This 12 months has seen 69 bear assaults throughout Japan, nearing the 2023 all-time excessive of 71. Five individuals additionally tragically misplaced their lives in encounters with bears which are more and more encroaching on rural communities as meals grows scarce and human populations there shrink.
Staying alert is the important thing to staying protected in areas the place bears are identified to wander into, and one software that just lately got here out is BowBear, by which “bow” is pronounced like “bow and arrow” however can be a homophone of the Japanese phrase for “prevention.” The app intends to be an assist in holding bears away with a two-pronged method.
First, the app accommodates a map of Japan with locations the place bears have been noticed marked in orange. Spots the place bears have been confirmed to have been are marked in crimson. Also, if you happen to spot a bear, you possibly can report it by way of the app and replace the map.
It’s essential to notice that this app works on consumer enter, and whereas BowBear celebrated over 100,000 downloads just lately, the accuracy and protection of the map relies upon vastly by itself customers. In phrases of staying protected, we extremely advocate checking the native authorities web sites for up-to-date bear sighting info and steering as effectively.
However, if increasingly more individuals are utilizing BowBear in earnest, it couldn’t solely present regional security info but in addition show large information on bear motion all around the nation.
The different means BowBear intends to assist is with a function that performs the audio of a canine barking for a set period of time. The makers of the app don’t assure this may maintain away bears, nevertheless it’s value a shot if you find yourself in bear nation and don’t have another instruments obtainable, and specialists do usually advocate that hikers discuss, play sound from a radio, or connect a ringing bell to their belt or backpack to make their presence identified, since many bear assaults happen when the animals are startled by unexpectedly crossing paths with people.
Reading by way of all this, you possibly can simply see that BowBear is just not a miracle app to maintain you completely protected from bears. That’s as a result of no app can ever be that, however the core level of BowBear is that it takes as many individuals and communities working collectively as doable to remain protected from encounters with bears.
Source: PR Times, NHK World Japan
Insert photographs: PR Time
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