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manbearpig
(quokk.au)
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this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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I don’t think you understand what adjusted for population means. Bears kill like 2.6 people a year.
Humans kill ~11,000 times as many, and have 100 times the population. So humans are 110x more likely to kill you than a bear. (Note this is humans, not men. Men are responsible for 87.5% of known murders, but 50% of the population.) Adjusting for this, men are ~145 to 200x more likely to kill a human than a bear (like a quarter of murders are unknown so I gave it a wide range) You also have to take into account humans are generally bound by society and thus most human interaction won’t be as dangerous where as it’s not like a bears gonna be like “uh oh there are cameras here or other people might see me kill this person” so like… yeah you can’t perfectly account for everything but uh, point being bears really aren’t that dangerous if you see one alone in the woods.
Also sorry if I didn’t provide links and math might be slightly whatever I was taking and shit and honestly don’t care that much.
Edit: and before you try and say anything else please note this is me being nice and only looking at literal murder. Ignoring assault and sexual assault and etc, which all bear attacks are about 35 a year total and… yeah human numbers are uh, MUCH higher.
This ignores exposure time though which is a huge factor, and makes the comparison disingenuous.
It absolutely doesn't. The original question is about if you would prefer to be alone in a forest with a bear vs. with a man - it's not would you like to interact with a bear vs. a man. People are alone in the forest with bears all the time - neither the bear nor the person knowing the other is there beyond an abstract concept. Heck, I'm alone in a forest with several bears every time I take my recycling out. I wouldn't choose to interact with a bear, but I do know that there's no circumstance in which the bear is going to come and seek me out (barring obnoxiously tedious rare exceptions like rabies or famine or something equally too uncommon to be relevant).
People do seek out other people, all the time. If it knows I'm there, the average bear wants nothing more than to avoid me as much as it can - the average man wants to do that significantly less, if only because they're seeking the company of another human.
So an individual bear kills how many humans on average and an individual human kills how many humans on average a year. You're almost there!