When working on the sea ice in Barrow, we always travel with a bear guard from the native community. It keeps us from being distracted by watching for bears and avoids the paperwork nightmare that would arise should one of us have to shoot a bear; the Native Alaskans living in the area have the right to hunt the bears for subsistence (as they have been doing for thousands of years), but for a non-Native it can be a legal problem to shoot one, even in self defense.