I regularly backpack in country where there are brown bears. In thirty years of backpacking I have seen bears a total of three times...not counting the cub that was so acclimated to the free-handouts at a certain Sierra Nevada campground that he practically roamed free on the grounds....there's a disaster in the making. I could rant, but won't. It's utterly stupid.

Once the Luminous Joan and I were coming down a washed-out road which served as a trail. We were talking, it was only half a mile to the trailhead, and a wash-up. We came around a corner, and there was a mother bear with a cub, not fifty feet from us. We backed right back up that trail a good hundred yards, mighty quick, and gave her fifteen minutes to clear out. She eyed us right good, but nothing happened, and I wasn't about to put up a fuss about who owned the trail with mama....ten times over not with her cub right there. That's it,..seriously in thirty summers of backpacking in bear country in the Sierra Nevada, ONE encounter. The other one, I saw a bear about 200 yards up the trail ahead of us. He saw us, and took off.

Wild brown bears aren't a problem, they stay away from people. It's when the bear learns that there's food in your backpack, or food in that bag hanging near your tent that there's a problem. Seriously....thirty years of backpacking in bear country and I have not once had a dangerous or even scary close encounter with a bear. Every single close encounter that I know of, and I have a lot of friends who backpack and camp, has been over improperly stored food, or in places where the bears have so much human contact that they don't care what the people do. They don't want to EAT people. They want to eat PEOPLE FOOD. Any raving idiot that tries to take a food sack away from a bear once he's got it deserves the clawing he's going to get. I mean...how bloody stupid can you get?

Now Grizzly bears, like in Alaska or Yellowstone Park. That's a WHOLE different question!!!! I would think VERY hard about going for an overnight backpacking trip in grizzly country, but I personally know people who do it. One of them says he likes the feeling of knowing that it's REAL Wilderness, where he is NOT at the top of the food chain. It intensifies the experience. **ahem** Yeah, well. Fine.

Wolves... There are probably next to no wolves left in California, although there are a gazillion coyote, everywhere. I saw one three weeks ago on Stanford Biological Preserve at Jasper Ridge. I can't count the nights I've gone to sleep under the stars listening to coyote barking and howling. It's wonderful.

But there are absolutely wolves on Isle Royale in Michigan.

http://www.isle.royale.national-park.com/

As you can see, there is hiking and backpacking information on that website. People hike and camp in wolf country. Boy Scout troops go backpacking and camping on Isle Royale. One of my college roommates was in a Boy Scout Troop that did a ten day trip onIsle Royale and they saw wolves. No problem. I would not think twice about it, myself, though maybe I would think twice about it in the winter when food is really, really scarce. Honestly, I'd be more concerned about the mosquito's than the wolves.

Now, if the are bears and wolves around, then tabby cats DO disappear now and then. It happens. But even raccoons will kill a cat and eat it, if they can, and raccoons are all over the place. Sheesh, we have them in my back yard.

I would not worry about human safety if European brown bears and wolves were reintroduced to Scotland, honestly.