The Casper Star Tribune reports:
A Park County rancher seriously injured in a grizzly bear attack believes the sow was simply trying to protect her cubs and could have killed him if it had wanted.
Nic Patrick, 64, has been released from University of Colorado Hospital, where doctors have been rebuilding his face, but he still requires up to five more surgeries.
In his first interview since the attack, Patrick said the incident could have been much worse. He said the 400-pound bear came at him twice but not to kill him.
“Either time she could have taken me out,” he said.
Patrick was irrigating crops at his ranch early on June 20 when the bear went after his dog, then attacked him.
He believes global warming is driving bears out of their normal habitat in the mountains, where they can find cutthroat trout, white bark pine nuts and other natural food sources.
The real reason he was attacked by a grizzly is because the proliferation of grizzlies and other ravenous predators in the last few decades is forcing them to spread out where they would not normally be.
Bear and wolf free areas are a thing of the past.
Nothing bad would ever happen to a man if it weren’t for mankind. In other news, myopia blames bear attacks on myopia.
… simple explanation is that the bear really didn’t think that this dumbass ‘rancher’ was worth the trouble, and his ass was too skinny anyway 😉
Let me see if I got this: a rancher is harvesting hay in the hot plains where there is no bear food, a grizzly bear comes down from the cool bear-food-providing high country and attacks him but does not kill him. He blames the attack on global warming and his survival on the benevolence of the bear.
If global warming made the high country too hot for the bear, why would it go down to the hot dusty plains instead of going higher? What we have here is a very stupid bear.
I’m happy but not surprised that Mr. Patrick survived the bear attack. Grizzly bears are omnivores and inefficient killers. Now if he had been attacked by mountain lion, which is a carnivore and an efficient killer, the attack would probably have been fatal.