Dangerous Animal Encounters – Section 1: Risk Assessment & Fear vs. Logic
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The information that follows has been realized and collected over my many decades in the outdoors in some of the most rugged and wild terrain in North America. Much of the information that I am going to share has come from deep personal interactions with an understanding of the behavior patterns of the creatures that I am going to be discussing. I will also add in helpful tips that I have picked up over the years through discussion with other experts and close friends. My goal for this class is not to instill fear, but rather understanding. As a teacher and student of the outdoors and wilderness survival I have found that a fear based motivation and teaching strategy is nothing more than a marketing gimmick and/or manipulation tactic. Don’t let yourself fall prey to that, no pun intended…
Prepare yourself, because I am going to, bust some huge myths about animal encounters, help you to understand how and why another creature will likely react to your presence, and give you some tools to prevent and de-escalate potentially dangerous encounters with animals in the outdoors. The creatures that I am going to discuss here range from potentially very dangerous to only slightly dangerous. It is important to note that our societal emotional understanding of just how dangerous or threatening any given wild creature is to us is often very skewed and inaccurate. In assessing risk, I feel that it is vital that we remove emotion from the equation to the best of our ability.
Let me give you an example that highlights why this is important. Imagine that we are standing on the top of the Empire State Building in New York City. Looking down, many of us would feel real fear of falling. That fear might even prevent some of us from walking all of the way over to the edge and looking over. Others might walk to the edge, but get a sick knot of fear in their stomachs as they approach. In reality, the viewing deck of the building is surrounded by a tall fence, and even though you may be somewhat crippled by the fear of falling, and that fear you might feel is 100 percent real, the chances of accidently falling off of that building are essentially zero. Therefore, there is fear but there is no danger.
Now imagine the route you would have had to take to get up to the top of that building. You no doubt took a car, train, or bus at some point, you also walked, crossed streets, and even took an elevator. No doubt you would not have experienced much if any real fear during these travels, certainly not to the extent that you felt on top of this building, but all of those actions, driving, riding, walking, crossing the street, all of them were actually more dangerous than standing on the top of that building. The difference is that they were familiar to you and that you either had consciously accepted that risk, or in some cases were just oblivious to the risk all together.
The scenario of a fear response without actual danger can also be witnessed in reverse when there is no fear response when there should be. We see this story over and over each year when we hear of idiot tourists who take selfies 10 feet from a buffalo or bear. They don’t understand the risk and feel no fear and yet they are putting themselves in extreme peril nonetheless.
For some people, watching a snake slowly slithering along 10 feet away might be a terrifying experience, for others it might simply be a cool experience. Assuming you are in North America, no matter your fear reaction, neither of the people watching the snake is in any immediate danger yet they have wildly different fear reactions.
Interestingly enough, a quick fear reaction itself can be the catalyst that causes injury or death i.e. the person who screams and runs from a mouse only to trip and fall and hit their head. I am certain that more people have died running from mice than though any kind of physical assault by the furry little creatures themselves.
In a “perfect world” our fear response would always be directly and accurately correlated to the severity of the threat. Unfortunately, in the “real world”, that is simply not the case. Given this information, what are the conclusions that can be drawn from this knowledge of fear? We must do our best to remove fear and emotion from our risk assessments and reactions as much as possible and instead rely on knowledge and statistics based in fact, not emotion, when determining an appropriate reaction to a perceived threat. And when we come upon unfamiliar potential threats we must be extremely cautious until we can get a solid handle on things.
Interestingly enough, this is exactly what animals are generally doing when they are approached by a human, assessing threat and determining what action is best to keep themselves or their young from harm.
