HA!!!!!! I've been saying this for YEARS!!!!!!!

Spray more effective than guns against bears: study

Despite persistent doubts among hikers and campers venturing into bear country, you're better off with an eight-ounce can of bear spray than a gun, according to an analysis of 20 years of data.

Canadian and U.S. researchers announced Wednesday that they found the spray stopped aggressive bear behaviour in 92 per cent of the cases, whether that behaviour was an attack or merely rummaging for food. Guns were effective about 67 per cent of the time.

Brigham Young University bear biologist Thomas Smith, along with Stephen Herrero, bear expert and professor emeritus at the University of Calgary, and their research team report their findings in the April issue of the Journal of Wildlife Management. The researchers analyzed reported bear encounters in Alaska involving
175 people.

"Working in the bear safety arena, I even found a lot of resistance to bear spray among professionals," Smith said. "There was no good, clean data set that demonstrated definitively that it worked, so that's why we did this research."

Shooting accurately during the terrifying split seconds of a grizzly charge is a very hard thing to do, Smith pointed out, and his data suggests that it takes an average of four hits to stop a bear.