I encountered a large carnivore in the civilized before but not in the wild. Canadian here for what it's worth. Ran across a black bear on night shift bang in the middle of a massive oil refinery complex. Paved for a kilometre in every direction.

Black bears are very low risk to humans and I had an F350 between me and it, even still it's just not something you mess with. It changed the whole course of my day instantly as I had to start reporting to site safety etc, I spent the next 3 hours on the radio.

Other than that I've seen the occasional lynx or mountain lion, but at great distance. Generally these things aren't seen by humans unless they want to be or don't care. You see them because they're chasing prey or you get lucky and their out sunning themselves or something and you're far enough away they aren't threatened.

Large carnivores are pretty rare and not necessarily the largest wild animal threats to humans or livestock. Something like racoons or foxes taking chickens is a much larger nuisance to many more people than something like a mountain lion taking sheep. And something like a moose or a goose is a lot more likely to fuck you up because people don't perceive these animals as threats and take way larger risks than they do around predators.

Not a carnivore ... but a pack of wild boars with piglets in a nearby forest. My initial thought was "fuck" as I walked backwards like Homer in the meme. Once I had some distance I started running.

I have had three..

Two were encounters with sharks in the ocean, and while both sharkes were not really larged, less tham three feet in lmgth. When you are in the open ocean they might as well have been Bruce.

(Bruce was the nickname of the mechanical shark in Jaws)

The third was a boar when i was stationed in germany. Again the magnificantion effect, ibet the beasty was maybe 50 pounds. When you are stumbling throught the forest at night with mo lights and a thing about the size of a coffee table starts miving around and making noise..

Never.

Seriously lucky to live in Australia, rather than growing up somewhere dangerous.

EDIT: /s

I've had multiple encounters with bears, cougars, alligators, and meth heads.

The closets I came to dying was being chased around my car for 30m by a mother black bear after I disturbed her hiding in a basement via coal flue. Lost my keys and had to wait for a park ranger to come save me.

I've been almost killed by a grizzly, twice, when I used to live on the eastern slopes of the rockies in Alberta. Climate change and human activity are making it hard for the bears and they are hungry as fuck in those parts.

One time when I was like 6 years old camping with my parents, I went on a walk to the river and got charged from behind a bush, but it didn't seem hellbent on killing me

Another time I was hiking up a fire cutblock and my buddy and I thought we saw three hikers maybe like 3km uphill from us. Eventually it was obvious is was a mom and cubs, and they were chasing at us full speed (we were upwind from them). If we were a little further into the hike, I think one of us wouldn't have made it back to the truck in time.

I've also been trapped by a moose in my parents garage for 6 hours, once

I still would rather run into either these animals out in the sticks than random humans. I've encountered some really sketchy people in my time spent in the woods. Seems to be getting worse too. I'm not a gun person, but that's why I have a gun.

Saw a bear once at the beginning of a hike. The hike was over before it started

The biggest carnivores around here are foxes.

Yeah. A pig. A feral boar that weighed in at nearly 700 pounds.

I live in the US. I've seen black bears in the wild a couple of times, and personally I don't have a lot of actual fear when it comes to them. I respect that they're totally capable of hurting me severely, but also I know they are mostly harmless to humans and just want to be left alone. Grizzly bears scare me a lot. I've not seen one yet but I've been near them a couple times. They are far more likely to be aggressive. Realistically though, for us, carnivores aren't the biggest concern most of the time. Bison, mooses, and even deer can be deadly.

Lions in africa and other big cats freaks me out a lot. Luckily we don't have many big cats here and the ones we do have make themselves very scarce.

I grew up in Florida as a kid, and I lived on a lake. I have on more than one occasion encountered alligators. They are assholes.

I remember on occasion, I was probably six years old, maybe a little older, and my parents called the police because there were a couple of alligators sunning themselves on the back lawn by our boathouse. The local police came over and clearly had no idea what to do. They started yelling at the alligators, trying to shoo them back into the water, with little success.

Eventually, the two alligators did creep back into the water, but they were lingering around the boathouse, and in an effort to get the larger one, a female, to go away, the frustrated officers began shooting at the water. This did not have the intended effect. Alligators are not just assholes, they’re much more clever than most people seem to think.

As the officers kept firing into the water, the alligator would hiss at them, and then go under the boathouse to the other side. As the officers would run over to the other side, the alligator would hiss and, predictably, go to the other side of the boathouse and hiss them again. This went on for about five minutes or so until my father had the good sense just to tell them to stop and request that they contact animal control.

As soon as the officers backed off and left, so did the alligators, with a noticeable final hiss that I swear was them laughing.

only a coyote, i thought it was a husky one time, but it was actually a coyote casually walking pass me.

I saw a guy at a McDonalds who needed two chairs to sit. Terrifying.

Canadian checking in! I've been face to face with black bears, grizzlies, bobcats, cougars.

In Ontario, the black bears were the most common. When we would go camping in the summer in the 80s, my parents were given a tip that driving to a local town dump in evening was a sure fire way to see bears from thhe safety of your car. It worked. 5 or so were feeding and would try to get through the closed window. At the same time, we would see bears in the waste bins at the park.

As I got older and did interior camping and true wilderness camping, we would encounter bears often. We practiced extreme camp hygiene and would not have food out, without fire. They would poke around the edges and see more trouble than its worth and leave.

As a working adult, I saw a blackbear on a bc highway and pulled over to take pictures. It ran away from me and I chased after it. Never got the photo.

I also saw two grizzly cubs walking along a B.C. highway. Cars pulled over would roll down their windows and feed the bears. A conservation officer pulled up, brought out his rifle and shot them both dead. The tourists formed an angry mob yelling why did they kill the bear. The CO said I didn't, everyone who fed the bear killed it. They became habituated and a nuisance bear in that moment and the ministry is obligated to kill them before they inevitably attack people.

Only seen a wolf once, but we have coyotes everywhere. Really only a threat to pets and small children.

Several black bear sightings (and one very close encounter) at a recent vacation in Tennessee

How large is large? I met a particularly chonky beagle once while hiking. Positively vicious slobber attack

I've seen a black bear- I was in a vehicle and so I was pretty safe, but he was close up. I was driving through a curvy mountain road in Appalachia, and the dude was just vibing off the side of the road.

I've seen multiple Lynxes, usually from a distance. I saw one just crossing the road, the other was on the other side of a lake from me just drinking.

My thoughts were mostly just, "damn, that's cool. Don't usually see those." I was always safe, and I don't have any livestock for them to bother. They can mind their business and I'll mind mine past the occasional glimpse.

I was jogging at night in rain in a cedar forest in the mountains and had a mountain lion sidle up on the switchback above me. Just checking me out, maybe 20 feet out and 10 feet up.

I was hiking Crypt Lake Trail a couple of years ago. Didn't have any problems on the way up but on the way down there was a juvenile grizzly bear on the trail in front of me and my brother. We paused on the trail for a bit, looking for a possible mother to be around and I was gripping my bear spray, but the bear eventually moved on.

When approaching the boat dock where the ferry picks up hikers, we heard a lot of yelling "Go away"! "Get back". Didn't heed the warning, but they weren't yelling at us, they were yelling at a very large grizzly bear in the trees close to a group of about 15 people who had finished the hike. The bear had been probably 15 meters from me at the closest. But thankfully with all the people around it too just moved on. Bear attacks are pretty rare, but you still don't want to win that lottery ticket.

The hike itself was already pretty thrilling. Some edge walking, a tunnel and a climb with some metal chain attached to the cliff side to help out before getting to a mountain top glacial lake. It was an exhausting experience.

Around day four of a week-long backpacking trip just east of Yosemite, I encountered a bear one morning on my way to do my business. I turned a corner around a large boulder and there he was, was sunning himself on the trail. When he saw me he slowly got up and wandered back into the trees. That simple description left out the few seconds of sheer panic I experienced realizing that the bear could, if it wanted to, cover the distance between us before I could turn around and take three steps. There was nothing but flat, open ground between us and that is what was most frightening.

Underwater, I have. I've seen two - a group of large barracuda and one extremely large eel - looked like a Giant Moray.

I was probably like 14-16 at the time, diving in the Atlantic and Pacific respectively.

Reactions for both were just to stay away from them and make sure they didnt come closer, while trying to get a good look. It was kind of surreal seeing them, because you don't usually expect to encounter things like these.

Barracuda aren't particularly scary, but they are some of the largest fish I've seen underwater - probably around 5ft (1.5m) long and I was within 20ft (6m) of two or three of them. They are also quite aggressive, though not usually to divers. I was swimming up from below them coming up from around 60-80ft (18-24m), so we got a good view of them swimming around near the surface.

This Giant Moray is the largest creature I've ever seen in the water bar-none. We were diving a reef, and as we swam over some rocky structures, there was this hollow in the rock - like a partly-covered underwater grotto - and in it I could see this absolutely massive eel. I thought it was some kind of coral or something until I saw its face. The surface I saw of the eel had to be nearly 1.5ft wide (45cm), since they'ye ovoid in cross-section I may have gotten the impression that it was larger than it really was. But even still, it must have been nearly that large in diameter and probably about 9ft (2.7m) long, though I couldn't see all of it at once. I was a bit frightened just because of the sheer size of the eel, and I thought they were more aggressive than they are, but we couldn't get too close because of the rock. It was really cool to see. In years since then I thought maybe I was misremembering the event because it seemed surreal to see such a large eel - but then I researched a bit and found that giant morays can be... giant... while there are other species that I've also seen that are much smaller.

I think they're neat. Like with all wild animals, though, I want to keep my distance. Especially to the aquatic variety.

I experienced a sense of awe in both situations as well as a very real sense of how dangerous these animals could be if they wanted to be.

A shark. Maybe 7~8 foot long but not thick like a tiger or anything truly scary. Still scared tf out of me so I kinda froze in place ready to fight but it turned away about a foot or two away from me, and disappeared and I rushed back on the boat. My heart was racing hard.

I was quite near a black bear once but with a group of people so I felt pretty secure. It actually followed us for like a mile walking late at night, middle of winter along a mountain road. Technically I don't know it was a black bear because we didn't see it, but we heard it keeping pace in the darkness maybe fifty feet away and it's the only thing (other than Bigfoot) that checks all the boxes for that behavior. A deer wouldn't be doing that and if it had been a mountain lion we wouldn't have heard it.

I've seen brown bears from a distance and from inside a car. I've been close to coyotes, swam near sharks, always with people or with some kind of barrier.

The one that freaked me out was different. I was living in California and regularly hiked the nearby trails, my favorite being up Cerro San Luis. One day I decided I wanted to watch the sunset from the peak so I grabbed my water bottle and walking stick (tall and pointy) and set out in the evening. It was gorgeous! Fog rolled in right as the horizon lit up all shades of red, really breathtaking. I watched until it got dark and that's when I realized I had neglected to bring a light of any kind. (This would have been ~2012. Whatever phone I had was not particularly useful for illumination.) The night was moonless, and the trail was now blanketed in thick fog.

I got lost.

I took the wrong turn at a fork and didn't realize until I was clear under the fog a mile or two the wrong direction. While contemplating my situation I happened to glance a dark shape just barely silhouetted against the clouds. Something on four legs that watched me for a few moments then silently melted away. In that moment I remembered seeing "mountain lion sighting" warning signs at the trailhead earlier that month and felt an intense, primal sensation I've not experienced before or since. Being stalked, being hunted, in such a precarious position... I picked up a large stone and waited in silence for at least ten minutes, grateful the whole time that I always hiked with my stick, before I decided it was safe to pick my way back up to where I got turned around. Slowly, cautiously, nauseous from the adrenaline, until on the main trail I ran into a family of four merrily returning from the top with headlamps and I rather sheepishly asked to join them. (They were nice about it). I don't night-hike solo anymore.

In the light of a new day I went back and looked around and I'm pretty sure what I saw was a large bobcat rather than a mountain lion, which would have still been worrying given the circumstance of being nearly blind, so I wasn't in as much mortal danger as I felt. In the moment I'm not sure if "afraid" is the right word. Yes there was fear but it was tempered by other instincts. I was prepared to fight that animal with a rock and a pointy stick just like our distant ancestors would have, and everything in my mind and body was shifted into that very specific gear. No coherent "I could die here" thoughts or anything like that.

What do you think of them in general?

I'm glad they're out there. Even if I had been attacked I wouldn't bear them any ill will, that's just carnivores being carnivores. I was more careful after that to avoid a similar situation but I don't want wild spaces to lose their large predators. It's pretty easy to be safe and share the planet.

I live in the PNW so the large carnivores are orca, man, puma, bear, sealion, eagles, coyote, fox and dogs/cats

I have backpacked and spent a lot of time in the wilds. I have encountered a buch of the preditor/carnivores of my area except bears. I have only seen them in a roadside pasture as I drove by.

I never saw it but I am pretty sure I encountered a puma (cougar) once while backpacking alone. It was a little unnerving but I had my pack tall behind me so it couldn't get my neck if it jumped me. Still to be in the woods full of bird song and other forest noises and then to have it all go cold silent for a while is chilling. I was warned that this is usually how the forest reacts to a puma hunting. Making a lot of noise and making sure to keep an mirror to be sure whats behind me kept me from freaking out too much. I have seen puma on distant hilltops and what not in the same areas and I have no problems with them being who they are. Just hope they never get desperate enough to try taking me on. That is usually the case, a young male without a good hunting area gets displaced and starving and has to try and setting for attacking a person.

I encounter coyote enough, I genually enjoy them. Sure they are devious and dangerous but the little surviors are amazing. I remember one time hiking on the Washington coast and in some places you can see for miles even though its a rocky mess to traverse. So we see this coyote like a mile ahead and we wonder what its doing. It seems to be walking in our direction. As it gets closer we notice it has a problem with one of its legs, so its walking on three. Its walking in a pretty straight line, deviating every so often like maybe there was a goodie to be found here or there. And as it gets closer to us it just walks by looking at us like it wanted to wave and say "oh hello there human, good day for a walk on the beach yeah? well I have to go, have a nice day" and keeps on going the way it was. It was an truly special encounter that I will never forget

Another time backpacking on the coast. The trees are tall and dense so finding a spot to setup a camp can be tricky. We found a nice spot with a good flat area under a huge tree that already had a fire ring so we stayed there for the night. When I woke up in the morning and decied to make a camp fire, about halfway through the process I noticed about 5 feet above me was a massive bald eagle perched on a branch just watching me. I totally got the impression it was sizing me up. It was huge and its claws were bigger then my hands! after some time, it must have thought better of it and flew off.

Looking directly into the eyes of a preditor is a special thing. To know that it is looking at you in the same way you see it. Each of you have that moment together. I love that feeling.

Nope. If there's dangerous animals there, I won't be. They can have their untamed wilderness, and I'll have my internal organs

I was walking through some forest in Costa Rica to go from my car to the beach. Halfway through I look up to see an adult crocodile about 50 yards away from me.

I was pretty scared because this was a small stretch of forest and didn't expect it. Once I go to the beach I turned my chair to make sure a croc didn't want to eat me or go to the shore of the beach. I later found out crocodiles are really slow. If it was an alligator I might have been toast. I don't believe Costa Rica has native alligators though.