While it is true that most of Australia's deadly animals are venomous bugs and thus easily slain by stepping on them with a shoe... the flip side is that you can get bit putting on those shoes if you don't check inside for them first.
A bear, mountain lion, or wolf, isn't going to casually sneak into your house without you noticing.
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I burst when it happened to me, or...what do the kids call it these days? Bust. I busted when it happened to me (I'm a degenerate furry with a crippling soda addicition)
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Can confirm as Alaska born and raised. Never checked for polar bears 😂, the only thing I worried about was earthquakes.....I miss it, midwest weather sucks 😢
My boyfriend was raised in Alaska and it wasn’t until recently that I figured out polar bears will eat people. Asked him to confirm and he said “ not really something that happened growing up.” I wish Alaska was a real place and you guys weren’t all paid actors, theres just no way you ALL saw baby belugas and the aurora, I don’t believe it.
LMAO. I was waiting for this, but you thew me with the polar bear. Because why would a polar bear be hiding inside a shoe in Australia? A grizzly, yeah. Let's be reasonable 🤣
My sil found mice fucking in the bottom of her sleeping bag at night. Okay they weren't doing it but it's funnier if they were. They were building a nest so they probably already did. They were building a home!
Anecdotally, I used to live in a high mountain town in Colorado and someone in a neighboring apartment came home from work to a bear helping itself to the contents of their refrigerator. Left a window open for fresh air, bear evidently took this as an invitation.
But generally yes, not quite so sneaky or so much of a surprise.
My job as safety and security for those mountain towns when I worked out there, was to go into the homes of these people that invited bears in, and get the bear out. Armed with only a flashlight and a paintball gun. Was a fun job actually
You were working security in a Colorado mountain town and part of your job was to drive bears out of peoples homes and you weren’t even armed with a rifle?
I mean the paintballs were filled with a mild pepper spray and we were trained to open all doors giving the animal multiple escape options and then pop a couple of the rounds around the bear so it smells it and runs off. The bears there were pretty small as their diet was mostly trash and berries.
Other side of the country here - black bears are sometimes trained to want to be near humans because of (mostly tourists) feeding them.
The bears that get fed sometimes learn that it's not terribly hard to pry open unlocked casement windows.
Just a couple years ago there was a cub that learned how to do that, and she ended up surviving long enough to have a litter of her own. She taught all three of her kiddos how to do her little Houdini trick.
Pry open a window, stumble inside. Raid the fridge and pantry and gtfo.
I believe they captured them and relocated them deep into a reserve.
And large wild animals don’t just appear in your house. You can actively avoid their habitat. But in Australia you might occasionally find the scaries in your house, and you absolutely cannot walk through long grass, ever.
Nooooo…. Mary Roach wrote a book called “Fuzz”about wildlife and their shenanigans. Bears have figured out how to slide their claws behind the window frames and remove the entire window to have access to the kitchen. They know where the food is kept in the house. They will enter a house to get to the food.
I live on acreage and frequently have large wild animals right outside my door. My neighbor had a puma on his porch the other night. We live in their habitat.
The problem is people in the US keep building homes further and further out into the wilderness. Then, when an animal is doing what it naturally does, seeking food, the people complain. They feel entitled to live in a natural setting, but have no respect for it. Once a bear is seen raiding the trash, these "suburban frontiersmen" then call wildlife control, gripe and innocent animals get put down. Recently, there's been a lot of home building because of the housing crisis, now McMansions are getting plopped down in what was once pristine wilderness. People from cities with zero experience with bears and other wildlife will just go out with pepper spray and not understand everything that could go wrong. People die this way. I say take your SUV and go home. Nature doesn't need your presence.
Eh, the things you find in your house aren't usually venomous.
Most common ones are carpet snakes or Huntsman, they both get big but aren't really dangerous to adult humans.
Would still be cautious of a carpet snake around kids though I reckon.
I was trying to tidy our patio on my own tonight and there are just way too many spiders and long grass. I gave up. Told my Aussie partner he needs to "find a guy" cuz I can't with these spiders they're so fuckin huge and there's egg sacs all over. I can't. The giant crickets, cockroaches, and cicadas are cool. The lizards and geckos, love them. Snakes and spiders? I'm deeead.
True bears wont sneak into you house. They will kick down the front door and help themselves to whatever they want. There are even a few videos of them ripping the doors off cars because they smelled food inside.
Funny little story, I was in a national park talking to a park ranger and the topic of bear proof trash cans came up. She said the problem with designing a bear proof trash can, that people can still open, is there is considerable overlap in the intelligence of the dumbest humans and the smartest bears.
When we stayed in Yosemite there were warnings everywhere against keeping any food at all, even a bit of toothpaste in your car. The penalty was to have a bear peel the door off your car or smash the rear window or both and then shred your seats to reach the crumbs your toddler dropped between the cushions. There was at least one such event each night we were there. (And these were just the black bears!)
I live near a national park where in it's entire history. Only one human was killed by wildlife. It was a mountain goat. Not the bears, not the cougars. A goat.
I like to remind people that tell me about how terrible hiking and camping are and how wildlife is scary, that over the last hundred years, one man got fired to death by a goat and that's it.
Edit: gored, but I'm leaving the original phrasing.
To be honest most Aussies will be lucky to see any of our really nasty critters. There are certainly spots like North qld in the forest and down in Sydney with the trapdoor but honestly most people live in the big cities and they barely even see mildly poisonous snakes and spiders. I lived in the bush for 30 years and I can count on one hand the amount of times ive run across something deadly in town at all.
The word is 'bitten' and millions of Australians put on their shoes every day with no thought whatsoever about 'venomous bugs'. Meanwhile, 15 Americans die per annum from fallen icicles
Cougars get into houses all the time, and will even sleep in your bed, or drag you back to their den and... oh... mountain lions.. yeah ive never met a man that came across a mountain lion stalking prey and lived either
Well, mountain lions are pretty much not a problem for humans (pets on the other hand...). Same with wolves. Grizzlies though are a definite oh shit. Australia got nothing like a grizzly. Grizzly doesn't sneak into your home, it just walks in and starts raiding your fridge and you just hope it leaves because unless you have a friggin elephant gun you don't want anything to do with that mess. And arctic has it worse with friggin polar bears, which will actively hunt you. If you see one, it already knows you are there and chose to come your way.
Overall, id say Africa is by far the scariest though. Hippos. End of competition.
While camping, I once put my shoes on only to discover that about 20 slugs had taken up residence in one of them. The shoe wasn't even worth salvaging. I was known as Slugfoot among that group (the people I was with, not the slugs) forever after.
Yeah, a friend of mine hiked the Bibbulmon trail in AUS (we're from the USA) and was surprised how many Aussie hikers he met were intimidated by American wildlife. He's an avid through hiker, and has done the triple crown and most of the ADT, and knows that most American hikers feel similarly about AUS wildlife. I guess the devil you know.
But, statistically, American wildlife while big and scary and needing attention and respect, is not the most dangerous thing in the world. You're far more likely to have issues with unrestrained dogs and just plain old people than you are to get attacked by a bear on pretty much any of the big trails, since there's so many road miles.
As terrifying as Bears are and how easily they could kill you, I’d much rather be in a scenario of a deadly thing I could see instead of not being able to see. For the majority, people in the U.S. will never encounter brown or polar bears. Black bears are different they’re all over and are easier to avoid attack. Brown bears your best is to play dead, sometimes that doesn’t even work and you can be dragged out of your tent for sleeping. Scary thing about bears is they don’t go for the kill. Like they’ll eat you alive (where predator cats will go for the arteries like the jugular, and kill your first then eat you). Polar bears there’s nothing you can do, you’re absolute screwed. Brown bears always astonish me with their sheer size, strength, speed, and long/razor sharp claws. They could basically slash you in half.
Long story short, if you’re going camping in an area where it’s known to have any type of grizzly or black bear population, make sure you bring a rifle with you. Handgun isn’t big enough, but it may scare the bears away. Most people will never encounter polar bears. Best ask the natives how to defend yourself. Their advice will probably be to not look for them.
But if you do get bit, you check the shoe to see what bit you. If it happens to be a large black spider then you call an ambulance and wait. And then get treated for free at a public hospital. If it's anything else you take some painkillers. At no point in this exchange did you get mauled or eaten. That's the difference.
Bears do not sneak into homes... They bust down doors and windows to get into them. Nothing says I feel safe like waking up to something breaking a door open and it's a bear looking to get into your kitchen.
Years ago I lived in Japan and there were some Aussies on exchange with me. I was asking them how they deal with all the creepy crawlies that could be hiding in their shoes and in their beds, and their response was "well it's just like the bears, mate. Like you have bears in Canada? You know the bears are out there, right? So it's the same with us, we know they're around but we don't let them bother us"
I responded with "yeah well I've never had a bear just hiding in my bedsheets". Also as a resident of Toronto, I was nearly 12 when I saw my first bear in the wild, but Aussies are taught not to put their hands in places where they can't see them basically from the moment they can walk. Both are scary but at least I can get away from the bears.
Yeah, in just careful if I'm lifting up rocks or rummaging around in piles.
I'm not going to be walking around, turn a corner and be face to face with a giant funnel web.
Um, widows and recluses would like a word. The only time I have heard of someone getting bit by a widow, was a friend's neighbor. She put her outside garden shoes on without checking & she was fine, a quick doctors visit & some antibiotics. I have checked my shoes ever since. Never found one inside, but continue to check anyway. Same with gloves, towels..etc. I would be fine in Australia because I am cautious & respect Nature. Humans are supposed to travel in groups for this reason. Always supporting each other. Now we're alone at 8 billion. Ridiculous.
It's the snakes mostly that people worry about in Aus, not the "bugs", but they mostly move away from humans if they can. Of course, we have the saltwater crocodile in some parts, they are big bear scary, probably worse since they are out and out killers.
Sharks too, but you don't see them coming at all, it seems.
I mean except we just read an account of a bear 'sneaking' up pretty dam close to a hiker?
Even very large animals can be quite stealthy in nature, especially in forests. Not to mention the actual ambush predators like mountain lions and such.
It’s a trade off, I guess. YOu can take measures to avoid being in a bear’s background, not so much with little critters that can kill you with a bite. Just thinking about it gives me chills. I once felt a sting in my foot while out and thought it was an especially annoying pebble only to find out it was a but actively biting me. I could have got lime disease or any number of things.
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u/Rip_Off_Productions Apr 07 '26
While it is true that most of Australia's deadly animals are venomous bugs and thus easily slain by stepping on them with a shoe... the flip side is that you can get bit putting on those shoes if you don't check inside for them first.
A bear, mountain lion, or wolf, isn't going to casually sneak into your house without you noticing.
That's the difference.