How many Ursacks have you personally seen fail?
Somewhere around 8. That's more than the total for all of the other canisters combined in 20+ years of them being around. And back to the main point of food reward. The original criteria defined failure as getting food. With a cannister, that usually means a catastrophic failure and access to all the food. With the Ursack, that includes (!) punctures such that food drips out or whatever. That means that the wily bears will keep trying to get into Ursacks and keep hanging around camps in the hope of doing so. That's considered a failure for those reasons.
I'm not sure of the status of the testing and you seem to know more. If I remember right, one of the things that came out of the lawsuit was that the NPS/USFS testing procedure was flawed and they just decided not to do it anymore and so avoid any liability whatsoever. The hope was to get a UL type lab to establish testing and standards. So maybe that's happened?
And, no, I didn't in any way equate the failure of regular stuff sacks to that of an Ursack. That paragraph was for Bob's comment that the food/sack debris might have been staged. My experience with bears getting into stuff sacks -- of whatever material -- is a scene exactly like the one seen in the photo.
There's no conspiracy against Ursack -- nothing to see, keep moving folks! They just need something so bears don't keep getting food, however small. I've said it elsewhere but will repeat that the canisters and boxes have been an incredible success in changing the behavior of bears in the backcountry. They just don't come through camps anymore in areas where canisters are required (Kearsarge etc.). Bear/food incidents have gone from dozens a week in the early 80s to maybe one or two per summer (and only people who aren't carrying a canister or who leave food out). It's darned amazing. I don't think that success would have occurred had Ursacks been allowed.
g.
