Iceland: Police shoot 1st polar bear sighted in years – DW – 09/20/2024
www.dw.com
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.

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.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
    6·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • greedytacothief@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      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.

    • Dasus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

      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?