The Boy Who Cried Bear

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I just returned from a long visit to Yellowstone and Grand Teton. Great fun, but there’s a background climate of fear. Wherever you go, you see and hear warnings about bears — and admonitions to carry bear spray. The warnings and admonitions come from official signage, friends, and fellow tourists. Conveniently enough, bear spray is available at virtually every store, for a price of $40 a can.

While I routinely ignore safety signage boilerplate, I take warnings from humans much more seriously — especially when concrete behavior backs up those warnings. Actions speak louder than words, after all. If tens of thousands of tourists are shelling out $40 a pop for bear spray and wearing it in belt holsters, I’m inclined to emulate. Especially since my son and I almost immediately saw a grizzly bear, walking just thirty feet from our car.

Still, soon after I bought my bear spray — and spotted our first bear — I decided to confirm the risk. I found much ado about next to nothing. Over the last ten years, Yellowstone saw just 9 bear attacks, with 0 deaths. Grand Teton had 1 bear attack, with 0 deaths.

Admittedly, if there were one bear attack per year and one fatal bear attack per decade on my local hiking trail, I’d find that slightly worrisome. After all, I’m one of the few people who even uses my local hiking trail. But Yellowstone and Grand Teton get enormous numbers of visitors. Total visits during this time: 42M for Yellowstone, 34M for Grand Teton. So we’re talking about a 1-in-8M risk for attacks, and about 1-in-80M for deaths.

Clever debaters, including my son Simon, point out that attacks and deaths could be minuscule because tourists are so well-armed with bear spray. But that’s clearly false. While bear spray is common, most people clearly don’t have any. If bears were smarter, you could appeal to deterrence — a 1-in-10 chance that a random tourist has bear spray could lead all bears to stop attacking all humans. But bears are nowhere near that smart. Until they feel the burning spray on their bodies, they have no idea bear spray even exists.

Furthermore, even if you possess bear spray, what are the odds that you successfully use it the first time in your life that you’re attacked by a bear? You’ll probably panic — or worse. One of my friends actually tested his bear spray in advance, pointing it directly away from his body, and discovered that it’s so potent that just getting a misting on your skin is excruciatingly painful. Upshot: You’re almost surely more likely to severely injure yourself using bear spray than to use it to save yourself from a bear attack.

There’s a lesson here. Yes, actions speak louder than words. If everyone pays lip service to precaution in general, but refuses to actually exercise it personally, you can probably ignore the risk. But even when people do take costly action, this may just be conformity run amok. Though Covid was deadly, the precautions people took totally failed a cost-benefit test. Bear spray is the same story, writ small. Learn from my mistake and save your $40.