Re: You're out in the woods and run into a...
O.K. Walking down a trail in the National forest about ten miles from Mexico in Southern Arizona, had a black bear cub go "woofing" across the trail in front of me and straight up a tree.
I turned around on the trail and started whistling and walking away. I also had an 8" Bowie knife in one hand and a .22 with snake shot for the first two rounds in the other. I figured if I had to shoot it, it would be better to blind its eyes and the nose with the smell of its own blood while I then tried to run. The knife was in case I couldn't run.
The bigger problem down there is rabies.
I grew up out there with a "10 foot rule".
If you saw an "animal in the wild" that was with in 10 feet of you and it didn't run when you yelled at it and stamped your foot, you shot it.
It was either rabid or sick, because it was not scared of you, knowing it was there.
When I was growing up in Florence, Arizona, we lived right at the edge of town and a bobcat crazy with the heat of summer came into the yard and started stalking my mother. The dog looked at her, looked at the bobcat and dived into the cat. She ran past them and as she opened the backdoor to get inside the dog was right there.<G> She called the "Town Marshall" and he came out to shoot it with a .22 pistol. The cat started stalking him and it made him nervous enough that he missed with the .22, so he dropped it and pulled out his .38 and shot it dead. They took it down to the lab to check for rabies, but it was "clean".
When my dad came home, he noticed that the dog was favoring his nose on one side. He looked close at it, got some pliers and removed one of the bobcats claws from being buried in the dogs nose.
We also had some "Feral dogs" out there and it went back to the "10 foot rule", if you were more than 3 miles out of town and couldn't see a collar on it. Of course, if he was coming at you as if you were food, you shot him right then.