When It’s Humans Vs. Wildlife

Re “Walk Softly and Carry a Big Gun,” Commentary, Jan. 19: I recently moved back to Southern California after eight good years living in Alaska. We could walk out our driveway, up a neighbor’s driveway and we’d be on a trail into Chugach State Park. Climbing less than a mile would bring us to hundreds of acres of wild blueberries -- there for the picking, and for the bears. We had five or six black bears, two or three browns (grizzlies in the Lower 48), a pack of wolves and dozens of moose in our section of the valley.

We learned some simple rules and had few problems: Don’t attract bears (or big cats or wolves or coyotes). While you can keep garbage outside when the bears are hibernating, we’d store it in the garage or a bear-proof box during the summer. My mistake was putting a cat door in the garage door; in the spring of 1999 a bear tried to eat his way in. I had to replace the garage door.

If you want to walk a dog, get the right kind of dogs -- we had Great Pyrenees -- and keep them on a leash. Pyrs are bred to keep bears and wolves away. When we’d run into bears, the dogs would lower their heads, stare at the bear and growl. Between that and our yelling, the bears always ran. The leash is so the dogs can’t chase the bear.

Everything -- bears, wolves, moose, cougars, even people -- is startled and scared by an extremely loud, unexpected noise. I was fishing in a rapids that sounded like a freeway, in waders and knee-deep water, when I turned and realized a young brown bear was 20 feet behind me, between me and shore. It was standing up, looking things over. I grabbed the survival whistle my wife had given me and laid into it. Seven years of French horn came through and the bear did a double-take. It also alerted every fisherman for 200 yards -- half of whom, being Alaskans, had .44 magnums out in a few seconds. Everyone started yelling and whistling, a few threw rocks, and the bear decided to leave.

After that encounter we started carrying an aerosol boat horn -- about the size of a can of shaving cream, lightweight, legal almost everywhere and loud enough to hurt your ears even pointed away from you. You don’t have to aim or worry about injuring an animal, and it will bring help at a run. It could also save your life if you get lost.

Lee Aubel

Downey

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Alaskan Karl Francis asks why we in the Los Angeles area don’t protect ourselves from predators that want to kill us.

It’s simple -- our politicians want us to be disarmed. Thirty-six more-enlightened states issue gun-carry permits to all qualified citizens (Alaska and Vermont don’t even require permits), but here in L.A. our leaders don’t trust us with the power of self defense. So we die.

Marshall Buck

Los Angeles

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Somehow I’m comfortable hiking the hills and trails of Southern California knowing that in the past century about 20 mountain lion attacks have occurred. I’m less comfortable with the idea that nearly every human on those trails will be packing a gun, if Francis’ view prevails.

Steven Sittig

San Dimas

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I won’t dispute that carrying protection while hiking in the wilderness might be a good idea, and I might be able to buy Francis’ claim that he loves bears, and “not just to eat.”

Just last summer we witnessed, first hand, just how much many Alaskans “love” their wildlife during a long-awaited RV trip to that state. Aside from sanctuaries, such as Denali National Park, Alaska’s wildlife was rarely seen, unlike in British Columbia and the Yukon, where moose and bear are often seen ambling alongside the road.

When we observed that, in Alaska, every Wal-Mart, hardware store and even some grocery stores sell and stock huge amounts of bullets and guns, that roadside signs are so riddled by bullets that they can’t be read, and the Sunday newspaper in Anchorage proudly proclaims the “taking” of a 20-year-old rare glacier bear by a “brave” hunter at a bearbaiting station, it became obvious to us just how Alaskans “love” their wildlife.

Sandy Brown

Oxnard