One of the highlights of my year is an all-girl backpacking trip with a group of friends. I mentioned this at a party recently, only to have some (male) geek give me dire warnings about women camping while on their periods. He claimed bears are irresistibly attracted to the scent.
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Always wise to discriminate in re party chitchat, Kate; you never know when you might bump into a (shudder) non-Straight Dope reader. Dubious as this business about bears being attracted to menstruating women may sound, however, it can’t be entirely dismissed. Two menstruating women were killed by grizzly bears in Glacier National Park in 1967, and the authorities have been warning women to stay out of bear territory during their periods ever since. There’s been a fair amount of research, some of it conducted by women, suggesting that omnivores and carnivores (e.g., bears) are inspired to attack by the smell of human blood, while herbivores (e.g., deer) are repelled by it.
Some think the attraction/repulsion of animals by human blood is one of the main reasons behind the menstrual taboos found in many primitive societies–a menstruating woman could play havoc with the hunt on which the tribe depended, and so was best kept out of sight during her period. For the same reason women often were not allowed on hunting trips.
Denmark? Try Holland. New Zealand was discovered by the Dutch sailor Abel Janszoon Tasman in 1642 and named Nieuw Zeeland by the Dutch government a few years later after Zeeland, a part of Holland. Holland was a great commercial power at the time and one of the pioneers in world exploration and colonization. For a time, in fact, the known part of Australia was called New Holland. But Tasman painted such a dismal picture of New Zealand–four of his men had been killed there by the Maoris–that the Dutch stayed away, and it wasn’t until James Cook of the English Royal Navy visited in 1769 that the islands were opened to European settlement, or exploitation, as you prefer.
