Police have shot and killed a polar bear that came ashore in northwestern Iceland, the first sighting of a polar bear there since 2016. It might have hitched a ride from Greenland on a floating iceberg.
Well, now I’m sad.
I mean in this case people don’t deserve to be killed by animals, even if they’re cute animals
Here in the states, we shot a gorilla once.
It, uh, . . . It didn’t go very well for a long time after that.
Personally I’d recommend some other approach. But that’s just me.
I think there’s a slight difference in a captive gorilla and wild polar bear.
I mean (unrelated but still) I think a polar bear could 1v1 a gorilla. Meaning I think a polar bear is more dangerous. Especially a hungry one, that’s able to just walk into a population center.
I too wish they could’ve saved the bear, but I don’t think people are gonna complain about this as much as with Harambe (RIP)
Like even if anaesthesia was an option, they’d still have had to give it a ride back, or build it a home. And building zoos just isn’t too popular nowadays imo.
Polar bears are three times the size and weight of a silverback. They could likely prevail in a 1v2 or 1v3. 1v4 would be a fair fight.
I mean, 1v1 is easy, 1v2 maybe even, but if there’s a group of silverbacks, what with being somewhat smart and sturdy themselves, I think they could occasionally even get a win.
I’ve never seen a gorilla irl, but I’ve seen a taxidermied polar bear, and holy fuck those things are big. But then I think of just how versatile opposable thumbs are and of how insanely thick gorilla muscles are.
I’m marking this as a thing I’d like to know but probably never will, what with the moral implications of setting animals on each other in blood sports.
I think a polar bear could 1v1 a gorilla. Meaning I think a polar bear is more dangerous.
An inuit friend once told me a polar bear could hunt, stalk, kill and eat you in about 8 minutes. I’m told the conversion from Minutes to Treadwells says it’s longer, but I didn’t check whether he was putting me on.
a hungry one, that’s able to just walk into a population center
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/13/churchill-canada-polar-bear-capital
It takes a lot of training and a little acceptance. Note, in the article above, the term ‘medical bills’, which in Canada doesn’t mean “cash for care” so much as “rent and food during recovery”, which aren’t covered by insurance.
What does? Living in a polar bear habitat? Did you actually read the article yourself, or did you — I presume — just Google something you thought supported your view?
“If you were to build a town today, you would never put it here,”
Because it’s s place where polar bears naturally live, see? Unlike in Iceland. They’re not unheard of in Iceland, but it’s not their habitat.
Did you note them size of those buses they do these bear tours in?
Did you note that these people don’t live alongside bears as much as in a place where there are often bears. These people don’t take risks either.
“When I was growing up, it was common for conservation officers to shoot 25 bears a season,” explains the mayor, Mike Spence, who is of Cree and Scottish descent.
Culvert traps, baited with seal scent, line the perimeter of the community; bears that are caught in them are taken to a holding facility, popularly known as the polar bear jail, where they are held for up to 30 days (without food, to enhance the deterrence factor of the experience), before being drugged and helicoptered to a spot safely away from town – or, if late enough in the season, on to the sea ice.
This is a single community, in a place where it’s actually feasible to anaesthetise a bear, then keep then without food in a place meant to keep bears, then fly them to a place where the bears naturally live. And it happens so often that it’s something that actually warrants constant attention, again unlike in Iceland.
Youre proposing the entire country starts putting down polar bear baits and traps, and then when they work once in a decade when a bear floats down on accident, they’ll fly a bear from Iceland to the Arctic?
The inuit folk I’ve talked to said that sometimes they have to shoot a polar bear if it’s harassing the village. When they kill one, it’s not uncommon to find bullets in it from the last time it was harassing a village. Polar bears are big and scary and we are destroying their habitat.
The irony of an American lecturing another country on finding an alternative to shooting.
Sure, but America doesn’t really seem to be the best at alternatives to shooting…
Wall, net, alert system, radar, video feeds, traps of some sort to relocate the bear to [some sort of arctica].
There are solutions where the bear doesn’t get shot, obviously. They just cost money. That’s all.
And there’s the rub.
This is going to be increasing in the coming years. The ice is melting, and they will be forced onto land to look for food.
… and yet they survived the last interglacial, warmer than ours, with no sea ice in the arctic during summer.
That’s a lot of justification for killing something that can go fishing for food.
polar bears will absolutely hunt humans for food without a second thought. And you will not be able to outrun them or scare them away.
This one came quite close to homes, which is a reason for almost all towns with polar bears in the area to shoot them.
That this bear was the first in quite a while is a sad thing, but it’s understandable that the town doesn’t want a bear mauling people for a snack
See also: The town where guns are required
If it’s black, fight back. If it’s brown, lie down. If it’s white, good night.
This reads like it’s justified.
We destroy their habitats so they need to come to us to survive only to get killed by us.
Sounds like we are just bad guys.
Read the article. They don’t even go onto that. They have a shoot on sight policy regardless.
Yes. Because they’re not going to wait until someone got turned into kibble for something to do
If you can see a polar bear it’s a threat.
They really aren’t like other bear species. They are an apex predator in an area where basically nothing other than another polar bear can even harm them. They see most things as food, including humans.
As a bonus, Iceland has a pretty wonky ecosystem that needs protecting as is and polar bears aren’t native to the island. They have to swim extreme distances to get there, making relocation extremely difficult and expensive, plus if they leave it be it will entirely disrupt other wildlife in the area, to say nothing of the human population.
As others have said, it sucks that it got shot, but Iceland especially has very limited options on how else to deal with it. Shoot on sight is, unfortunately, a very reasonable policy for them.
Except that’s not how Polar Bears prefer to hunt. They prefer to hunt by holes over pack ice, where they wait for animals like seals to surface for air. When there’s no pack ice, which is what is happening thanks to global warming, they hunt for whatever they can on land. And if that land is inhabited by humans, that means humans.
I would say the potential to kill and eat humans, including infants, is excellent justification.
Does it suck that this is our fault to begin with? Absolutely. That doesn’t mean that human lives should be put at risk as well.
So tranquilizers and trailers don’t exist in Iceland? They couldn’t just send it back to Greenland?
So no map? You said it wasn’t an immediate threat. Where’s your evidence?
Also, why are you assuming it came from Greenland and why are you assuming that it would survive just being dropped off in some random place in the humongous island of Greenland anyway?
Humans have lived in polar bear territory for centuries though. So we know it’s possible. Shooting endangered animals on sight because you don’t want to learn how to co-habitate a region is just peak shitty human.
And they’re bears they can absolutely find other sources of food without killing humans.
Brother you are literally required by law to carry a firearm in svalbard if you go outside of longyearbyen because if polar bears. Its pretty shitty if iceland(400k people) suddenly have to deal with the mess.
Yes, and those people all have guns to shoot polar bears.
How the fuck do you imagine “co-habitating” with polar bears??? That’s like starving a wolf and telling it to “co-habitate” with a baby.
Yes, it sucks that we have forced polar bears out of their natural habit and that they now have to hunt humans for food, however if something starts hunting humans for food it’s just gonna get killed.
I wouldn’t say it’s sufficient justification, to be honest. I guess it depends on the population to some degree. But since we caused this problem, I would say moving even a whole village out of polar bear habitat is worth the cost of shooting even one, and we can suppose there will be more to come. I think we have a responsibility to get the hell out of their space, even at a huge cost to us.
Sorry… you think an entire village needs to be moved when a polar bear is seen in Iceland? How would that even work?
but can they actually go fishing for food? If a wild animal is wandering into human territory, there is usually a resource-limiting reason for it.
https://news.ucsc.edu/2013/03/polar-bear-genomics.html
Polar bear brown bear hybridization
