We fear that which we don’t know. So it’s not surprising there have been numerous myths and downright false claims about black bears bandied about by supporters of the decision to kill the 150-pound female bear that walked into a Bangor neighborhood recently.

The black bear is no more inherently dangerous than a human being. In fact, the black bear is decidedly less so.

In the last century, only about 60 humans have been killed by a black bear despite millions of encounters annually. Most of the time, outdoor enthusiasts here in Maine have no idea they are in the presence of a black bear. This is because the black bear’s evolutionary history has kept it an extremely shy and timid animal. When a black bear smells a human coming, more often than not it flees into thick vegetation or scales a tree.

And bears that are used to humans are no more dangerous. They may even be less so.

“I conclude it is mainly wild black bears found in rural or remote areas – where they have relatively little association with people – that occasionally try to kill and eat a human being,” bear researcher Stephen Herrero writes in “Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance.”

According to the North American Bear Center in Ely, Minn., headed by Lynn Rogers, the world’s foremost expert on black bears, for every person killed by a black bear, 60 will be killed by a domestic dog, 180 will die from a bee sting, and 90,000 will be killed by another human being. Only one in every 600,000 black bears will kill. But one in 16,000 humans will commit murder.

But fear is a powerful drug. It is what causes people to believe that you should never get between a mother bear and her cub. It is what causes people to characterize a black bear’s expressions of anxiety as expressions of aggression.

It is the grizzly bear mother to be wary of in the presence of cubs. An estimated 70 percent of human deaths caused by grizzlies involved the presence of a cub. To date, there have been no confirmed human deaths caused by a mother black bear protecting her cubs. Three times in the last 13 months I have been close to a mother bear and cub at Bangor’s Rolland F. Perry City Forest. In two instances, the mother and cub fled. In the other, the cub fled up a tree while the mother remained hidden while I spent an hour watching the cub.

When a mountain biker at City Forest surprised a mother bear with two cubs in June, he reportedly told WLBZ-TV that the bear “growled” at him. The Associated Press reported that the bear “bellowed” several times.

However, black bears do not growl, and they may even lack the ability to do so. In 40 years of researching black bears, neither Rogers or his associates has ever heard a bear growl or roar. Nor have I in the nearly three years I have been observing the bears around City Forest.

What black bears do, however, is huff, snort, smack their lips, and clack their teeth. Their most common expression when surprised by a human is to huff. The sound, a powerful and loud series of breaths, is not an expression of aggression, though. It is actually an expression of anxiety, not unlike the hyperventilating a person does when having a panic attack. Rogers and his team of researchers came to this conclusion when they observed a black bear fall out of a tree and go through the ritual.

Unfortunately, the truth often gets in the way of telling a good story, which may explain why nobody has yet elaborated on the descriptions of the Fairmount bear being “disoriented,” “wound up” and “agitated.” In all likelihood, the bear was simply expressing anxiety – a good thing if you’re not looking to be attacked.

We as a society need to stop acting more on our fears without trying to understand the fears of others. And that is why a black bear was needlessly killed and we will not educate ourselves to eradicate the myths surrounding one of our region’s greatest and beautiful assets.

Ryan Robbins of Bangor is a freelance writer and owner of cityforest.bangorinfo.com, a Web site that provides information about the Bangor City Forest.