[pct-l] Pee as bear deterrent?

[Brick Robbins]

On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Jim Marco <jdm27 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> Anyway, Bears can pretty much "smell" food, regardless of how the actual mechanism works and how they process the info. Estimates range from 2 times to 50 times what a dog can smell.<

In the experiment,  police dogs were able to locate stuff stored in
opsacks, hidden inside closed lockers.

If a bear's sense of smell is 2 to 50 times better than a dog's? well,
then I would guess that the opsacks aren't providing much more
protection than a placebo. How well do rodents smell? dunno. Maybe
opsacks protect against them.

But lots of folks "believe" in things that have been disproven by
experiment. Belief and hope are amazing human traits, and evidence
often doesn't shake belief.

That being said, I have never been bothered by bears while storing my
food in a nylon stuff sack, but I don't pretend the stuff sack
protects my food. I just seldom camp where habituated bears go looking
for food, and when I do, my food is safely locked away inside a bear
box.

HYOH, YMMV