Rob Fox
Did you know that if you express to a giant, wild bear your displeasure with their attempts to intrude on your property to potentially maul and eat you, they might listen? Yeah, if this video from ABC News is any indication, bears understand that no means no.
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"GO AWAY!" This woman let a curious bear know it wasn't welcome when it walked onto her property near Lake Tahoe. https://t.co/6WBX5W2chh pic.twitter.com/IdIBGGZS3t
— ABC News (@ABC) July 16, 2018
This video somehow both makes sense and, yet, is still deeply confusing.
The conventional wisdom is that making yourself look big and/or sounding loud will scare a bear off. Okay, sure. The woman was definitely forceful in her assertion that the bear was in no way welcome into her Lake Tahoe home. But also, she wasn’t that loud or scary to the bear. Close your eyes and it sounds like she could be telling a Jehovah’s Witness to get off her porch.
The key is probably her confidence. (Which, my God, bears can sense confidence?) If she had been louder, but terrified and desperate sounding, that bear is definitely rumbling up those stairs and taking a bite out of this lady. But because her refusal was of the “Nope!” variety, and not an “Oh God please no no no,” the bear was like, “Whoa, this is not the house I want to pillage.”
Odd that the bear can sense a human’s confidence but not the fact that it, itself, is a giant, unstoppable killing machine.
In other, more adorable bear news, here’s a video of a bear belly-flopping into a pool!
Dawwww. Sweet, silly bear. You can bet whoever is filming that probably acts confident as hell towards those bears. Because, again, if they didn’t, they’d be dinner. Or maybe they just have a tranquilizer gun strapped to their leg. Though, to be fair, that would imbue confidence.
So what have we learned today? Bears are just like women. They can sense confidence, and if you don’t have it they’ll eat you alive.
This article was originally published on July 17, 2018.
