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Some of the confusion and fog surrounding the fatal bear attack and failure of bear spray in Wyoming has cleared. The investigators have done their job, and much was learned from the evidence on the ground. The attack occurred on Friday afternoon, the 14th of September, in the Teton Wilderness in Wyoming, near Terrace Mountain. The hunter, Corey Chubon, and Mark Uptain, the guide, had almost finished processing the 4×4 elk. Mark Uptain, the guide, was attacked first, as he was cutting off the elk's head.  The 250-pound sow grizzly gave no warning. She was first seen in an...

In a tragic story from Wyoming, Mark Uptain, a hunting guide, was killed by a grizzly bear on Friday.  His client fled the scene after throwing Mark a pistol. The two were retrieving an elk that had been wounded the previous day while they were bowhunting. The men were processing or packing out the elk when they were attacked by two large bears. It is difficult to categorize this as a defensive use of a firearm when no attempt was made to fire the handgun. The handgun was reported to be in a pack when the attack started. It...

BLACK MOUNTAIN, N.C. (AP) -- A woman says her dog has died after warding off a bear that broke into her family's North Carolina home. WRAL reported Saturday that the incident occurred in Black Mountain, a town outside Asheville in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Tiffany Merrill said she thought she was going to die when the bear broke in. She yelled to her children to shut their doors. Her dog Pickles quickly appeared. Merrill said the five-pound dog "started barking and got the bear's attention and got the bear outside and he saved my life." Merrill said she couldn't save...

RATON, N.M. - A New Mexico man is sharing his story of survival after he was attacked by a bear while walking his dogs. He killed the bear while its jaw was clamped around his leg, and the jaw stayed that way for a while. ... When he saw me, he pinned his ears down and immediately made a big charge at me," said Petrini. That's when the struggle began. "Down the hill, we went again rolling and he had bit me a time or two but he was never able to get on my upper body, so my legs...

Wes Perkins was the luckiest man to walk the earth, this guy survived the most gruesome bear attack ever. The bear attack was so horrific, hard to look at or to think about. The following is a story from Anchorage Daily News about survival, incredible willpower, and how the unbelievable can become the truth. So how did this nightmare of situation come about? It was essentially a bear hunt gone bad, a routine and pleasant hunt that took a turn for the worse when Perkins came across the wrong bear at the wrong time. Rather than fleeing like most usually...

Here's proof that us folks in the U.S. aren’t the only idiots when it comes to wildlife interaction, a man in India was reportedly mauled to death when he tried to take a "selfie" of himself with a bear. According to an Indie article, Prabhu Bhatara was returning from a wedding with some others when they stopped for a potty break. Seeing an injured bear, he decided it would be a good idea to get close to it and take a "selfie". There's a video, that shows the bear chewing and shaking this guy. There was quite a crowd there,...

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. – A 5-year-old girl suffered serious injuries after she was attacked by a bear overnight in east Orchard Mesa. The girl had gone outside around 2:30 a.m. early Sunday to investigate noises she thought were being made by her dog, the girl’s mother told Colorado Parks and Wildlife officers. But the girl’s mother heard her daughter screaming and went outside to see a “large black bear” dragging her daughter, CPW officials said. The bear dropped the girl after her mother screamed at it. Their home is in the east Orchard Mesa area, above the Colorado River corridor,...

Todd Orr is the survivor of a double mauling by a grizzly bear on 1 October, 2016.  When the bear charged him, he used bear spray in an attempt to stop the attack. It did not work. Todd was taught that bear spray was superior to pistols for stopping charging bears. He took the use of bear spray seriously, kept an up to date can of spray in a holster, and had practiced quick drawing the spray and using it. He had used bear spray on a black bear twelve years previously. In that instance he surprised the sleeping...

A Florida man Andy Meunier was taking his dog out for a walk when a bear attacked him. It was a short while after leaving his Naples home when he turned to see a black bear staring at him. Without warning, the bear attacked. Neunier recalls, “Everything went in slow motion,” “Everything went in slow motion. It was just as scary as you can imagine,” Meunier told ABC affiliate WZVN. “It was standing in front of me and I tried to turn left real quick and get back in the house, and caught an uppercut from a brown, or a...

On 19 December, 2017, a bear attacked a dog and her master in Northern Minnesota.  The attacks occurred at McDougal Lake a little after 10 a.m. The unusual bear attack, in midwinter Minnesota, would have been a perfect reason to use a defensive firearm.Instead, the unarmed dog owner went hand to hand with the bear, and was bitten on the abdomen. From twincities.com: ISABELLA, Minn. — Seeing his dog pinned to the ground in a black bear’s jaw, William Vagts ran to the bear, threw his arms around its neck and tried to pull the bear backward. “I didn’t...

I have not found any other reports of this attack and the defensive use of spray and firearms. This is not unusual. None of the people involved were injured, except for the exposure to bear spray, which did not incapacitate them. This story was published in goHUNT.com on 27 December, 2017. The writer is Jake Purlee. Although not explicitly stated, a comment on Jake's facebook page says the the events recounted occurred two years ago in 2015. Jake and his friends were hunting elk and wolves. They encountered evidence of bears and decided to leave the area. The two...

Over 20 years ago in 1996, I was driving to Phoenix, Arizona to catch a flight to Wisconsin. I had the radio on. The news was reporting a horrific bear attack on Mount Lemon, near Tucson, Arizona. A teenage girl had been badly mauled by a bear, in her tent, as part of a 4-H outing.A camp counselor had accessed a handgun and shot the bear, driving it off. As the hours rolled along, the AP stories started getting vaguer and the story less heroic.  The Internet wasn't well developed in 1996. It took me several years to track...

In a rapid-fire drama Davy Crockett would be proud to regale, a 68-year-old man living deep in Minnesota's northwoods wrestled an angry bear off his little dog. Bill Vagts and Darla, his 30-pound Corgi, survived their bite wounds from the bear, which then lumbered down the road near McDougal Lake and attacked two other men Tuesday morning

An off duty Wyoming Game Warden, Chris Queen, was hunting elk in the Little Sunlight Basin north of Cody, Wyoming, not far from the Wyoming border. He was returning to his horses late in the day, about 6:30 in the evening. The sun had set 15 minutes earlier, but there was still considerable light.  A grizzly sow bluff charged Chris, then charged him full out. From ktvh.com:Queen told investigators he slowly backed away believing the sow would return to her cubs and move on. But, after returning to her cubs, the sow exhibited even more aggressive behavior.Suddenly, the animal...

On August 15, 2017, a 42-year-old man jumped a fence at a roadside cafe and tried to feed some caged bears. One of the bear grabbed his arm and bit it off at the shoulder. A man from the Shelekhov district of the Irkutsk region was seen in the distance on a closed circuit security camera jumping a fence to approach some caged bears. The man, Andrey Sakharovsky, was carrying a plastic bag with some cans of condensed milk which he had intended to feed to the animals, which are a part of the cafe’s roadside attraction. Sadly, Sakharovsky got...

While sleeping under the stars in the mountains near Boulder County, Colorado, on Sunday morning, a 19-year-old camp counselor was awoken by what he initially perceived to be a loud crunching sound. The sound, it turned out, was a black bear pressing onto his head as it dragged him from his sleeping bag. Speaking with local Denver news station KMGH-TV, the teen, who was identified only as Dylan, claimed he believed the crunching sound was caused by the bear's teeth digging into his skull. As the bear tugged at him, Dylan and the four other campers sleeping by the lake...

There are many ghost stories to hear about but for this Montana hiker, you'd have live a lifetime of scary tales in a single, death-defying day. Todd Orr survived, but barely and he had a firearm that he chose not to use in respect for the bear. If you've ever wondered what it's like to be attacked by a bear, here's the story in vivid detail as posted on his Facebook: Hello everyone. Thought I should share yesterday morning's Grizzly incident. I took an early morning hike in the Madison valley to scout for elk. Knowing that bears are common...

Todd Orr Relied on Bear Spray instead of the Pistol he had with him While discussing the effectiveness of pistols to defend against bear attacks, a consistent theme is the claim that pistols are not effective, are difficult to use, and that many more people who use handguns are badly mauled than use pistols successfully. I tried to recall an incident where someone used a pistol in defense against a bear, where it did not work.  I could not remember one, so I posted this request in response to the claim. From freerepublic.com: “Actually, there are legions of people...

If you have been reading about defensive uses of firearms against bears, you have likely read that bear spray is more effective than firearms, and that a large percentage of people faced with bear attacks failed to disengage the safety.  Both are based on a highly flawed study. In a discussion at The Truth About Guns, a commenter, writing about the subject thought that a high percentage, maybe 20%, of defenders, failed to take off the safety.  The commenter did some research, found the study by Tom Smith and Stephen Herroro and others, and corrected the number to "8...

Another documented bear spray failure.  In this case the victim chose to use bear spray instead of the pistol he had with him.  It is an interesting contrast with Kim Woodman, who was also charged by a sow grizzly with cubs.  Kim had a 10 mm pistol, a Glock model 20.  He stopped the charging grizzly at almost contact distance. Kim only had 30 yards to react.  Todd says the grizzly charged him from 80 yards off. Link to video From Todd's facebook post:  I yelled a number of times so she knew I was human and would hopefully...