Humans and bears have reached a tenuous detente. Most of our kind is now educated enough to know better than to mess with bears, and bears, in turn, probably see humans as too big to bother destroying. I mean, granted, one-on-one a bear could almost always take a dude, but the dude is big enough to be a pain in the bear’s ass to kill, and why would the bear bother when there are so many delicious fish available for so much less effort.
Plus humans have access to guns, and guns can kill bears, so if bears started overstepping their bounds people would probably clamp down on them pretty quick. This arrangement should hold until bears develop guns, at which point we’re pretty much f***ed.
Anyway, there was a time in the not-too-distant past, when our race was still manifesting its destiny and forging new frontiers and all that stuff, when our ancestors still had to live in fear of bear attacks.
And in our history, no series of bear attacks I know of has been as bloody, calculated and downright terrifying as the those that occurred in the small pioneer village of Sankebetsu in Hokkaido, Japan in the snowy December of 1915.
From the Wikipedia: Sankebetsu brown bear incident.
The Wikipedia page is a bit — pardon the pun — grisly for TedQuarters, so in lieu of a comprehensive summary I tried to just provide a timeline here. But then midway through I realized that even just a timeline was a bit more disturbing than I’d like to be on this site. Read the article only if you’ve got the stomach for horror.
The moral of the story: Bears are terrifying. This particular bear weighed 836 pounds, menaced a village for nearly a month and killed seven people — eight if you count the attack victim who died of complications three years later. It also outsmarted multiple teams of hunters. When they went so far as to bait it with a dead body, it appeared to recognize the trap and ran away.
Also, they had to talk an old, drunken bear hunter out of retirement to finally kill the thing. And the hunter maintained that he knew the bear, and that it had previously killed three women.
Over the course of the incident, the bear was shot six times, and finally died only when the old, drunk bear hunter found it sleeping and shot it twice.
Do not mess with bears.
Tedquarters 
I’ve always supported the right to arm bears.
If a bear-baboon alliance ever materializes, we’re screwed.
You sound like Stephen Colbert.
“Also, they had to talk an old, drunken bear hunter out of retirement to finally kill the thing. And the hunter maintained that he knew the bear, and that it had previously killed three women.”
This guy sounds like the Quint of the bear hunting industry.
It gets better: the movie was directed by none other than Sonny Chiba. Best thing to happen to my Amazon wishlist in ages.
I just happened to have read the Wikipedia article in Japanese – only to find out there is English version too – although it’s not as detailed. Is this the worst bear attack on human on record so far?
I forwarded the URL to my English speaking friends. It’ll shiver them to cool them down their spine in the midst of heat wave.
But……this is some gruesome incident.