they have few natural predators. A cull is the best thing for both the humans and the environment.
So he ate one baby, out of literally billions on the planet. Not such a big deal when it's a matter of survival.
And anyway, that baby would have grown up to be another first world consumer, destroying huge swaths of bear habitat and belching CO2 into the air. Since we're already over 400 ppm, we really must do something right away.
All in all, it was for the best.
See! HN people can be sensitive!