Steeliegreg,are you sure your not talking about my post? ha,ha,ha. Anyways, you and I seem to have a similar thought process,until you said you carry a .45 with 165gr loads for bear.The reason I carry my .45 for cats is because there not nearly as tough as bears,smaller skeleton and less muscle as well as thinner skin, you don't need much penetration to ruin their day. Bears on the other hand are just plain tough, I shot a 150 lb black bear a couple yrs back with my .338 win mag shooting 225gr Federal High Energy loads, two shots in the chest at about 100yds,thats like 8000lbs of energy and he didn't drop for 40yds. If you shot a bear with the .45 load mentioned above you'd hit him with a pathetic 400lbs of energy and the bullet would be lucky to penetrate enough to kill it before it got ya! after seeing first hand how bad a$$ even small bears are,I gotta carry more gun if I am concerned about bears thats why I carry a .41 mag Ruger Blackhawk with handloaded 210gr ammo and thats because I can't always carry my .338 or a 12ga. with slugs. Just something to think about.