Ask most people the most dangerous animal in Yellowstone and they'll say grizzly. They're wrong — it's the bison, by a wide margin, and 80% of the people it injures walked toward it first. This Field Skills episode is the survival companion to the wildlife parks, and it's really about one thing: the margin of space that keeps an encounter a memory instead of an ER visit.

Host Shawn Spainhour, a former Army officer, lays out the real numbers and the discipline behind them. Why a two-thousand-pound bison that looks like furniture can hit thirty miles an hour, the warning signs that mean move now, and why the average person hurt was standing eleven feet away with a phone up. Then bears: how grizzlies and black bears differ and why the right response flips between them, why the research puts bear spray at over 90% effective — better than a fire ...