'Nother sort of beast

The video amusement du jour seems to be images of a house cat squaring off against a black bear and coming off the winner.

I can buy most of this except the idiotic headlines about "heroic cat defends household from bear," etc.

Bullshit. The cat (which in the video was off the porch like a rocket in pursuit as soon as the bear exited with what I assume was a bag of garbage) had two things in mind. First, making sure that the interloper wasn't making off with her food and second, giving hell to any creature that invaded the cat's personal space. I think the bear was an easy mark because it had people in mind. As a rule, black bears don't mind lifting something from humans as long as the humans aren't in a position to object strongly; say with firearms. If the people look like they can cause trouble, the bear is likely to exit. If you follow the video, you'll notice that once the cat had figured out that it wasn't her food, she was solely interested in self-defence and perfectly happy to let the bear pick up its bag of trash and beat it. Hardly heroic: Cats won't even move off the armchair for hoomanz without some mutual display of aggression. Also, this was not a huge bear. When it gets older, it may understand that the irate display of claws, teeth and fur in front of it could be a meal.

Or perhaps not. Where I grew up, it wasn't unusual this time of year to find signs in the woods that a wildcat had taken down a deer. The average wildcat is maybe half again the size of an average house cat, but far more muscular and with much nastier weaponry. The deer would be up to twice the size of that video bear. Those things happened when both animals were very hungry: the deer was weak and the wildcat was desperate.

All the same, Video Kitteh here had very little idea of how to take out an animal ten times her size like a wildcat does. Until she learns to sneak up from behind, jump on its back and go for the jugular, she's likely to end up as dessert.