Ok, regarding your first point. Fair enough. Such comparisons usually aren't apples to apples. Yes, a lot more humans spend a lot more time around other people than bears. And there are a lot more man hours outdoors in general (and sometimes in thunder storms) than people in bear country. Fine, I did not make great argument there.
Regarding your second point, I didn't mention any ratios or assumptions. I just described the general differences in black vs. brown bear fatal attack behaviour as described in Herrero's book, widely considered a solid source on the topic. Herrero isn't a PETA activist. He was a wildlife biology prof at the University of Calgary who researched bear attacks for decades, personally investigated some fatal attacks, etc. He talks about bear defense in his book and is not anti-gun. He has stats in his book as of around 2000 but I don't have the book with me because I loaned it to someone. Anyway, the discussion on here got me curious. Unfortunately the Wikipedia page (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_bear_attacks_in_North_America) isn't as well organized as it used to be, and the stats are broken out decade by decade. But because I find this interesting, I spent a bit of time to tally up the decades. Below is a listing of fatal attacks over the past hundred years. I may be off by one or two here or there because I manually counted from tables by decade. The individual instances are sourced in the Wikipedia article. It looks like they are mostly news articles. I am extremely skeptical of journalists in general (and have been my entire adult life since the early 90s), but things like this are reasonably verifiable. The general numbers are consistent with what I remember from Herrero and whenever I've looked this up over the years.
| Black Bear fatal attacks in NA | Brown Bear fatal attacks in NA |
| 2020s | 6 | 11 |
| 2010s | 11 | 18 |
| 2000s | 16 | 10 |
| 1990s | 10 | 15 |
| 1980s | 7 | 10 |
| 1970s | 7 | 9 |
| 1960s | 6 | 3 |
| 1950s | 5 | 4 |
| 1940s | 3 | 4 |
| 1930s | 7 | 3 |
| 1920s | 1 | 3 |
| 1910s | 0 | 1 |
| Total | 79 | 91 |
So, slightly more brown bear fatalities than black bear. Since you mentioned that grizzlies are over a much smaller range, this suggests that they are generally more dangerous: fewer human interactions, but similar number of fatal attacks. While I find this interesting, I am not going to look up the precise location of each attack and examine the differences in areas where black and brown bears are both found, whether in Alaska or other jurisdictions. But given the relatively low total numbers, fewer than 100 fatal attacks by either kind of bear in North America over the past hundred years, when you start to slice and dice at that fine a level the numbers will get smaller and less meaningful statistically. Whatever the ratios are in various regions, it doesn't change the behavioural observations of how black vs. brown bears typically kill people.
Regarding your third point, ok, I get that the story sounds far fetched. I always found it amazing. I don't remember the exact details, but the pot happened to be on the stove when she fled the bear and ran into the cabin. Her parents were somewhere close by but not in the cabin. It's in Herrero. I can't personally vouch for the story but I'm pretty sure it was well documented. Regardless of whether that particular story is true, there is apparently a trend among almost-fatal black bear attacks where a determined human managed to discourage the bear. For sure, the bears probably could have killed the people in most of those cases, but it seems that putting up enough of a fight can sometimes make a black bear give up. That was my only point in mentioning that. Just something to add to the discussion here.
For sure, a good .45 ACP bullet would be much better than a fillet knife, a hatchet or a pot of boiling water against a black bear. And presumably also effective against meth heads or gangsters defending a marijuana field one happened to stumble across.
