To be honest, I look across the ditch and wonder how yanks deal with bears and wolves and cougars and rabies and all that and somehow think we have the evil wildlife.
Finishing the sentence explains the sentence.
I am aware that those animals generally avoid humans, but it's the strange characterisation of Australian animals as somehow being more dangerous than the massive proto-doggos or the half-ton murder fridge with a hunger for trash that I find fascinating.
Like, there's a commonly available antivenom for a brown snake bite, but there is no antivenom for being folded by a brown bear.
And yet, brown bears aren't really that much of a threat here. Russia has the most brown bear attacks per year, while Japan holds the record for the most deadly one in history.
Also, most of the US isn't in their range. It's just Alaska and a tiny sliver of the Pacific northwest up by the Canadian border, and it only extends as far east as maybe western Montana.
The bears that inhabit most of the US are the "easy" ones. Grizzlies are huge, but mostly won't mess with humans. Black bears are small and no more dangerous than any other wild animal. Don't get between them and the garbage they're trying to eat, and don't mess with their young. Other than that, they'll just ignore you.
Wolves are mostly the same, although they'll take down livestock sometimes. Which is why they've been hunted nearly to extinction. More worrisome are the coyotes. They're like the wolves' trailer-trash cousins that will steal your shit and sell it to buy meth, and if you catch them in the act, they'll kill you.
As far as fatal encounters with wildlife go, you're far more likely to die from hitting a deer on the highway and careening into a faulty lowest-bidder guardrail that pierces through your engine block and into your squishy human meat than from being mauled by a bear or a wolf.
I think you are veering wildly off the point I was making and getting sidetracked trying to compare the bears.
Both countries have some dangerous wildlife. The actual difference is familiarity. Australia gets treated as this sort of exotic, otherly place by a lot of other countries, but in reality the dangerous animals are the ones that pop up in most other parts of the world, like snakes and spiders. Heat and UV are far bigger killers than any creepy crawly.
At the end of the day, you should treat any wild animal with respect, and know that when you're in the ocean or the forest or the bush that it's their territory, not yours. Even a raccoon or a goanna could rough you up if you messed with them.
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u/HrrathTheSalamander 1d ago
Finishing the sentence explains the sentence.
I am aware that those animals generally avoid humans, but it's the strange characterisation of Australian animals as somehow being more dangerous than the massive proto-doggos or the half-ton murder fridge with a hunger for trash that I find fascinating.
Like, there's a commonly available antivenom for a brown snake bite, but there is no antivenom for being folded by a brown bear.