Free Republic

While discussing bear attacks, a consistent refrain is that pistols are useless as a way to defend yourself against bears.  In discussion groups, nay sayers claim that pistols are difficult to use, of insufficient power, and there are numerous instances where people who attempted to use pistols to defend against bears are badly mauled. I have read of numerous cases where people used pistols to successfully defend against bears, so I asked one poster to give some examples where pistol defenses failed. The exchange occurred on freerepublic.com: “Actually, there are legions of people who have been badly mauled after...

Neither rain nor sleet nor a storied football rivalry could keep an angry group of local patriots from turning out on a dank Sunday afternoon during the Bears/Packers game to burn their football jerseys in protest of the way NFL owners have responded to the long-simmering national anthem controversy. Not only did some of these passionate veterans, ranging in age from mid-30s to upper-80s, toss their once beloved jerseys into a metal pit set ablaze near a pond on Aurora's West Side, the charred remains were to be gathered up and mailed to the owners of the teams represented as...

Hikers reported seeing a black bear at Jacks Peak Park in Monterey on Monday. Monterey County's parks department issued a public warning about the bear. Park rangers tried to find the bear, but were unable to locate it Monday afternoon. County spokeswoman Maia Carroll said the warning was issued to park visitors out of an abundance of caution. "Jacks Peak is quite wild. You have to know you're among nature," Carroll said. The park's peak is the highest point on the Monterey Peninsula.

Nature is a rough place, and not for the weak. It is even more rough if you are a prey animal like this deer. This family’s suburban backyard was the scene of a gruesome bear attack. Can you imagine sitting on your porch on a nice summer evening when… When we think of gruesome bear attacks we usually imagine the deep Alaskan wilderness. This suburban backyard is indeed not a remote area deep in the backcountry. This video, worthy of National Geographic, was shot in a family’s backyard. That is definitely a front row seat for an intense nature clip....

Mike Ditka has apologized for saying he wasn’t aware of any racial oppression over the last 100 years in the United States. The famed Chicago Bears coach came under fire for making the comments during a radio interview on Monday about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. He issued an apology the next day, saying he was talking about professional football and not society as a whole. “I have absolutely seen oppression in society in the last 100 years,” the Hall of Fame tight end and Super Bowl-winning coach said to WGN-TV in Chicago. “The interview was about the...

NFL had better get its act together. There is nothing to discuss. The deadbeat NFL players, "Hate America" "Lock your arms, together" has failed miserably. Packers, Q/B, Aaron Rogers earns the title of "Failed Obama Girlie Boy, Pajama Boy" as the overwhelming majority of thousands of Greenbay Packer fans rejected his request that fans lock arms to show unity with the NFL America Haters on the Packers and Chicago Bear NFL teams. The fans simply chanted unending, loudly all night long, USA, USA, USA!!! POTUS, Trump wins big time!!! There is only one road open for the NFL, the NBA...

Video of a mother bear and her two cubs climbing down a tree in the middle of Aspen, Colorado went viral earlier this week, prompting police to issue a warning about trying to photograph the wild animals. When the bears came down from the tree on the Hyman Avenue mall, police said there was a "fairly large crowd of photo-takers and those that insisted on trying to get close enough to take selfies." Police said one woman walked up to the bears -- while carrying her child -- to get a selfie. Police said when the bear and her cubs...

Grizzly bears have stopped eating salmon in favour of elderberries after being forced to make a choice due to climate change. Warming temperatures meant that the berries are ripening earlier than usual, at exactly the same time as the freshwater streams on Alaska’s Kodiak Island are overflowing with sockeye salmon. The island's brown bears typically feed first on salmon in early summer, followed by elderberries later in the season, in late August and September. “What you have is a scrambling of the schedule," said William Deacy, a biologist at Oregon State University that studied the phenomenon. "It's essentially like if...

"Their deaths have reignited the bitter debate over the presence of bears in the mountain range that straddles the French-Spanish border, where they were reintroduced 20 years ago after disappearing in the early 1990s."

“Polar bears hurt by climate change are more likely to turn to a new food source — humans” is the rather chilling headline WaPo went with in its article, published Thursday. The Post reported that with higher temperatures, “the more likely polar bears are to interact with humans — and possibly attack and eat them.” WaPo relied on a recently-published study in the Wildlife Society Bulletin that looked at recorded polar bear attacks going back to 1870. The authors found “no trend” in the number of attacks by decade through 2014, which you’d think would count against the claim that...

“There was four of them in a line … my son was third,” Clark said. “The bear came down the trail at them, fella in the front, who was his uncle, the bear was on him so quickly that he didn’t have time to take his rifle off his shoulder.” The bear ran through the first two men, who were pushed to the side of the trail, leaving Elliot Clark in front of his unarmed cousin. The boy raised his pump action shotgun and shot the sow, hitting it with birdshot, which is often used just to scare bears off,...

Elliot Clark, 11, was walking through the woods near Game Creek last week with his three family members and three dogs when the bear came out and charged them, The Juneau Empire reported. The bear ran through two of the men, pushing them to the side of the trail, leaving Elliot and his cousin left in its path, Elliot's father, Lucas, said. "There was four of them in a line. My son was third," Elliot's father said. "The bear came down the trail at them, fella in the front, who was his uncle, the bear was on him so quickly...

The Trump administration is removing Endangered Species Act protections for Yellowstone grizzly bears, after they spent more than four decades on the threatened list. The Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service announced the delisting decision Thursday, which immediately drew rebukes from conservationists and Democrats. Officials said that conservation efforts for the bear, a more than fourfold increase in its population and state policies designed to protect the bears show that the delisting is warranted. The Yellowstone grizzly bear lives in and around Yellowstone National Park in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. “This achievement stands as one of America’s great conservation successes;...

CrowdStrike is the company (headed by a Ukrainian national) that inspected the DNC servers. No member of law enforcement (FBI etc) was allowed to inspect the servers. Instead, CrowdStrike prepared a report that's been the sole basis for the "Russians hacked the DNC" story. In this exchange, reference is made to Panda. We now know that "Panda" was a frequent nickname of Seth Rich. He would cheer up co-workers dressing as a Panda. He used "Panda" in several email accounts (Pandas4Progress was one of many).

JACKSON, Wyo. (AP) — Grizzly bears continue to expand their range amid an ongoing effort to turn over management of the bears from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to the states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, a federal official said. “We’ve seen an 11 percent change in increasing range in just a couple of years,” Frank van Manen, head scientist of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, said last week at a meeting in Jackson. Since coming under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, grizzlies have steadily expanded their habitat outward from the population’s core in Yellowstone National...

WAKARUSA, IND. More than 50 years after Gale Sayers, the “Kansas Comet,” inspired awe as a Jayhawk, he was honored in January in Topeka by the Native Sons and Daughters of Kansas as one of its Kansans of the Year. At a table near the front, Sayers was seated next to his wife, Ardythe, as a mesmerizing KU-produced tribute played. ************ But Ardie Sayers has come to believe its onset was years before that — possibly even as far back as when he returned to Kansas in a fund-raising capacity for a time in 2009. While she considers Sayers, 73,...

Aboriginal hunters from Arctic Canada have a couple of names for what they say is an extremely rare polar bear that is huge, narrow-bodied, fast-moving and lithe: "tiriarnaq" or "tigiaqpak," meaning "weasel bear." Now the thawing and rapidly eroding Chukchi Sea coastal permafrost has produced evidence that one of these legendary weasel bears — or some other strange kind of bear — roamed Arctic Alaska centuries ago. A huge, fully intact and unusually shaped polar bear skull emerged in 2014 from an eroding archaeological site about 13 miles southwest of Utqiaġvik (Barrow). It is one of the biggest polar bear...

Some wildlife activists and Banff business owners are voicing disappointment over recently released results of a $1-million, five-year study into bear deaths on train tracks in mountain national parks. Jim Pissot of WildCanada Conservation Alliance, says the recommendations to create alternative habitat and escape routes, manage vegetation, install early warning systems and electric mats ignore one glaring reason grizzlies are attracted to the tracks — spilled grain from rail cars. “Bizarrely, after six years of study, Parks Canada and Canadian Pacific have blamed the bears,” said Pissot. “They are determined that the bears, wolves and other wildlife must change their...

A Framingham middle school student was hospitalized Monday after he and another student ate a marijuana edible on the school bus, according to a letter released by Fuller Middle School. School officials are trying to find out who brought the edibles on the bus and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Stacy Velasquez says her 12-year-old son was riding the bus to school Monday morning when he found a container of gummy bears that got him very sick.

Would you this to your co-workers? Bear! Or not. With friends like these, who needs enemies? Sometimes office teasing goes a little beyond "Go pick up a bottle of elbow grease" or "See if you can find me the level straightener", and delves into the pre-planned pranking. case in point: The "bear" milling around outside! On a construction site, seeing a bear probably isn’t all that far from the realm of possibility. I've never been one to tease somebody for having a functioning Fight or Flight reflex, though. What do you think? Seen or done any good pranks lately? I'm...