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You typically want to avoid any situation where you find yourself face-to-face with any kind of bear, but that’s especially true when the animal in question is a polar bear. A husband and wife in Canada were recently unfortunate enough to find themselves in that situation, and he’s thankfully expected to recover after pulling a daring move to protect her.
I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to assume the vast majority of people who’ve seen a polar bear in real life have encountered them in the confines of a zoo, as you typically need to make the trek to some fairly remote regions of the world (specifically Arctic locales in Russia, Greenland, Canada, Norway, and Alaska) to cross paths with one in the wild.
It’s safe to say Fort Severn First Nation fits that particular bill, as the northernmost settlement in Ontario (which is home to around 500 Swampy Cree members) is located less than 10 miles from the Hudson Bay and not the kind of place you randomly stumble upon.
It’s not particularly rare for polar bears to be spotted in that area, as there are around 600 members of the species located in the western Hudson Bay region, a population that’s one of the most studied due to the relative ease of access for researchers.
With that said, interactions with—and attacks on—humans tend to be relatively rare, but there was a very notable exception due to what unfolded on Tuesday.
According to The Guardian, a husband and wife who reside in Fort Severn headed outside their home around 5 A.M. on Tuesday and encountered a polar bear in their driveway that lunged at the woman who fell on the ground after it pounced.
Her husband wasted no time literally springing into action, as he quickly “leapt on to the animal” to give her the chance to get away. Their neighbor heard the commotion and scrambled to the scene with a gun in tow and shot the bear multiple times before it fled into the woods where it was found dead shortly after.
The man was treated at a local hospital for the “severe” but thankfully non-life-threatening injuries he sustained to his arms and legs as the polar bear battled back, and he’s expected to make a full recovery.
According to a study published in 2017, there were just 73 confirmed instances of polar bears attacking humans on a global scale between 1870 and 2014 along with 20 fatalities.
Unlike other members of the species, polar bears view humans as a potential food source and are not shy about actively hunting them when hungry, and experts strongly recommend going on the offensive as resorting to the “playing dead” strategy that’s recommended as a potential method of de-escalation during situations involving bears of the non-polar variety.