Bear Size, where are you at, and how do you judge Bears, By weight or Square/shooters

[UncleRick]

i'm new to this forum so this may be the wrong place to ask this question. please correct me if i'm wrong.
i live in alaska, up here we talk about the size of bears (black or brown) as it they square out, average of length of hide from nose to stub tail by the width from front claws to claws. thats a 8 1/2 foot grizzly, thats a 6 foot black bear, or that browny squared 10foot 3. Over the years of talking with hunters in the lower 48 and watching hunting shows it seems everybody else does it by weight, that bear weighed 350lbs or that one weighed 400.
forget the Boone and Crocket skull measurements
From here on i'm talking about Black Bears.
my first bear squared 5 foot 8 inches ( roughly 180 lbs, spring) my second an even 6 footer (280lbs ish... ok maybe it was 240ish. spring) haven't bothered to shoot another. and ive passed up some big ones on the coast. i have helped skin out and butcher another dozen or so. (most memorable was the neighbor down the island shooting a black bear 15 feet of the porch when she was pregnant and 2 days over due) I don't particularly care for the bear meat, even high mountain berry bears. but if I see that one Mountain BERRY bear that i think will square over 7 feet i would drop it in a heartbeat.
MY QUESTION HERE IS, where are you from and/or hunting, at how and why do you judge size, and what is a shooter? i'm more curious about this than about how people judge deer

 

[PAGOAT]

We go by weight here, a shooter by law is any bear. We try to not shoot a mom/cub together anything else is good.

 

[pabearhunter]

We go by weight here, a shooter by law is any bear. We try to not shoot a mom/cub together anything else is good.

I look at size of rump, size of ears compared to head size. crease in forehead and even marking a tree or some thing for height.

 

[AvidIndoorsman]

I tend to talk about bears squared out and then skull size after it's skull is cleaned. In the field I judge by body size; head size/ proportion of head to ears, does it look lanky, does it's belly seem to drag, etc. Weight seems to me to be a weird way to judge size post harvest because it varies so dramatically spring to fall, a bears length and skull size will stay the same from June to Sept but the bear's weight might change 20%+. That, and I've never killed a bear even remotely near a road so if I weighed the boned out meat and hide when I got home coming up with a gross weight for the bear would just be a wild guess.

Similarly, I've had a few buddies from back east come over and ask me how the weight of one elk on my wall compared to another... guess I need to work on getting my animals out whole

 

[MinnesotaHunter]

Here in MN it is by weight, but I have only hunted bears in MT, so I refer to them by what they square.

I think the reason the tradition here is weight, is that most bears/deer come out of the woods whole, so weighing is convenient.