>>1463739People who carry spray are more likely to use it even if they don't need to because you have a 0% risk of getting charged with poaching for using spray. However when someone kills an aggressive bear with a firearm they're less likely to report the incident at all for the inverse reason or it's actually hunting season and the bear's just got bad luck.
Encounter stats are warped by pussies macing the fuck out of bears that are just trying to snuffle about their own business and irresponsible fuckers just leaving the corpses of would-be aggressor-bears to rot in a hollow covered with some hastily cut brush.
Add to that the simple fact that people hunt bears, so people with guns are encountering them deliberately and regularly with the intent to start a (hopeful one-sided) confrontation. Ever wondered what those environmental & anti-hunting activism groups do most of the time? It's not the stuff they want you to believe like lying in front of bulldozers and all that, mostly they sit around trying to find the most advantageous way to frame statistics like this example I'm replying to.
