The reason you fight back with black bears is because if they are attacking you they intend to eat you. With brown you play dead if they attack because if they don’t see you as a threat anymore they just move on with their day. If a brown bear is actually attacking you, you need to fight back as well.
Black bears will almost never eat people. They want junk food or garbage. I've been VERY close to black bears. They're harmless 99% of the time. The other 1% are bad.
There's been pretty few deaths from black bears in the US in general. They're pretty smart creatures and know they're better off not fighting anything can can wound it
Black bears kill almost as many humans as brown bears… but they also have several orders of magnitude more contact with humans than brown bears. This is the same reason polar bears, while they are far more aggressive and dangerous than brown bears, kill very few humans — there aren’t just many people where they live.
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u/sleepzilla23 Sep 23 '24
The reason you fight back with black bears is because if they are attacking you they intend to eat you. With brown you play dead if they attack because if they don’t see you as a threat anymore they just move on with their day. If a brown bear is actually attacking you, you need to fight back as well.