Archive for the 'Animals' Category

Apparently not.

A hiker on Mount Wilson in California came face to face with a black bear in the middle of a trail, but his method of trying to scare away the huge animal was less than successful.

In fact, the man was fortunate to escape injury, or even death.

Cellphone video by another hiker in the Angeles National Forest shows the man trying to frighten the black bear (who was actually brown) by jumping up and down and making noise with bells attached to his hiking gear, KTLA reported.

The video, which was posted on Instagram on Monday by Eric Chiu, shows the bear’s reaction, which was not what the hiker had hoped for, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Instead of retreating, the bear charges at the hiker before the video stops, the newspaper reported. The hiker and the person recording were not injured, but Chiu, whose stepmother filmed the video, was incredulous.

Folks in the Smokey Mountains weren’t so fortunate.

Parts of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park are closed to the public after visitors encountered aggressive bears in two areas over the weekend, the National Park Service said. In some cases, bears chased and bit people.

Rangers responded to three incidents involving bears along Ramsey Cascades Trail, a popular hike to a waterfall, and three more on Abrams Falls Trail, which is another waterfall hike, according to the park service.

In the encounters near Ramsey Cascades, two bears “approached visitors and took two backpacks,” while a third “displayed aggressive behavior and briefly chased a group,” the park service said. Ramsey Cascades Trail and Ramsey Prong Road, which leads to the trailhead, remained closed Monday as rangers continued to monitor the area for bear activity.

The other trio of incidents near Abrams Falls involved “an aggressive black bear,” which in one instance bit a visitor who had entered a closed area, the park service said. Both the trail and road leading to it had been closed, but they were reopened by Monday after several days without bear activity.

About 1,900 black bears live in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a massive wildlife area that covers sections of North Carolina and Tennessee. It’s also the most-visited national park in the U.S., according to the park service, which notes that the “combination of high visitation and a thriving bear population increases the likelihood of human-bear encounters.”

Thanks, but I’ll carry a large bore firearm rather than jingles and jangles and human seasoning packaged as bear repellent.

Source.

During a training exercise in Alaska, two U.S. Army soldiers were attacked by a brown bear, officials said.

The two troops were participating in a “land navigation training event” at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson’s Arctic Valley training area in Anchorage, Lt. Col. Jo Nederhoed, a spokesperson for the 11th Airborne Division, told the Anchorage Daily News.

Wildlife officials from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game told the Anchorage Daily News the incident appeared to have been a defensive attack after the bear recently emerged from its den, and both soldiers were carrying bear spray and used it.

“We hope both individuals have a full and quick recovery, and our thoughts are with them during this time,” Fish and Game Regional Supervisor Cyndi Wardlow told the newspaper.

After the incident, the soldiers were “receiving appropriate medical care” Friday morning. The extent of their injuries is unknown.

“The safety and well-being of our personnel is our highest priority,” Nederhoed said. “The incident is under investigation, and we are coordinating with local wildlife authorities to ensure the safety of all personnel in the area.”

So, the deployment of bear spray wasn’t a successful tactic. Color me shocked.

I guess the safety and well-being of their personnel isn’t really their highest priority since they weren’t carrying large bore sidearms for bear defense.

Source.

That’s either an 8-pointer sparring with a 6-pointer, or a 10-pointer sparring with an 8-pointer. It’s hard to tell with the mix of horn in the video. The one of the right is clearly more mature, and the smaller buck will fight right up to the point of death, or if he’s wise, leave before that happens and learn from it.

We’ve discussed here, here, here, here and here the United Nations-hatched idea of “rewilding.” This ridiculous notion of rewilding is popular in the U.S., but only in states like Colorado and Oregon who have proposed to ban all hunting.

The propaganda is so pervasive now that you can see it everywhere. We need to “save the planet” on a massive scale (TED talk). Why Britain needs a greener culture through rewilding. Punk rewilding, that has turned into a gigantic plant to rob farmers of their land, eat less meat, and a cash grab that creates pots of money from which underserving and lazy people can steal. Can Scotland become the world’s first rewilding nation?

They have big plans for this UN program. Oh, the UK is in love with this, but doesn’t that make sense to you? If you send your only real men out and neuter them by fighting over ball games and ignore the rape of little girls in grooming gangs, while you also invite savage Muslims into your country, it stands to reason that such a program would assuage the injured souls of the guilty. Even UK police officers used police cars to help traffic girls for Pakistani rape gangs – all for a salary and pension, plus a bit extra, I’m sure.

Learn to live and get along with disease spreading feral hogs. Learn to live with Coyotes who kill livestock, wait on deer to give birth and eat the young along with the placenta (every deer hunter knows this happens). Learn to live with having no children or pets when Coyotes or other predators take them away and eat them. Learn to live with bears that are a danger to humans.

All for make-believe problems that are better handled by humans.

It is as if the opponents of human management believe bears to be immortal, never to die except at the hands of human hunters.  This is a false, emotional, irrational belief structure. All predators die. Death by human hunter is overwhelmingly less painful than death without human intervention.

[ … ]

Managed human hunting has evolved an ethos where a prime value is the “clean kill,” which minimizes the suffering of the animal. Compared to being torn apart by a bear, starving to death, or lingering death by accident, death by bullet is quick and painless.

[ … ]

Humans can manage wildlife populations to achieve greater productivity than when they are not managed. Non-Gmanagement results in horrific swings between environment-destroying maximum populations and ghastly minimum population deserts devoid of most large mammals. Most of North America was managed by humans with varying degrees of success long before Europeans were able to establish and maintain a presence.  Human management aims for high, but not destructive, productivity.

There are more trees in America than when the settlers landed. The deer herd size is much larger now that wildlife biologists set tag limits to control the rate of expansion of the herd. Humans know how to do this. Let nature take its course, and herds starve to death, predators eat humans, and nature swings badly between the extrema as if on a pendulum.  This is the same reasoning that fights forest fires when we should be doing controlled, managed or prescribed burns.

I see all of this as the logical successor to the lie of anthropogenic global warming. So, let’s rehearse what Professor Mann did. He wanted to prove AGW was real, but there isn’t enough historical temperature data to do that. Hence, he wanted a positive correlation between tree ring data and temperature data (for as long as we had it).

But there was just one problem. The so-called hockey stick. The temperatures went one way (down) and the tree ring data went the other (up). He couldn’t prove his point unless he hid the real data by renormalizing the data to be equivalent. The rewilders believe the same lie – the earth is dying and needs saving. They all need a religion, and the earth fits the bill.

Man is become God, and in order to save the planet, we need to suppress human activity and reintroduce predator animals. But you see the paradox, don’t you? Nature is king, but in order to pull that off, humans have to interact with it. The paradox doesn’t occur or maybe doesn’t matter to them.

The silliest thing is the “punks” who want to make beer and be rewilders. Can you imagine a worse waste of a life than drinking beer all the time and pushing UN programs? These little boys should be eating meat, farming, hunting, and learning to be protectors and providers. If they believed in having families maybe their little girls could use the help to stay safe from the Pakistani rape gangs in England. Instead, they sound like little junior high school girls who found something to believe in to fill the voids in their souls after thinking hard about the fact that little girls were raped on their watch and they did absolutely nothing about it.

It isn’t clear whether we should hurl insults at them or pity them.

Source.

A highly controversial ballot measure that seeks to protect all animal life is inching closer to passing in Oregon.

Known as the PEACE Act, which stands for People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions, the measure could potentially ban hunting, fishing, livestock slaughter, and animal testing, according to Fox 12 Oregon.

People who support the petition say “it’s about recognizing animals can feel pain and updating state law,” a News Watch 12 story explained.

But opponents of the act, such as Amy Patrick, of the Oregon Hunting Association, say if it passes, this legislation could have catastrophic effects on “ranchers, coastline economies, and wildlife management,” as per News Watch 12.

I see that Rachel Rear uses a stock photo for a hunter probably because she doesn’t actually know any hunters. When I see things like this I immediately think of the “rewilding” efforts that lead to things like this.

Wildlife biologists who have studied this their entire careers at DNRs are overlooked and ignored in favor of people who think they know better. No one bothers to think about the fact that predation, starvation and a host of other things cause as much or more pain as managing the herd by culling it.

Men know how to manage the herd size in order to maintain a healthy herd or slightly increase herd size over time, just like there are more trees in the U.S. than when the settlers landed on the shores. And not men who work for the U.N. Rewilding is a UN program. Real wildlife herd management is done by people who care and don’t have an agenda. In a recent commentary at Ammoland entieled Nature isn’t Gentle, Dean Weingarten explains.

It is as if the opponents of human management believe bears to be immortal, never to die except at the hands of human hunters.  This is a false, emotional, irrational belief structure. All predators die. Death by human hunter is overwhelmingly less painful than death without human intervention.

[ … ]

Managed human hunting has evolved an ethos where a prime value is the “clean kill,” which minimizes the suffering of the animal. Compared to being torn apart by a bear, starving to death, or lingering death by accident, death by bullet is quick and painless.

[ … ]

Humans can manage wildlife populations to achieve greater productivity than when they are not managed. Non-management results in horrific swings between environment-destroying maximum populations and ghastly minimum population deserts devoid of most large mammals. Most of North America was managed by humans with varying degrees of success long before Europeans were able to establish and maintain a presence.  Human management aims for high, but not destructive, productivity.

But Oregon is so overrun with ex-Californians that they wouldn’t listen to reason under any circumstances, and would favor the starvation of game animals or human predation by large, dangerous animals over managing the herd like it needs.

It’s the same thing with non-predatory game animals too. Too little hunting causes the herd size to precipitously increase, leading to starvation and diseases. Too much hunting leads to a smaller and less productive herd. DNRs across the country know how to manage that balance. Rachel Rear and her ilk do not.

Source.

Gov. Greg Abbott has issued a statewide disaster declaration over the continued northward expansion of the New World screwworm, which has been labeled by state officials as a threat to Texas’ wildlife and livestock industries.

“Although the New World screwworm fly is not yet present in Texas or the U.S., its northward spread from Mexico toward the U.S. southern border poses a serious threat to Texas’ livestock industry and wildlife,” said Abbott. “State law authorizes me to act to prevent a threat of infestation that could cause severe damage to Texas property, and I will not wait for such harm to reach our livestock and wildlife.” 

Originating in South America, the New World screwworm is a parasite that eats the tissue of warm-blooded mammals. Although there have not yet been any confirmed cases of the parasite in the U.S., multiple cases have been confirmed near Texas’ border with Mexico.

I’ve told you the answer to the screwworm threat (“All we needed to do was keep a flow of those planes. But the cartels were extorting money for every flight of flies that came out of Panama. They were extorting $35,000 a plane,” he said. “So, for all practical purposes, this is really kind of a political closing to make a point that they have got to get their act together”).

So you kill the cartel boss who’s extorting money for the USDA flights. Then when you try another flight and some cartel big wig tries to extort money from you, you send folks to kill him too. And so on. Until you reach the end of cartel bosses who want to perish because of fly drops.

There is no real problem that can’t be solved in this manner. The other option is to let our cattle herds be eaten alive and forswear ever eating beef again.

Which will it be?

Use this as an opportunity to force cartels to self-identity, and then kill them. This approach solves two problems at one time.

Otherwise, decide not to eat beef.

Source.

While carrying a firearm is one option, bear spray is widely considered the most effective and humane way to deter an aggressive bear. But using bear spray incorrectly – or failing to carry it at all – can put you in a life-threatening situation

[ … ]

Bear spray is essentially a highly concentrated pepper spray designed to stop a bear in its tracks by overwhelming its senses. When deployed, it creates a cloud of intense capsaicinoids (the chemical in chili peppers that causes burning), which temporarily incapacitates the bear’s eyes, nose, and throat.

Unlike firearms, which require a direct and accurate shot to stop a bear, bear spray creates a barrier between you and the animal—which is why it’s recommended by wildlife experts and national park rangers as the first line of defense against bear attacks.

Okay. Whatever. Now watch this.

Which is why a 10mm is far superior than a can of seasoning. pic.twitter.com/GS9rGBsFoF

— Steve 🇺🇸 (@SteveLovesAmmo) February 8, 2026

Eh, 10mm Whatever. I shoot Double Tap 450 SMC 230-gr fat boys at 1320 FPS.

— CaptainsJournal (@BrutusMaximus50) February 9, 2026

It may very well be that if you can’t deploy OC spray quickly enough, you can’t do it with a gun either. But carrying the gun at the ready it seems to me that a large bore firearm is still the best solution to predator animals.

Source.

A hunter from Montana who narrowly escaped death during a grizzly bear attack has disclosed that one split-second decision saved his life.

Chase Dellwo, then 26, was hunting with his brother in the Montana backcountry when he inadvertently stumbled upon a 400lb sleeping male grizzly.

Local reports indicate that Dellwo was moving up a creek bed on a Saturday morning, attempting to herd a group of elk towards a ridge where his brother was stationed, when the bear woke up abruptly just three feet away.

Poor weather conditions, including snow, rain, and winds reaching 40mph, appear to have concealed Dellwo’s approach, meaning the bear didn’t see him coming and was thus taken by surprise.

He barely had time to retreat before the creature knocked him to the ground and bit his head, reports the Mirror.

“He let go but he was still on top of me, roaring the loudest roar I have ever heard,” Dellwo said.

The bear then clamped down hard onto his leg, shaking him violently and tossing him into the air. As it lunged again, Dellwo says that he didn’t succumb to panic, a factor that may have made all the difference.

“I remembered an article that my grandmother gave me a long time ago that said large animals have bad gag reflexes,” he said. “So I shoved my right arm down his throat.”

Incredibly, it worked. The bear immediately released the quick-thinking hunter and fled, leaving Dellwo severely wounded but, importantly, alive.

Despite bleeding profusely, he managed to reunite with his brother who quickly took him to the hospital. Doctors treated him for hundreds of stitches and staples in his head, a swollen and bruised eye, and deep puncture wounds on his leg.

The article says he was a hunter. I don’t know if he could reach his weapons in time, but I think I’d rather shoot the predator with a large bore handgun (.44 Mag, .454 Casull, or 450 SMC).

Parody, but still amusing.

@waynecountylyfe

Stop Texting Me Pictures of Your Deer!

♬ original sound – waynecountylyfe

Animals just seem to know when to stop in order to preserve life.