[pct-l] Subject: Re: Pee as bear deterrent?

[Anthony Biegen]

Brick wrote:

>In the experiment,  police dogs were able to locate stuff stored in
>opsacks, hidden inside closed lockers.

>If a bear's sense of smell is 2 to 50 times better than a dog's? well,
>then I would guess that the opsacks aren't providing much more
>protection than a placebo. How well do rodents smell? dunno. Maybe
>opsacks protect against them.

>But lots of folks "believe" in things that have been disproven by
>experiment. Belief and hope are amazing human traits, and evidence
>often doesn't shake belief.

Since my respected colleague Mendo Rider isn't here to defend his favorite
bit of trail gear, I'll just chime in here as someone who has training is
setting up experiments and statistical analysis.

This so called 'experiment' is flawed in so many ways that it's hard to
know where to begin. First of all they used dogs instead of bears. Not sure
where the numbers on the sense of smell being 2 to 50 time better but it
sure sounds like it was made up. I'm guessing there is no study that shows
what the number is. Second, the dogs were trained to smell drugs in lockers
at schools and inside other buildings. Bears live in the forest, not in
buildings. Third, they used drugs in the bags (which the dogs had spent
quite some time training on) instead of food.

So I can see no factors at all in this experiment that matched the real
world except the Opsack bags. Dogs vs. bears; trained animals vs.
untrained; drugs vs. food; controlled indoor environment vs. forest; cops
vs. scientists. This experiment proved nothing about the use of Opsack bags
in real life, except as a warning perhaps to teenagers trying to make a
little extra money at school.

Does that mean that Opsack bags make your food invisible to bears? No, of
course it doesn't. But it also doesn't prove that they don't work. It was
just more crappy pseudo-science that it thrown at the American people every
day. Don't get me started on the garbage Prudential Insurance ads of TV the
last few months!

Mendo, I think of ya!

TrailHacker
Friend and admirer of Mendo Rider

P.S. I don't own any Opsack bags and have never used them so I really don't
care if they work or not. I do care about crap being thrown about and
called science.