Hi Raul Prytog; Re bears, boyscouts &c...
I knew a boy who, perhaps out of an excessive feeling of delicacy, refused to defecate during the course of a full 6-day 50 mile backpack trip. (Or so he claimed.) I'm sure the prunes would have been a good thing for him, as it must have been horrible.
By the way, there was a guy who got attacked by a (brown?) bear up around Vancouver BC a year or two ago who stopped it with his pocket knife. He wasn't looking too good afterwards, but the bear looked worse.
It is quite unfair to compare a naked human with a bear in a fight. Humans are the essential tool user, sticks and stones are too common to be ignored.
It is my suspicion that humans picked up their intelligence largely in the effort to accurately throw objects over long distances. With regard to this ability, no other animal comes even close. You have to predict the other guys' movement and sensitive targets in addition to the force of gravity, air resistance, object weight, density and shape &c. By the time you have an animal that can consistently hit even a fixed six inch target with a rock at 25 yards you have a human.
I believe that the other animals in the woods avoid us largely because of evolutionary pressure brought on the problems that humans cause other animals with their thrown objects. Watch carefully any group of young boys in the woods, for example. Unless carefully watched by their elders, they will pick stuff up and throw it at the larger animals just like chimpanzees in the wild. It's hard enough for a bear to find enough to eat, much less trying to do it with only one eye after a chance encounter with a boyscout troop. And these are just the kids, if adults had the inclination the results would be much worse for the bears. Kids seem to instinctively throw rocks from high places (like off of cliffs), and I also think we carry an instinct to play with fire. Animals with fur just hate getting lit.
Maybe wildlife is becoming unused to being abused at long distance by humans in the woods and are so losing their genetic fear of humans.
On another subject, I bet that that woman athlete actually could have outrun the bear, but that she was caught by surprise. More or less ordinary humans in hunting and gathering societies (with physical skills far, far, far below that of a world class athlete) regularly run down all sorts of animals. Over a long enough distance, (i.e. many miles) the human can outrun anything on land. While a lot of animals can outrace a human for short distances, humans are more efficient at running than any other animal is (at its preferred mode of locomotion).
We like to think of ourselves as being very delicate creatures, but we are not. We are brutally efficient hunters and killers, and we were well on our way to eliminating the competing carnivorous fauna of this planet long before we invented 10MM handguns. But personally, I'd take the handgun.
-- Carl |
