Bear spray repels cougar at the very last second.
I've seen many real life situations captured on video where pepper spray in the form of a gel(less likely to blow back at you) has been effective in human vs human attacks that didn't involve guns. On video I've seen several "First Amendment Auditors" using pepper spray to actually spray someone's face but they have also been extremely effective as just a deterrent every time I've seen them employed. These examples are anecdotal and haven't been against extremely violent thugs with the sole mission to kill the pepper sprayer however.
I used to not pay much attention to pepper spray until I started to seeing videos of people using it over and over again effectively.
