In theory - if you're out in the boonies you might need to shoot some critter that wants you for dinner. For most Americans that is not an issue.

@HippieChick58
I once worked for a small company that made radio tracking collars for animals. You remember the show Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins and Jim Fowler? We likely made the radio collars. It was fun because almost every job was effectively unique. We did everything from elephants to bears, even things like manatees and sea turtles. (Manatees had a buoy on a rope that trailed behind them. Turtles had devices that detected when they were at the surface and would transmit like crazy before the animal dove again.)

I met several bear researchers and they generally did a couple of things to stay safe.

1. They always wore a bell on the trail so the bears could hear them coming and get out of the way. Nobody likes surprises.
2. A couple of guys did carry shotguns but not to shoot at anything. A twelve gauge was the loudest noise maker they knew and for a last ditch the researchers thought they might scare the animal away. I never heard of it being tried but I guess it sort of made sense.

Again -- guns were useless for shooting things. At best they were last ditch scary noise makers.

@RichCC I lived in western Washington State when my kids were growing up. We used to take hikes in the woods and mountains. We always made lots of noise, like you can be quiet with youngsters. But we were deliberate about being noisy, the kids all had bells. We wanted to warn the local critters that we were coming. We never encountered any potentially threatening critters.

@HippieChick58
When we lived in suburb Seattle we used to love the countryside. The only complaint we had was it was busy by our (AZ & MT) standards. Ha, ha.

One of my customers was a startup that used to close its doors every spring and vacation camping together over at Ft. Flagler. We went with them twice.

Growing up in very northern AZ it was pretty safe for people.
My mother was a Cub Scout Den Mother. The LDS church ran both the Cubs and the Boys but for some reason they didn't start proselytizing until after the Cubs. We used to go out with the kids all the time without any special precautions (except water of course. ha, ha.)

The only real episode I remember was about halfway through a line of 15 or so boys one noticed a rattlesnake right in the middle of the trail.
But it was chilly so the snake wasn't active -- it didn't move at all.
It was just a wonder that nobody accidentally stepped on it. We just pointed it out and went on.