Hunter buys bear spray even though they don't "trust" it (sound familiar Deaf?), then if/when they are involved in some sort of bear encounter/attack and are "forced" to shoot the bear, guess what they claim to avoid the penalties? The bear spray didn't work...
OC: I got involved in this conversation when you posted the sentences above. In order to make that clear, I quoted them in my first post, and have quoted them again here for convenience.
You are making a specific accusation here: that people buy spray, then shoot bears w/o justification (that's what the scare quotes you put around 'forced' seem to imply), then spray the general area with bear spray afterwards and say 'when the spray failed, I had to shoot'.
I wasn't asking for a rehash of the general discussion; I was asking for your source for that specific allegation - that people are using fake spray discharges to cover up the crime of illegally shooting a beat
often enough to skew the statistics.
Your accusation sounds fishy to me because:
1)Since illegally shooting bears is a serious crime, I expect the authorities to investigate. As with any other crime, the crime scene, interviews of witnesses and so on will be carefully matched to the shooter's story. I think if your accusation is commonly true, the authorities would have found evidence to support it at least once. If so, the shooter would have been prosecuted. Can you cite such a case of a post shooting bear spray coverup?
2)My sense is that the investigating authorities would be unlikely to call up some employee at PepperSprayCorp and chat with them about their investigations; that's not how things work in my experience.
You ask us to take your accusation as gospel based on no more than 'I worked for 30 years in the industry'. I'm sorry, but that's not persuasive. You'll have to expand that with a lot more details - both about the inside info you say you have, and how it came into your possession.
As I posted, I tend to think spray is a better choice for most people. It's your accusations of people commonly using post shooting spray discharges as part of a coverup that I'm questioning.