Bear Necessities?

I was flipping through a catalog today and came across an ad for Bear Spray.

Come to find out Bear Spray is not the “clever” name of a spray-tan product, but really is for bears! Or more to the the point, against bears since it’s actually bear repellent.

Yeah, who knew?

Apparently Bear Spray doesn’t work like Bug Spray, in that you aim it at the thing you’re trying to keep away instead of spraying it on yourself. I guess that makes sense, since shooting individual mosquitoes would probably be pretty annoying—even more annoying than having them bite you. But I digress.

The Bear Spray ad copy was pretty standard—something along the lines of:

“blah, blah, ... bear encounters...blah, blah... 9.2 oz. can...blah, blah...may give you the time needed to make your escape... blah, blah...made in the USA.”

But wait a minute... what was that bit in the middle? Did it say, “may give you time to escape?”

May?

I hate to unleash a “half empty” on such a weak “half full,” but the presence of the word “may” in that sentence does not exactly inspire confidence.

After all, “may” is a synonym of the word “might.” Swap one out with the other and you get something along the lines of, “might give you time to escape,” which already sounds quite a bit worse!

But when you extend the sentence through to its logical conclusion you quickly arrive at, “...but might not.”

Personally my biggest question about Bear Spray was whether or not it worked. The customer service representative I talked to laughed and said, “Well, let’s just say we’ve never had anyone return a can saying it didn’t work. If you get my meaning...”

Okay, that didn’t really happen. And as far as working or not, if a bear came running up to you in the forest I bet you’d be plenty happy to have Bear Spray on hand!

If nothing else, you could always hit it with the can.