iPhone as bear repellent? Uh, no thanks.
Look, I don't know from brown bears, but here in the eastern part of the country, you generally aren't going to see any bears. Black bears are skittish, generally afraid of people, and don't do the kind of territorial bluffing attacks that you hear about out west.
If you do see a black bear, and it's coming at you, that's because it's half-crazed from hunger and you look tasty. The only way your iPhone is going to do any good at that point is if you can somehow wedge it in the critter's jaws to impede its chewing.
Alternatively, depending on how long the batteries last while playing the "bear scaring app", it could act as an audio beacon to help searchers find your gnawed remains.
(H/T to Maddened Fowl.)
No kidding. They could have at least programmed it to give you something useful, like an app that tells you which caliber for bear...
ReplyDeleteHaving read more than my share of BearThread on internet gun boards, I question whether the current iteration of the iPhone has enough RAM for that.
ReplyDeleteI've read that "In brown and grizzly bear country, you should carry pepper spray and wear little bells on your clothing to deter attacks. You can identify brown bears by their smaller size and shy disposition. You can identify grizzly bears because their shit has little bells in it and smells like pepper."
ReplyDeleteIf you don't have pepper spray, there is another way to identify what type of bear it is.
ReplyDeleteKick the bear real hard in the ass, then climb a tree.
If the bear climbs the tree and mauls you, it is a black bear.
If it knocks the tree down and mauls you, it is a grizzly.
One of the reasons the general public treats the idea of wild animals as sentient friends of Bambi, is because for a long damn time, said friends got pruned back by meat-eating natives bearing weapons.
ReplyDeleteWhether it was Appalachian b'ar hunters, or a Western stockman with a pack of hounds, the carnivores pretty much were trained to avoid humans. Especially since lots of the humans they did scent had gun oil perfume on 'em.
Now that we've culturally adopted the teethy bas...unh, our fellow animal friends as equals, it should come as no surprise to note their choosing to dine on the occasional homo sapiens du jour.
I trust that PETA and the head mo'fo of HSUS will get together over a nice carafe of red wine to celebrate another win for 'their side'. Ain't decades of propaganda a wunnerful tool for population control?
The best use of an cell phone or other handheld device which has Internet service is to look up the nearest "Friends of Bill" meeting hall.
ReplyDeleteAfter only a few sessions, sbstaining from the Irish sauce, and maybe light exercise, you will no longer see bears and thus be completely safe from them.
Shootin' Buddy
What's bad is when the sauce gets into your camcorder.
ReplyDeleteYes, and if you drink Irish sauce you'll see hordes of bears charge the camera instead of a single bear running away in panic, much like the Chicago Bears (whose fans want Irish sauce after seeing them play).
ReplyDeleteShootin' Buddy
There were some of those videos, too, but they were all brown bears out west, where people leave pickanick baskets out at Yellowstone apparently for the sole purpose of being able to film Yogi trashing their campsite to show the folks back home.
ReplyDeleteGiven all the videos of that type, I'm kinda hoping one will end in tears. It's amazing: A sort of version of "Jackass" played by the Royal Robbins/North Face set...
One of the reasons the general public treats the idea of wild animals as sentient friends of Bambi ...
ReplyDeleteWhich is hilarious for anyone who's read "Bambi: A Life in the Woods", seeing as Disney took an uncompromising and open portrait of nature in all its savage, unhuman glory and turned it into doe-eyed (no pun intended) pablum. The second half's not as sugar-coated, but still.
So... now the bear piles will contain shards of plastic and silicon instead of little chrome bell smelling of pepper spray?
ReplyDelete