In watching the effects of Russia’s war on Ukraine from TV in North America, one is troubled but “safe”. Nonetheless, it has the “potential” for spilling beyond those borders into other parts of Europe, and from there to World War 3!
In a no less severe case of “potential death” for an individual happens when a hunter is in pursuit of a particular game species under certain conditions! Most times the particular game species in question is referred to as “Dangerous Game”. But what are the conditions under which “DG” are dangerous to the hunters’ welfare or only “potentially” so?
That’s our topic for this blog, and perhaps the next:
As an intro to this theme, I need to clarify some issues: The first being that the separation of certain species into two types of “dangerous” is completely arbitrary, ie: “dangerous” and “potentially dangerous”. Recently, the Alaskan wildlife officials’ universe received a very severe shock to their systematized bank of knowledge and experience when on two separate occasions two juvenile black bears individually killed two mature men. Also, it appears to have happened within a relatively short period, though one was not related to the other. One bear weighed 70 lbs and killed a man just outside his house!
< A juvenile black bear of about 18 months. Weight less than 100 lbs.
Question: were those “cute, cuddly fun loving bears” only “potentially dangerous” or “potentially harmless”? Or were they both “potentially” dangerous and harmless depending on the context? If you know the answers to those questions then you know more than the Alaskan wildlife biologists!
I say it’s arbitrary because the “dangerous kind of wildlife” have basically been designated and limited geographically and commercially. You’ll pay a big bundle of cash more to shoot an animal designated “dangerous” than another designated “potentially dangerous”. The history for that being African safaris, and perhaps Asian. Such activities have morphed into individual hunters hiring several businesses to get them “there” and back safely, allowing them to “safely” kill a terrifying beast with natural God-given equipment to shread them, stomp them, eat them, and break every bone in their body in the process!
And today, nobody in their right mind is going to attempt such a feat without support, if it were allowed and affordable, because their chance of survival would be too close to ZERO!
On the other hand, “potentially dangerous” game are hunted annually by the tens of thousands because they can be, even solo, and don’t need an army of supporters! I’m speaking, of course, of the lowly critters like black bears in comparison to Brown Bears or elephant! And, they don’t cost more than a deer hunt if you’re smart and don’t hire an outfitter.
I propose that hunting a certain black bear solo in a wilderness is more “potentially” dangerous than hunting a Brown Bear commercially in open tundra, and with a commercial experienced guide who’s pledged to look after you. And I further propose it to be foolhardy to attempt such a hunt on your own! I’ve watched a self-made video of such by a husband-wife team in Alaskan snow-covered mountains where they almost lost their lives – and mostly due to the physical conditions of tent dwelling, deep snow, gale force winds and bitter cold! But the same could happen, under certain conditions, on a solo black bear hunt!
< A ~200 lb black bear walking beside a stream in the Northwest Territories. My friend, Roger, was canoeing.
So what was more deadly for the two mature Alaskan men – a big Brown Bear or the ~70 lbs juvenile black bears?
A big bull elephant at 500 yds is not dangerous! At 20 it might be! It’s potentially so, the closer it gets. And really so if your PH stumbles over a Mopane root with no seconds left on his “most dangerous” time piece before “FIRE” must have taken place!
There are degrees of danger! A lion in your dreams might awake you with some fear, but it’s neither dangerous or potentially so until you arrive in Africa and have to face a real live one at less than 50 yds!
The second issue of vital significance is correctly reading the beast’s attitude, and the sooner the better: I watched that dominant bruin of 2024 approach me within 20 yards, and it was still walking the same as when I first saw him at ~75 yards. He knew I was there and was walking as he would have in a normal manner through timber and bush till just below me without hesitation or stopping. I “read” that and knew he was not being aggressive or wanting me for lunch! So I turned and walked away because his next stride would be in coming face to face with me and I didn’t want to have to shoot him.
We read an animal’s attitude by their body language, the same as for humans. As humans, in meeting strangers for the first time, we get a sense of their attitude by gestures of friendliness or offstandishness: Looking in the eyes, shaking hands limp or firm, body stance, etc. We need to pay attention to that in meeting people for the first time, but also animals. My wife and I had returned to Toronto to visit close friends that I’d joined in marriage several years earlier, but my work as a pastor took us away to Halifax for a few years. When we returned to another location about an hour’s drive from the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), we decided to pay them a visit at their new home. Upon arrival, the first thing noticed was the high borded fence that completely obscured the house – but a “large” German Shepherd was jumping up with it’s head above the boards, barking and growling! We weren’t so sure of the kind of welcome we were about to receive from our longtime friends! Gary, the husband met us and fended off the dog but we still really never felt comfortable during that renewal of friendships. And each visit thereafter that uncomfortable feeling persisted.
The wild animal kingdom is not ours – we are the intruders and must always keep that in mind. It may turn out to be an unfriendly place!
< A friendly firearm in an unfriendly place – my former Ruger 96/44 in .44 Rem Mag. Used in toting bear grub to bait sites in Haliburton Highlands. 300gr Speers or Hornady’s at 1700 fps!
Even domestic animals can turn on you if you’re a stranger! As a bear hunter I often found myself by invitation on private property with horses, cattle, bulls and dogs living where bears, coyotes, wolves and other wildlife made their living! I had a ladder stand in the midst of all that. At times it was like a circus had moved in. Alone on that property and up in my ladder stand, toward evening cattle were moving from the woods and lower pasture to the area of the bear bait site on one of the main pastures, closer to where they would bed down for the night. I was wearing muffs with built-in audio. Suddenly, around 7 PM, I got this roar in my headset and began looking down and around the tree I was in for a bear climbing up to greet me! It turned out to be a mother cow bellowing for her calf that she left behind in the woods as she headed for “home” for the night! I also heard the calf’s response, and they kept it up until the lost one appeared on the other side of the treeline and began to suckel it’s mother – then peace and quiet again, but that day’s hunt was over!On that same property there were bears coming and going from the Queen Elizabeth II Wildlife Conservation Area that bordered the private property. Wildlife were protected inside the borders of that Wildlife Conservation area, but when they came over and onto private land they were fair game! A dominant boar bear chased one of the four horses into a ravine and killed it there and began to feed on it. It made several attempts to drive my partner, Ken, and I off of that property. It killed the black stallion the last night of the hunt after we’d gone home. We were unsuccessful in shooting him. . . but he tried to intimidate us and drive us away so he could carry out his unwelcome activities! He knew when and where we were on every visit to that property. And we saw the four horses every time we were there. And they would put on a show for us, and they could run like race horses, yet the black stallion, after darkness had arrived, was caught off guard and driven into the ravine where it couldn’t escape that killer bear. The cousin of the land owner, who set us up with the owner who wanted the bears “gone”, phoned me late that night of the last day’s hunt with the bad news.
You know what, each day we hunted during that season, that bear knew our every move – when we arrived and when we left – he saw us but we never saw him! We heard him (he intended that) and smelled him, but never actually saw him! And he killed one of the horses – the only black one – after the hunt was finished! Was he dangerous or only “potentially” so?
< This is the bottom of the ravine into which that bear drove the black stallion, where it was killed and found the following day!
When some wildlife authority says to you or I that a particular wildlife species is “potentially dangerous”, it needs detailed qualification, plus some real life examples, such as the following that was real enough, and that I shared in a blog several years ago:
At the time I was doing a series of blog articles on “Are Black Bears Dangerous?”, and came across a very interesting but true account of a man who was still in the famed Toronto Sunnybrook Hospital from a near death mauling by a black bear in a semi-wilderness area of Central Ontario. That being more or less within my own general Crown Land region for bait hunting black bears, I wanted to get in touch with the author of the piece that appeared in the outdoor sports magazine Ontario Outdoors, that was owned by the company Ontario Out of Doors in Peterborough on the doorstep of The Kawartha Lakes on which our town is also located. They also give training to new hunters, obtaining gun licenses, plus hunting trips or almost any activity related to fishing, hiking, hunting and any other of its various kinds of outdoor activity. I wanted to talk to the author of the piece since I was a writer of blogs related to guns, hunting and black bears, and had published a number of reloadiling manuals. They were happy to accomodate my request and gave me his personal home phone number.
I don’t recall the author’s name off the top of my head, and I’m not inclined right now to go on a search for it, but I do recall the details of our phone conversation – that I’ll not give entirely, but here are the salient points: The author of the piece was an outdoorsman himself and got the news almost immediately from the police. He then visited the man at Sunnybrook Hospital and did a firsthand interview. Somewhat different than his writeup to protect the guilty, the man wasn’t hunting when attacked by a big black bear, but was attending to his “grow-op” – an expression meaning his marijuanas plants. He was not armed and was busy with his illegial business when he heard a noise behind him, turned to be confronted by a large agressive male black bear! He attempted to escape and climb a nearby tall hardwood tree but the bear grabbed a foot and pulled him out and down to the ground. He tried to kick the bear with his other foot but that only seemed to make the beast more aggressive! He said he prayed and asked God to spare his life and then passed out as the bear was eating the calf of the leg with the foot the bear clamped on to pull him out of the tree. He didn’t know for how long he was unconscious, but when he did revive the bear was gone, having no idea why. He had a cell phone and called his wife who called the police and finally they found and rescued him. He ended up in Sunnybrook, recognised as one of the best hospitals in the world for trama and cancer patients who have lost limbs – since Sunnybrook was created for veterans of the WW2.
Soon after the interview with the trauma patient, the author visited the site as he knew it well and had often hunted turkey in the vicinity, not being far from his residence. He took several photos of the exact spot of the incident and published them in his article. They included pics of the ground churned up with leaves and earth mixed and spotted with blood. He even found the shoe that was tattered and torn, soaked in blood. And then he said there was blood splatter as high as 30 feet into the tree, and presented photos of that!
The trama team were unsure at that time if he could ever use that leg again!
At the conclusion of my interview, he said: “I’ll never again hunt turkey alone in that area with my back against a tree!”
Did he answer the questions: “Why did this happen”?, and “Are black bears dangerous or only potentially so?”
Because there are black bears in those woods that are also hunters!
And I, personally, will never go into any woods of like nature without assuming there are black bears there! Am I fully prepared for an encounter?
One further bit of information from the author in his interview with the crippled man was: This was NOT his first attack by a black bear in like conditions – that time he escaped with relatively minor damage! There will not be a third!
For some, there will not be a second!
Till the next – P2
Shalom
BOB MITCHELL
Lovin' The Big Bang 