why does playing dead work to avoid getting attacked by brown bears? Wouldn’t they want to eat you more if they thought you were dead and thus couldn’t fight back?
In: Biology
To most animals, humans are strange, scary, and taste bad. Unless the bear is pretty hungry, it probably doesn’t want to eat a human.
Most bear attacks are defensive – instigated by the bear’s sense that the human is a threat to it or its children. Playing dead, even if the bear knows you’re still alive, reduces the bear’s threat perception.
If the human is not a threat and the bear is not hungry enough to eat something gross and weird, the bear no longer has a reason to expend energy.
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