Man fought back after being bitten in stomach, thighs, and thrown into ditch

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A Canadian man survived an encounter with a grizzly bear, who bit him in the stomach and thighs, by stabbing it with a pocket knife.

Colin Dowler was mountain biking on a remote logging road on Mount Doogie Dowler – named after his grandfather – in British Columbia when he rounded a corner and saw the bear.

The 45-year-old stopped his bike and was assessing his options when the bear began walking towards him. As it got closer Dowler said he attempted to deploy his bike and a hiking pole as a makeshift shield and weapon.

After the bear started taking heavy swipes at him, he threw his bike at it, but undeterred the bear bit him in the stomach, then picked him up and dropped him into a ditch, roughly 50ft (15 metres) away, before taking deep bites into his thighs.

“I thought I wasn’t going to make it. It was pretty freaking scary,” Dowler told Canada’s public broadcaster CBC. “I could hear the teeth on my bone,” he told the North Island Gazette.

In an interview with the BBC, Dowler recalled trying to negotiate with the bear before the attack. “I know this is your territory, I’m just passing through - we don’t have to do this,” he said he told the bear.

“It was so much pain and weirdness, I could feel the hot blood,” he said. “I’m being rag-dolled, suspended by my flank by a bear carrying me.”

He added: “There was a point – I was scared the whole time – but I thought, ‘man, it would be cool to be catching this on video’.”

After trying to gouge out the bear’s eyes and briefly playing dead, he managed to reach for his pocket knife and stab the bear in the neck with its two-inch blade.

There was a rush of blood and the bear let go and retreated, Dowler said. Losing blood and needing to find help, he put pressure on his wounded leg using a shirt sleeve and cycled four and a half miles to a logging camp, where he collapsed.

Workers treated his wounds before emergency services gave him a blood transfusion, and then an air ambulance took him to Vancouver’s general hospital, about 185 miles to the south.

Conservation officers later shot the bear and said they were confident it was the same one because it had a knife wound in its neck. They added it was a 350lb (159kg) four or five-year-old male grizzly. Unprovoked bear attacks of the kind described by Dowler are extremely rare.



