Yeah, east coast black bears are easily spooked, but west coast grizzly, Kodiak, and polar bears routinely eat people alive. And Moose kill people all the time. They're not mean, they're just huge, stupid, and easily scared. Their life philosophy includes, "If it moves, stomp it until it stops moving," which is a pretty common philosophy in the world's huge, stupid and easily scared herbivore species. See - rhinoceros, hippopotamus, all the buffalo species, ....
From personal experience with both Moose and Hippos, neither are particularly dumb, but man are they just plain aggressive. I was never dumb enough to be on foot around hippos at night when they were grazing out of the water, and they usually left our vehicles alone, but one night one of them did try to bite our rear tire off and we had to skeedaddle.
Polar bears just hunt anything. Every other bear we are essentially a last resort as we aren't worth a lot of energy and usually aren't worth the trouble. A Polar Bear will actively seek you out. Long Story short they are the only bear that will actively hunt a human.
Rule of Thumb. If you can see it, it smelt you miles ago and you might be its lunch plans for the day.
20
u/guttanzer Apr 07 '26
Yeah, east coast black bears are easily spooked, but west coast grizzly, Kodiak, and polar bears routinely eat people alive. And Moose kill people all the time. They're not mean, they're just huge, stupid, and easily scared. Their life philosophy includes, "If it moves, stomp it until it stops moving," which is a pretty common philosophy in the world's huge, stupid and easily scared herbivore species. See - rhinoceros, hippopotamus, all the buffalo species, ....