Sorry but #nope. Hugely disingenuous presentation here—esp with that italicized "being eaten alive" (without even the "possible" qualifier You put in front of the rape part), which is absurd, even farcical, to such an extent that it prompted me to misread that entire portion as satire the first time.
Bear-on-human attacks, even by the biggest and fiercest North American bear species, are ••vanishingly•• rare—practically never happening in the wild unless the bear in question is BOTH famished AND deeply perturbed by oddities in the person's behavior that it mistakes for threat signals... and even in the event of an attack, 'playing dead' is likely to convince a non-starving bear to stop attacking.
Bears in captivity are probabilistically MUCH more likely to maul people—likely as a culmination of captivity being 999,999 kinds of torture and stimulatory privation for such a consummately wild animal. But of course that can't happen without the eventual victim recklessly breaching multiple layers of physical security.
Your argument also relies on an implicit denial of feminicide, since the main thesis is "rape vs. death" as though death at the hands of a strange man were unthinkable... whereas in actual reality feminicide is far too common for nominally civilized society.
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The main reason why nobody asked "What type of bear?" is probably because the viral videos asking the question to passersby were from the UK—where bears have been extinct in the wild for at least several thousand years, so that their entire mental conception of "bear" is mostly going to be cobbled together from random fragments of American pop culture.
You may have misunderstood the point of the article, which was not to get into the details of how likely one is to be attacked by a bear (esp in captivity, which has nothing to do with the TikTok question) but why women are more frightened of strange men than wild animals.
Ironically, Saturday morning as his article was auto-sending, I was listening to Meghan Murphy's podcast in which a friend of hers recounted a story of encountering a genuine psychopath in the BC woods years ago. She and her friend didn't go down the dark, narrow path he pointed them to for the herbs they were looking for. Something wasn't quite right about that guy so they got back into their car and drove away.
Might have been the knife duct-taped to a long pole he was carrying. Women's intution and all that. The kind of thing that might make one go, "Hmmmm, maybe this guy is kinda dangerous!"
When people say bear attacks are 'vanishingly rare,' I think "not common, but not as rare as advertised," the way I think of the allegedly uber-rare shark attack--except they get reported at least a few a year, which is still uncommon (you're probably more likely to drown than be eaten by a shark) but not necessarily the odds you want to read about. The Canadian government, for the first time ever, is going to start posting signs I remember from my Florida childhood for the first time ever: Warning when great whites are nearby, which has never been a problem for the Canadian eastern coastline before.
And, granted, great whites prefer grey seals rather than humans, so I'm thinking if you're going to swim off the Canadian east coast, wear a brightly-coloured swimsuit for this so you don't get mistaken for a seal. (I'll stick with beaching on the shores of lovely Lake Ontario!)
Good point about why UK'ers didn't ask that question...but also begs the question of why they didn't look askance at the reporter and ask, "When's the last time you saw a bear in Britain?"
Rather as I would do if someone asked me if I'd rather encounter a strange man or a saber-toothed tiger.
I find their answers mostly unnecessarily fearful of men and with near-zero understanding of wild bears.
Given that the "unnecessary fear" isn't such full-blown paranoia as to turn Woman into shut-ins who can no longer participate in society... does it have any actual downside?
If so, that would be a pretty singular phenomenon. "Excess caution", in reasonable amounts, very rarely brings negative externalities and indeed is a base conjoined of worldly wisdom in practically every culture on earth.
I'm not quite sure what you're arguing, and I *think* it's that women have very real need to fear strange men in the woods (which I understand, esp if they have a lot of real trauma with them--not 'woke' trauma). Maybe the biggest danger with bears is getting too close to cubs--the 'mama bear' metaphor exists for a very real reason.
I'm just kind of confused as to what you found was a big fail here.
Sorry but #nope. Hugely disingenuous presentation here—esp with that italicized "being eaten alive" (without even the "possible" qualifier You put in front of the rape part), which is absurd, even farcical, to such an extent that it prompted me to misread that entire portion as satire the first time.
Bear-on-human attacks, even by the biggest and fiercest North American bear species, are ••vanishingly•• rare—practically never happening in the wild unless the bear in question is BOTH famished AND deeply perturbed by oddities in the person's behavior that it mistakes for threat signals... and even in the event of an attack, 'playing dead' is likely to convince a non-starving bear to stop attacking.
Bears in captivity are probabilistically MUCH more likely to maul people—likely as a culmination of captivity being 999,999 kinds of torture and stimulatory privation for such a consummately wild animal. But of course that can't happen without the eventual victim recklessly breaching multiple layers of physical security.
Your argument also relies on an implicit denial of feminicide, since the main thesis is "rape vs. death" as though death at the hands of a strange man were unthinkable... whereas in actual reality feminicide is far too common for nominally civilized society.
.
The main reason why nobody asked "What type of bear?" is probably because the viral videos asking the question to passersby were from the UK—where bears have been extinct in the wild for at least several thousand years, so that their entire mental conception of "bear" is mostly going to be cobbled together from random fragments of American pop culture.
You may have misunderstood the point of the article, which was not to get into the details of how likely one is to be attacked by a bear (esp in captivity, which has nothing to do with the TikTok question) but why women are more frightened of strange men than wild animals.
Ironically, Saturday morning as his article was auto-sending, I was listening to Meghan Murphy's podcast in which a friend of hers recounted a story of encountering a genuine psychopath in the BC woods years ago. She and her friend didn't go down the dark, narrow path he pointed them to for the herbs they were looking for. Something wasn't quite right about that guy so they got back into their car and drove away.
Might have been the knife duct-taped to a long pole he was carrying. Women's intution and all that. The kind of thing that might make one go, "Hmmmm, maybe this guy is kinda dangerous!"
When people say bear attacks are 'vanishingly rare,' I think "not common, but not as rare as advertised," the way I think of the allegedly uber-rare shark attack--except they get reported at least a few a year, which is still uncommon (you're probably more likely to drown than be eaten by a shark) but not necessarily the odds you want to read about. The Canadian government, for the first time ever, is going to start posting signs I remember from my Florida childhood for the first time ever: Warning when great whites are nearby, which has never been a problem for the Canadian eastern coastline before.
And, granted, great whites prefer grey seals rather than humans, so I'm thinking if you're going to swim off the Canadian east coast, wear a brightly-coloured swimsuit for this so you don't get mistaken for a seal. (I'll stick with beaching on the shores of lovely Lake Ontario!)
Good point about why UK'ers didn't ask that question...but also begs the question of why they didn't look askance at the reporter and ask, "When's the last time you saw a bear in Britain?"
Rather as I would do if someone asked me if I'd rather encounter a strange man or a saber-toothed tiger.
I find their answers mostly unnecessarily fearful of men and with near-zero understanding of wild bears.
Given that the "unnecessary fear" isn't such full-blown paranoia as to turn Woman into shut-ins who can no longer participate in society... does it have any actual downside?
If so, that would be a pretty singular phenomenon. "Excess caution", in reasonable amounts, very rarely brings negative externalities and indeed is a base conjoined of worldly wisdom in practically every culture on earth.
I'm not quite sure what you're arguing, and I *think* it's that women have very real need to fear strange men in the woods (which I understand, esp if they have a lot of real trauma with them--not 'woke' trauma). Maybe the biggest danger with bears is getting too close to cubs--the 'mama bear' metaphor exists for a very real reason.
I'm just kind of confused as to what you found was a big fail here.