How are there so many videos, etc. of people interacting with bears peacefully even though they aren’t domesticated?
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This is why “anecdotal evidence is not evidence”.
In a world with billions of people and hundreds of thousands of bears, there are going to be thousands of bear-human encounters every year. And given that people are people, there are likely to be at least a few tens of them trying to get up close and personal with a bear. And since we live in an age where everything can be recorded, most of those encounters will probably make it onto the internet.
Not every person interacting with a bear is going to wind up mauled. In fact being mammals the bear might be just as friendly and curious as you are. But it might try to maul you instead. If you only take the videos of people interacting peacefully into account, you have no way of knowing the actual statistical likelihood of a bear petting turning into a mauling.
The only way to test this scientifically is to get a few thousand randomly-selected people together and have each of them seek out a wild bear and try to pet it while being recorded, and record the results. This will give you a more accurate measurement of how likely a bear encounter is likely to result in you dying. However it will also likely result in a lot of people getting killed, which is why you generally don’t see statistics like this.
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