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I live in an area with native Cougar and Bear. Local hunters told me a couple decades ago the best thing to do in the woods when you are alone is to put your s
by Ccecil 6y ago
I live in an area with native Cougar and Bear. Local hunters told me a couple decades ago the best thing to do in the woods when you are alone is to put your sunglasses on the back of your head. They explained that large cats typically attack from behind. When the glasses are on the back of your head it confuses the cat as to which direction you are looking and makes them hesitate (therefore less likely) to attack you.
It always made sense to me. This study seems to reinforce their advice.
- advaita 6y agoIIRC, In Sundarban Delta (India/Bangladesh) people put on masks on the back of the head for similar reasons. EDIT: Yeap, here's NYT article from 1989 https://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/05/science/face-masks-fool-the-bengal-tigers.html https://www.nytimes.com/1989/09/05/science/face-masks-fool-t...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sircastor 6y agoThis reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes comic where Calvin, having read about this practice, makes his own mask to protect himself from Hobbes' pouncing. [1] https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/10/23 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/10/23
- tome 6y agoThat's cool. The comic was about one year after the newspaper, so perhaps it got into the public consciousness during that period!
- erikig 6y agoRelated: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/10/25 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/10/25 The outcome of Calvin's "experiment"
- ravoori 6y agoApparently putting on a mask at the back of the head stopped working after a while https://books.google.com/books?id=zU7PmIjthpoC&pg=PA38#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=zU7PmIjthpoC&pg=PA38#v=one...
- deeringc 6y agoI heard the exact same from a shark expert in the Great Barrier Reef. Rather than using a cage or anything we'd normally associate with shark diving, he puts a set of googly eyes on the back of his head and had been safely shark diving professionally for 2 decades.
- slim 6y agoI don't think sharks have the same cognitive capacities as felines plus felines imply a lot of things about their prey when they do this like : there are only two eyes, facing the same direction, prey can only move in 2d etc... which are not true under water
- oopsiforgot7 6y agoDid you ever hear the tragedy of Vitaly Nikolayenko? "He spent 33 years living with the brown bears (Ursus arctos) native to the Kamchatka peninsula (...) For over 20 years, Nikolayenko followed an enormous male he named Dobrynya, forming such an easy bond that the bear would often curl up to sleep just a few feet from him." Eventually he died of a bear mauling. Moral of the story: it works until it doesn't.
- JackFr 6y ago"True Stories of Survivorship Bias"
- vecter 6y agoDid that bear maul him though?
- Udik 6y ago> Eventually he died of a bear mauling Wow, same year and two months later than Timothy Treadwell, "Grizzly Man". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Treadwell https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Treadwell
- mcguire 6y agoPlease don't tell the Discovery Channel about this. We'll be inundated by bear-related conspiracy theories. Or "Bear Week".
- Waterluvian 6y agoTangentially related: fighter jets do this too. Interesting how universal these tricks seem to be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_CF-18_Hornet#/media/File:Canada_Joins_the_Fight_Against_ISIL_141030-F-MG591-642.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_CF-18_Hornet...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rozab 6y agoAwesome! This is similar to dazzle camouflage from WW1, the idea being to disguise the heading of the ship. I'm not sure it was ever shown to actually work though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
- Tuna-Fish 6y agoDazzle was meant to fool coincidence rangefinders. The method of operation of such a rangefinder is that you see two halves of a picture, and your job as the operator is to adjust a range knob until the two halves "line up" and produce a single picture. By making parts of the ship easy to mistake for other parts, dazzle made this hard. Dazzle fundamentally failed at this task because the primary opponent, Imperial Germany, did not use coincidence rangefinders. Instead, they used stereoscopic rangefinders, against which Dazzle had little effect. (Incidentally, the Germans also went to war with a naval camouflage paint scheme that was best designed to defeat their own instruments, and was notably less effective against the Royal Navy.)
- Waterluvian 6y agoThis has me really curious about a bigger topic: “what are some massive wartime expenditures (money, resources, attention) that ended up being completely ineffective?”
- KineticLensman 6y ago
- king_panic 6y agoTIL :)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dalbasal 6y agoIt work on magpies. When they nest, Maggies "swoop" at people, dogs and such that get too close. In australia (where all birds are much bolder), people do the sunglasses trick.
- jcampbell1 6y agoMy second day in Australia I had one swoop me about 5 times and then finally peck or claw my scalp and it was a bloody mess. I went into the trailer I was staying in and the bird perched on a branch and evil eyed me for 30 minutes. Those birds are gangster. Later I saw kids waiting for the school bus with ice cream boxes on their head with two dots drawn on the back. Definitely not a fashion thing. The locals got I good laugh from me getting pecked because they all know the tricks after the first warning swoop.
- x0 6y agoThe magpies near me never swoop me, I've somehow made friends with them. They used to swoop my dog, until they saw me and my dog outside together, now they leave her alone. I love them though, they're friendly to other birds (but they have no tolerance for bullies), and they'll even chase off invasive species (Indian Myna birds). They are certainly the dons of my garden.
- suyula 6y agoCould just be that you were new to the area. I walk everywhere so the magpies see me all year round, and by the time it's swooping season they know I'm not a threat. I only get swooped when I take a different path to normal and come across an unfamiliar family.
- dalbasal 6y agoYeah. Schoolkids do the ice cream container helmet. In groups, one usually walks backwards... like a troop of little commandos.
- rootsudo 6y agoThat is cool.
- wrnr 6y agoEven big cats use this technique to ward off big cats: https://www.mindenpictures.com/cache/pcache2/00539194.jpg https://www.mindenpictures.com/cache/pcache2/00539194.jpg
- tejtm 6y agoI came to a different conclusion after watching footage of a family hunting together at night. There is also a third very similar white dot on the tip of the tail which is very much more dynamic that the two fixed points on the ears. By moving the tail relative to the ears I would swear the ones in front could at least communicate their own intents to the ones behind them if not issue perfectly silent directives
- wrnr 6y agoInteresting theory, Tigers not know to hunt in packs, but you might be right thats it's a way to counter their own camouflage. Do you remember the footage.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tejtm 6y agoIt was a mother and juveniles, and it would have been decades ago. Maybe not exactly "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kindom" but something similar. []https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Kingdom
- tantalor 6y agoWhy would animals recognize sunglasses as eyes?
- renewiltord 6y agoWell, I still see Orca eyespots as eyes and I've known they're not for at least two decades now.
- Ccecil 6y agoDeer and Elk have very dark eyes. https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/game_management/deer/images/WTD-Headshot.jpg https://tpwd.texas.gov/huntwild/wild/game_management/deer/im... Some sunglasses (probably not all) kinda look like 2 dark circles with a gap between. If you can make the cat second guess it sometimes is all it takes to make it look for other game. They really don't like to eat us anyways from what I hear.
- emmelaich 6y agoAs a kid, to defend against magpie attacks we used to paint eyes on the back of the upturned ice-cream bucket we used as a helmet. Worked as far as I could tell.
- nswest23 6y agoSounds like survivorship bias to me /s