Don Baccus wrote:

>Speculation is useless. You trust his experience, fine. However, you're
>>arguing that you also trust his INEXPERIENCE - in this case, his
>inexperience >with any actual use of pepper spray on grizzly bears.

His experience with pepper spray, along with my own and others suggests to
me that a consistent spray is less than reliable. Therefore, I don't trust
pepper spray as my line of defense in a grizzly attack. Weather conditions
also play a major role - wind can significantly impact the use of sprays.

Do you have a brand of pepper spray you find reliable? I would like to
know of it if you do. I'm always open for new information.

There is a lot of advice out there concerning how to properly handle a bear
encounter. However, even the experts disagree in many ways. It doesn't
take much reading from different sources to see this. Speculation is
really all there is to go on when considering the use of pepper spray on an
all-out-to-get-you grizzly bear charge or the freak attack by a predaceous
black bear. No studies, that I know of, have proven it to be effective in
either case - it should have some effect but no one really knows. Rogers
points out in his book that he has never seen a hungry bear that he
couldn't get rid of with a squirt of capsiacin - however, he also states
that to date, no one has tested it on a highly motivated or predaceous
bear.

Anyone want to be first in line?


Andy Sorensen
Anchorage, Alaska
ajstudio at ptialaska.net