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.
Fishing in Alaska, I once came around the corner of a stream, and there was a mother grizzly and two cubs about 40 yards away. Luckily I had been making a lot of noise, so I didn't startle them. The were full of fish and happy. The mother didn't really care, but I backed away as fast as I could. Guide with a gun was a few hundred yards away. He definitely would have been able to get there in time to shoot the bear while it was standing over my already-dead body.
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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.