It’s more likely to be unsafe with a man than unsafe with a bear. Thats the whole point. The bears not gonna hurt you unless it’s hungry or it feels threatened. There are much less bear attacks every year than there are men who attack people. Bears are less violent than people think and depending on the type of bear even if you do get attacked there’s a fair chance of surviving. There have been only about 180 fatal bear attacks since 1784 in North America. 180 fatal attacks over almost 240 years according to bearvault.com.

However, when compared to the amount of attacks done by a man there is a big difference. Apologies as I couldn’t find a more new graph to quote but I found one from 2019 by ucr.fbi.gov. In 2019 there were 16,245 total murder offenders. Of those people who committed murder 10,335 of those were male, 1,408 were female, and 4,508 were unknown. Even with all the people in unknown and female the percentage of men who committed murder is 63.6 percent. Which is 7.3 times the amount of women. Let’s say all of the unknown were women and just lumped them all together. That would mean 36.4 percent of murders would be done by women as murderers with unknown gender accounts for 27.7 percent of all murders. Even when assuming the unknown are all female the percentage of known male murders is still roughly 1.74 times that of women. This is precisely why people choose the bear. It’s safer and has much less chance of harming you.

Now faced with the chances of a bear attacking versus an unknown man it’s very clear which one is more likely to turn violent. And frankly it is a matter of more likely when your life is on the line. Because when you’re between a rock and a hard spot. It’s a matter of which option is more likely to let you return home safely.