Study: Bears Prefer Minivans

By Rocky Thompson on October 26th, 2009

Who in god’s name is commissioning these studies? A real group of scientists and analysts received actual money to examine data on bears breaking into vehicles in Yosemite parking lots. The study, which will be published in the Journal of Mammalogy, found that minivans were more likely to be broken into than any other vehicle. Actual scientist posit that this is because families with small children drive minivans, and those kids spill juice and drop food all over their car seats making the vehicles smell more like food. The study also found that bears are more likely to break into vehicles with food in them. While it didn’t explore the topic in depth, the study also found that bears were less likely to break into U.S. Army tanks.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 11:26 am and is filed under National Parks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Study: Bears Prefer Minivans”

1. bryantp October 26th, 2009 at 3:11 pm

   Dude, they don’t really do the study. They take the money, think up an outcome, and pay a technical writer $8 an hour to write the copy.

   I’m trying to get a grant to do a study to see how many people do that.

2. runrtom October 26th, 2009 at 5:32 pm

   Here’s a study I did when I was 10. According to my research if you leave your Mom’s nasty apricot pie in the cooler outside of the camping trailer in bear country the bears will tear the hell out of the cooler to get at it and mom will yell at you the next day. That will be $250 G please.

3. Bjornar October 27th, 2009 at 6:14 am

   While I’m all for the furthering of our understanding of wildlife, this type of “study” drives me crazy. Just like the countless “studies have found that…” they are nothing more than a few filters or pivot charts in freaking Office! These “researchers” probably pulled all of the incident reports, just threw a couple of columns of data into Excel OR, if it was really tricky first did some work in Access oooh! And then they just looked for large Counts. Oh what do you know, the reports are mostly showing minivan’s versus sedans or pickup trucks–why don’t we throw out a hypothesis on why. Of course the study didn’t run any experiments so literally is just a slightly educated guess on why minivans. Did you know researchers have found that in years where ice cream sales are up so are murder rates? Statistics are such a marvelous thing!