Posted on 05/15/2015 9:48:12 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Ralph Persson, a hunter in Jämtland, northern Sweden, scared off a charging bear by roaring at the animal as it attacked him, it has emerged.
While out training a new hunting dog, Persson sensed a change in the animal's bark. Seconds later a brown bear came charging at him from the woods. “I screamed as much as I could and made myself very big,” Persson told Sundsvall Tidning newspaper, in an interview which has gone viral over the past week.
The bear quickly veered off back into the trees, utterly surprised by Persson’s ferocity. Both Ralph and his wife Lena filmed the encounter which can be seen on the newspaper’s website.
Persson has come across many bears over his years as a hunter and it’s this experience that helped save his life. But he didn't take the passive approach many advise. “To lie down and play dead? I do not believe in that,” he told the newspaper.
His trick was to be more adversarial, a tactic he rather surprisingly credits to birds.
“I have seen in the past how even cranes have chased bears by folding up their wings."
Most bear experts agree that many more bears have seen humans in Sweden than humans have seen bears, so shy is the Scandinavian brown bear. They tend to steer clear of us. But Persson admits he may have got too close. “This time, I went over the limit. You have to have respect for the animals.”
There have been at least three bear attacks in northern Sweden in the last 12 months, although none have been fatal. Hundreds of brown bears are killed in Sweden every year as part of an annual cull.
Bear attacks on humans are relatively rare in Sweden, compared to the US, where on average two people a year die as a result of an encounter with a bear. By contrast, there have only been two fatalities caused by bear attacks over the last century in Sweden.
More likely the lutefisk on his breath.
hmmm... pretty impressive - keeps filming as the bear charges him.
Crazy Swedes...
Was outside with my baby Westie one night when we heard an ominous noise from the back yard. We’d had a bear sighting and coyotes so I raised up my robe like Batgirl to make myself large and ROARED, my brave trembling puppy at my side - to discover it was the sprinkler system coming on.
Skyrim belongs to the Nords! ping
Did the sprinkler system run away wimpering?
“Did the sprinkler system run away wimpering?”
Oh yeah! We won that one. It was a great moment.
I’m surprised to hear they have bears in northern Sweden.
They must hibernate about 8 months a year.
Do they have salmon runs up there? If not, I can’t imagine where they would find enough protein to survive.
I know they have some large grazing animals in Sweden, like reindeer, but trying to run down a reindeer would consume huge amounts of energy, so, once again, I’m surprised there are enough reindeer calves, etc., to feed a robust and healthy community of bears.
We come from the land of ice and snow.
Where the cold winds and the hot springs blow.
We are your overlords.
All hail Hiking kitty’s ..
The last time I saw a bear was last summer. I was sitting on a rock next to a lake in the Adirondacks. I looked at him/her, she/he looked at me and she/he wandered off. This has happened before. They don’t normally charge. My husband and kids had went into town for some reason. They come out into public in places where people tend to leave food out. A few days later we drove by a campsite a little farther down the road where there was a bear (I think the same one) with his head in a family sized Doritos bag munching away.
Oh, and my bear was a typical black bear.
I spent quite a bit of time TDY at King Salmon, AK working Civil Engineering operations. We spent months in the bush at remote sites and King Salmon was everyone’s favorite (at least in the summer). It was right below Brooks Camp along the river and was, and still is, the best place in the world to see bears.
Anyway, one of the guys decided to get a really nice camera and spend some time at Brooks Camp. He got a new 300mm lens and was taking pictures of a huge sow. She was a few hundred yards away when he began shooting. She was lumbering toward him, but being immersed in the great shots he was getting, he didn’t realize she was literally on top of him until she stuck her nose in the lens.
His first response was “play dead.” After all, everyone knows that what you do with bears. The sow, probably satiated on salmon and berries, bit his head as if to see what he was—not a hard bite for a bear, but enough to draw blood. The man was freaked out, but overcome with shock and fear; he just lay motionless and didn’t even cry out.
The bear, meanwhile, decided to find a better taste, drew around him and took a pretty good bite of that tender area politely known as the gluteus maximus. At this, the man screamed bloody murder and the poor bear, now scared out of her wits, ran off over the horizon.
This man now swore by the “scream your head off and look as big as possible method” when encountering a bear. I can’t help but laugh every time I hear a bear story that doesn’t involve death.
I shot a bear in my pajamas once. How it got in my pajamas I'll never know...
A feel good story showing all, see you don’t need a firearm to protect yourself just roar at them.
Some times it works some times it does not I prefer my roars back up with a high quality fire arm of a major caliber.
FWIW, the Euro brown bear is basically the same thing as a grizzly, much larger than a black bear.
Same here. Anybody out in bear country without a weapon is a fool.
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