It was the headline that caught my eye: “Woman defies bear with courgette”. You couldn’t make it up, but it got me wondering.

Anybody who’s delved into the dark art of vegetable growing will know that the courgette, despite its delicate sounding name, is a particularly robust beast which fruits briefly but copiously every year. For a month or so they’re everywhere. You give them away, you turn them into chutney, relish and heaven alone knows what else. Yet even though you eat them endlessly, there still always seem to be millions of the blighters left over.

So knowing they can also be useful for fending off the occasional rampaging bear is a strangely comforting thought. Another use for a courgette – brilliant! I wonder whether I should keep a couple at hand in case a grumpy grizzly should show up uninvited?

The woman in the story certainly found the vegetable to be a life-saver. It seems she threw a large courgette at a 200lb black bear that had a attacked one of her dogs. She had tried to physically separate the animals but resorted to the courgette when the bear sank its teeth into her leg.

Amazingly this proved all too much for the creature which fled as soon as the courgette attack was implemented.

As I say, having survived the annual courgette glut, and given away shedloads to friends who I fully realise probably have more than enough already but are too polite to say, this is something of a revelation.

Just in case you’re wondering, I fervently believe that courgettes are great (in moderation), though I’ve met a number of people who say they are tasteless and throughly horrible.

Not true. I sauté them with garlic, black pepper and perhaps a splash of Tabasco. They’re yummy like that.

Anyhow, now I know that should a passing bear bite my leg all I have to do is lob a large courgette at it and it’ll scarper. The humble courgette instantly seems a more exciting vegetable.