WOW! You should never ever get out of the vehicle to check any injured wild animal.

An animal in pain is totally unpredictable. A friend hit a deer and thought it was dead. When he got out the car, the deer heard the door open and close and struggled up and charged toward him. He dove intro the car and pulled the door almost shut when the deer hit the door. 4 holes in the outer door sheet metal and 1 in the inner door panel from the antlers was the result.

It sounds cruel but safe is safe. Even your own dog may bite if it is seriously injured.

ollo ollo, in Post #22 got it right. A bear can easily outrun a deer. A deer is a fast sprinter, but after about 75-100 yards, will usually stop to look back to see if the danger remains. I bear can run for miles. For their size and bulk they are lightning fast.

Deer are the most common road kill here, but I hit an already injured bear years ago in a Toyota Pickup, I was rounding a bend on a dark country road that crossed a small bridge, as I came around the curve the bear came sliding across the road after being hit by another truck coming the opposite direction. My truck was lifted with big tires so I sort of bounded over it and came to a stop on the other side of the bridge. The truck that hit it first was in bad shape. The local police made a bit deal out of it and were cautious not to publicize it Supposedly there were no bear in this area back then. These days their a much more common site. I had one in the back yard behind my garage just last week poking around at a bird feeder.

We have been getting warning, here at the cottage, about frequent bear sightings in the immediate area. There is even a female with two cubs. Needless to say, early morning rides are out of the question for another week or two. Then it is summer and most of the cottage dwellers will be here, making noise and creating an uncomfortable place for bears to hang out. Then, all we have to worry about are the wolves and stupid humans...

Well, the insurance company issued a check, yesterday, sending it by courier, indicating that I would have it by Friday. Already picked out a car, newer than the one I had, with less than half the mileage, more bells and whistles and in great shape. The really good news is that the insurance company treated me pretty good, paying out close to what a brand new car would have set me back.

Now, for a moment of levity, thanks to ollo ollo...
Travelling down a country road, a travelling salesman was stunned to seek a chicken pass him. He was going 50 mph. Filled with interest, the man pressed on the gas pedal, speeding up but, even at 70 miles an hour, the chicken was pulling away.

Suddenly, the chicken hung a right and streaked into a farm yard. Still interested, the salesman followed, coming to a stop near the farm house. He was stunned to see a flock of chickens, running around the yard, and every chicken had three legs. His interest grew...

Knocking on the front door caused a man, obviously the farmer, to appear. The salesman apologized for interrupting the man's day and explained the interest in the chickens and why then could run so fast. The farmer explained...

"Well, young fella, said the farmer, there is just me, the missus and our daughter. And, we all love drum sticks. With that in mind, I started raising chickens with three legs". The salesman pondered this for a moment, seeing the logic in it and asked - "How to they taste?"

"Don't know", said the farmer - can't catch em!

Thanks for bearing with me through all of this:-(

Today, ship a Sekini and then go riding on my new/old (nold) Cyclops. Tomorrow, get a new car then go riding on my Cyclops. And Saturday, if not raining, is Yard Sale day - yahoo!

Go for a purple replacement car. 😁 Funny you posted again now, my sister just went through this, replacing her Jeep. No bear though, someone got drunk & totaled it, while it was unoccupied, sitting on the curb. 🙂

I don't know about Canada, but here in the US, car insurance companies have gotten much better at paying out claims. Maybe customer satisfaction is now important to them.

In conversation, with my insurance agent today, he informed me that some car insurances, these days, offer a no-depreciation clause if the vehicle is written off with-in four years of purchasing it new. Good! Works for me:-)

WOW... what an experience.
So happy you are OK.
Cars are replaceable.
Humans? Not so much.

You mean Farmer's, no? "We are Farmer's. Dum da dum dum dum dum dum!" What a goofy jingle that is.

Randy, glad to hear that you are ok and the bear was well enough to get out of there. I agree with the swerving. If I saw something that large at speed, then I'd slam on the brakes. But if I don't stop soon enough, then its gonna get hit. Too dangerous to swerve at high speed. You litteraly did knock the poop out of that bear.

Just for the hell of it, I searched for a replacement airbag for my old 1999 Audi A4. I saw prices from $40 to $60 on ebay for an OEM one with the plastic cover to fit a three spoke steering wheel. Pretty cheap. I guess it depends on the car. Have seen some for other models go up to over $200.

My youngest daughter had a 30 mph front end collision in her '11 Hyundai Sonata that resulted in air bags deploying. To replace the airbag wiring "harness" that runs around the seats was $8000 alone. The front had some damage to the hood, grill, bumper and lights on one side, but the radiator was fine and the car was driveable. You'd never think the car would be totaled looking at it, but with $8K in just the airbag wiring harness + the other damages it was.

Yup and in Canadian dollars, $10,000.00+. Bear poop - not so much:-(

I almost hit a bear riding riding to work one morning, well, not really but it was very close. I came around a corner, looked to my right, and casually thought 'oh a bear', then duble take wait a minute 'a bear!". It was literally on the side on the road, not more than 4, or 5 feet. I was happy to be on the bike. Though all my experiences with black bears, and I have had many, is they either run away (small ones), or take look at you, and don't give a ****, go back to eating (bigger ones).

Though the overpopulated deer here are scary, I know what you mean by 'appear'. I did a shoulder check right before decending a hill a 50+km/hr, soon as I turn around, a deer, no time to avoid, was inches...inches away from contact. That gets the heart pumpin!

Deer. We definitely have more than our fill of them. I love them and find them beautiful, but they're dangerous and too numerous. I don't hunt, but I'm pro hunting.

might want to share the news with another authority besides the insurance company & the media so your neighbors will know about the incident

I have already done that and continue to do so any time I see one of our bruin friends snooping, or snuffling around.

And, for what it is worth, I came with-in a few feet of hitting a black bear, near the John Street Landfill Site, several years ago. The bear huff huffed, as he or she (not much time to consider which) passed within a few inches of my front wheel. I got a good whiff of that shabby fur ball and thanked my lucky stars that I was not on his or her food list.

had moles burrow under my bulkhead so I know what they smell like. like a guinea pig cage at a pet store. what does a bear smell like?

3 summers back my wife and I were hiking on Cape Breton Island. A few folks coming the other way warned us that bears had been spotted around the trail. We proceeded cautiously and sure enough at one point we could see a fairly large black bear rummaging in a field about 20-30 meters off the trail. We tried to be fast and quiet, but at one point the bear looked up and we were eye-to-eye for a second. It eventually returned to it’s business, and I’ve rarely been as unnerved as then. I’ve seen deer and an elk up close on trails but they didn’t rattle me as much even though they’re bigger.

Though not an expert at bear smelling, the odor was immediately noticeable and unpleasant. My guess is that the bruin had been dump fed since it was weaned. With that in mind, its odor might well have been tainted. I should add that black bears and landfill sites are a match. I have been with-in thirty or forty feet of half a dozen black bears, all feeding on the garbage that we toss at the MacGregor or Shuniah landfill sites.

More than once, I have chased black bears out of my cottage yard with a shovel. Only once did I feel a sense of trepidation. That time, as I was thumping the shovel on the rocks to frighten the bear away, I caught a hint of movement very close to me. Yup, sitting three or four feet away was a second black bear. probably a 200 pounder.

He, or she, was sitting on his or her haunches, head tipped a wee bit to one side, studied me with unalarmed indifference. At that point in time, the second bear was between me and the back door to my cottage. I took a cautious step backward, then another. The bear did not get up. Once inside the cottage, I immediately called the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police).

An officer showed up a short while later, lights flashing and all. He left the car running and glowing in my driveway, and asked where the bears were. I suggest that he turn of the noise and light maker. He did so and, sure enough, the bruin twins came out into the open.

The officer told me that policy was to not engage a bear unless it was imposing imminent danger, which neither was. Then the officer suggested that we close the windows and doors of the cottage. He said that whatever was being cooked, smelled very good, adding that now there were three bears on the property, him being one of them. I chuckled at his comment and marveled at his observation. He nailed it. I closed the windows and a short while later - no bears. However and this I did not, personally, witness.

My wife, who is a night hawk, told me that one of the bears came back and pressed its snout against a window in the front room of the cottage. That window in about two feet from where my wife sits to watch the idiot box. The bump on the window drew her attention and scared the poop out of her. She came running into the bedroom ordering me to do something about it, so...

I got up. Turned on the outside lights and went back to bed. What am I supposed to do in the black of night with a blacker than night black bear?

Now, of course, the biggest concern is those territorial chipmunks.

If we're talking deer too, I've never seen so many deer, as here in Colorado. Most recently, I had a young couple walk up on me, while sitting by the Arkansas River, then about half an hour later, another male did the same thing. I felt that second male, before I saw him, he crept up behind me. 😎

Yikes! Never knew that the harness also needed to be replaced. Although we never know what the front-end collision would do but never would have guessed the harness would need to be replaced at all. My wife scraped a parked car while trying to parallel park a while ago. She only hit and lightly scratched the rim on the wheel. But the hit on the front wheel hosed the front suspension and broke the steering box on a front wheel drive VW Passat. The bill for that was over $2000. I'm also glad to get rid of that car. Sometimes that front passenger floor takes in water. Last time it flooded the transmission control module (TCM) right near the door sill. Getting that part is usually $1200 or so from the dealer. However the dealer said that they couldn't get it in this case. It was for a turbo diesel (TDI) and they only import the last two years of that series back in 2004 and 2005. So I was "lucky" to find a used replacement from ebay at $900.