Weingarten's article claims rely on another article by "The Bear Examiner," Dave Smith. When you click on the link, to Dave Smith's article, you learn that the main argument that Dave Smith makes is that Tom Smith's and Stephen Herrero's works on bear attacks are fraudulent because they deliberately excluded a previous study by Miller and Tutterrow that (1) includes many more bear incidents, and (2) shows the effectiveness of firearms. Dave Smith concludes that Tom Smith and Stephen Herrero lied about their data and misrepresented their study as the first ever on bear attacks.

I think we need to call on a nature biologist who actually works on this sort of stuff to settle the issue. But we are also intelligent adults, and we can figure a few things out ourselves. Tom Smith does cite Miller's work -- and a whole host of other studies on bear attacks, You can't misrepresent your work as the "first ever" if you cite a whole bunch of other works that come before yours. in fact. I also noticed that Tom Smith and Miller seem to define their cases differently, which may account for the numerical disparity between the datasets of Miller's and Smith's studies.

The peer review process generally eliminates stuff like failure to cite important previous studies on a subject, especially if they matter for the article under review. It's also pretty good at eliminating obvious data fraud like the sort that "The Bear Examiner" accuses Smith and Herrero of. No, it's not perfect, and perhaps some stuff slips through -- however, the sort of stuff that slips through is not so obvious that "The Bear Examiner" can explain in the sort of simplistic argument he uses. ("They cherry-picked their examples!") I think "The Bear Examiner" is just some amateur hack with opinions that don't square with facts. It looks to me like he misrepresented the scientific research to advance his personal agendas. Click on his bio, and his main qualification seem to be "I've spent a lot of time out there." Doug, your friend Weingarten should stop listening to him.

Just to be clear -- in the spray vs gun thing I don't necessarily advocate one thing over another. However, I get annoyed by ignorant attacks on science.