the gist: man takes sons camping and is cooking with them at the fire. bear comes up and starts sniffing around food. son takes shovel and pokes at bear (dumbass, but that's not the point). bear doesn't like it. bear goes after son. dad throws firewood at bear then flees with sons in truck. bear dead from firewood bonk. park rangers investigate and fine dad $75 for not storing food properly to keep animals away.
the freakonomics commentary on it isn't really what i was thinking.
I am guessing that the $75 ticket is, in most cases, a good incentive to get campers to properly stow their food. And I am guessing that Everhart was truly guilty of said infraction. But if you were the officer in charge of determining whether this man who fought off a bear to save his sons should get the $75 ticket, don’t you think you might have considered waiving the fee, just this once?response #2 is closer to what i was thinking.
in my opinion, this guy violated park rules. the bear wouldn't have come up at all, and this would have been a non-issue had he properly stored his food. they have those rules in place to protect campers. not to say it wasn't great that he saved his son, or that it wasn't traumatic, but, this situation never should have unfolded in the first place! this guy and his sons should consider themselves lucky! $75 is a small price to pay considering what they could have lost.Sounds a bit of a similar situation to someone who gets into a traffic accident, nearly kills a member of his family, and then the police test him and find he is driving with twice the legal limit of alcohol in his blood. In such a situation wouldn’t you expect him to get charged with DWI?
The point is if you do something illegal and inadvisable and in doing so put someone else in severe danger, then you should expect some kind of punishment. Would the situation be any different if the kid who had been approached by the bear was someone else’s kid?
