I agree with you in this, but you can't convince people not to fear. I have a number of folks - some of them very experienced hikers - in my hiking group who have this pathological fear of bears. I ask if they were bitten or charged by one - nope. I can tell them my "saw a bear on the trail and it just walked away" story repeatedly and they still think a bear is going to jump out of the woods and eat them while we're doing a moonlight hike to Half Dome.

One lady (wonderful gal) was backpacking with us in the evening down the JMT from Little Yosemite Valley - this lady had a lifetime of camping and hiking and taking all her kids out there. She fell a little behind on the trail in the dark and ended up walking alone; I don't know why she didn't yell, probably didn't want to impose on the rest of us to walk slower with her, which we would have. She still insists she's not going back in the dark. Nothing happened to her other than walking alone down the trail, but she will say she doesn't want to be eaten by a bear - she must have had a major case of heebie jeebies going down. Or maybe she just doesn't like the dark and bears are more solid things to pin her fear on... Others worry about them in daytime as well. One lady with her aching back carried that bear spray the whole way in a side pocket of her pack - where it stayed, useless if she needed it because she had to ask other people to get stuff out of the pockets while she was wearing the pack.

So no amount of talk is going to change anyone's mind about bear spray... it's just fear. Some people have it, some of us go out anyway and lose it due to our experiences. But some of the experienced hikers keep it.

Again, experience has nothing to do with your chances of getting mauled by a bear or lion. Any one of us could be walking on the trail that day when the one-in-a-zillion previously-avoidant critter gets a flash of an idea to pounce suddenly. Whether we get the chance to use the bear spray or the stick or the .30-06 is a roll of the dice.