8 Unconventional Ways People Have Fought An Attacking Bear And LIVED!

Bear mace. Guns. Nunchuks. These are the traditional defense devices for those looking to repel a bear attack. Of course, if you don’t go hanging around in their habitat you mostly don’t have to worry about being prepared for bear attacks bro, but that’s none of my business…*sips tea*.

Should a bear happen upon you though, keep calm. Just because it’s a thousand pounds heavier than you, has razor-like claws and teeth longer than the odds against you having a threesome with Scarlett Johansson and Anne Hathaway doesn’t mean death is a certainty when you encounter them.

You have adrenaline. You have wits. You have the irrational hope of getting that threesome crossed off your bucket list. And if you stay focused you may find any number of ways to defend yourself.

With A Knife
Four guys in the woods in two groups of two. They were hunting a wounded bear they’d shot with an arrow. Two had guns. Two had not guns. They encountered the wounded bear and, in the spirit of Murphy’s Law, it went after the two without guns. The bear attacked one of them, Brandon Johnson, while his buddy, Trevor Nowak, was helpless to stop the attack while he waited for the gun-wielders to get back and intervene.

Brandon, purely on adrenaline and guile, used his knife to repeatedly stab the bear’s head in self-defense. The tactic worked and Brandon, though wounded greatly, made a full recovery.

Let It Throw You Off A Cliff
An 80 year old dude got thrown off a cliff by a bear and lived? You knew he had to be Russian. Russians are like cockroaches. You can’t kill ‘em so your only hope is to use plastic containers to keep ‘em out of the cereal boxes and the flour.

Back to the story, Yusuf Alchagirov was in a raspberry field when a bear attacked him. He stabbed, kicked and head-butted (WTF??!?) the bear, but the animal soon overwhelmed him and threw him off a small cliff. Alchagirov sustained several injuries, but was released from the hospital after only a few days. Of course, it was a Russian hospital so dude might have died a few days later anyway.

Grabbing Its Tongue
In bear attacks, people don’t usually wake up with a bear howling in their face. But if it does, you need to do like Gilles Cyr did and grab its tongue. His reasoning? If the bear is gonna bite at least make the bear bite itself. ‘Giant Balls’ Cyr’s tactic annoyed the bear so much it stopped attacking him and skulked off while Cyr only received minor injuries.

With An Old Computer
In Siberia this guy was rummaging for scrap metal at a dump when a bear spotted him and charged. This guy picked up the only thing he could think of at the time, an old computer, and chucked it at the bear. Since this is Siberia and a scrap yard we can assume it was one of those 40 lb. old school Amigo machines with about 4Kb of RAM and a whole lot of kickass apparently. After getting hit, the bear took off. Neither reclaimed the computer.

With A Bird Watching Scope
Biologist Toby Burke took his wife and three kids out on a bird watching expedition when his daughter spotted a bear following them. The thing charged, the wife and kids got behind Burke and he used his bird watching scope to fend off the bear’s bite. Jaw pressure is a mofo though and the scope was snapped in half. Burke then used the sharpened edge to stab the bear. It eventually gave up and Burke got treated for minor injuries. And later that night, his wife, hopefully, gave him the greatest blowjob of all time.

With An Axe
Of all the items on this list, an axe would seem like the most effective weapon to use in a bear attack. But axes are heavy so it took 15 minutes of axe-swinging for a woman who got attacked by a sloth bear to get it to leave her alone. She suffered some leg bites, but made a full recovery.

With Your Dog
No one actually wants their dog to go off trying to defend them when a bear gets all bear-angry and comes at you. But try telling that to the dog that’s desperate to defend you.

Michele Foster’s dog, Boo, refused to come back inside the house once they both spotted a bear coming their way. Instead, it charged and fought the bear before running off with the bear giving chase. The bear returned to the house shortly after to attack again before leaving with its two cubs. Thought dead from the mauling, Boo only had some bite marks and a few scratches and was out playing in the yard the next day. Oh, that Boo!

With A Baby Gate
Lisa Webb was at her home when she heard her dogs making a commotion outside on her deck. On the other side of the baby gate she used to keep the dogs on the deck was a bear. She herded the dogs inside, but as she did so her daughter ran out. Her adrenaline went into overdrive and she grabbed the baby gate and hit the bear with it square on the nose. The bear, probably in a state of ‘wtf just happened?’ turned and ran away. One of the dogs needed surgery for its injuries, but everyone else was fine. Well, except for whatever made the daughter run outside at a friggin’ bear.