Polar Bear Watch: Journalists Get Rare Bear Shot
POLAR Bear Watch: Anorak’s look at polar bears in the news
Police in Iceland were forced to shoot a polar bear that had apparently travelled several hundred kilometres from Greenland atop an ice floe when the animal charged a group of journalists.
Those endangered polar bears we read so much about:
A 12-year-old girl on a farm near the town of Saudarkrokur, on the Skaga fjord, spotted the bear and alerted the authorities.
The bear was the second known to have made the trip across the north Atlantic in just two weeks…
In the earlier case, authorities permitted police marksmen to kill the polar bear, sparking protests from environmentalists and animal rights’ groups.
After the protests, authorities had vowed to capture the second bear and have it shipped in a cage back to Greenland or give it to a zoo.
But after the bear charged a group of reporters “in a panic,” a police spokesman said they had “no other choice” but to kill it.
At least Germany has stocks of polar bears…
June 18th, 2008 at 10:00 am
why couldn’t they have shot it with an anaesthetic dart?
June 18th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Dairy 1. Agree…. it also infuriates me when they say things like
‘give it to a zoo’. Is this really the 21st century? Catch a wild, fully grown polar bear and put it in a zoo?! Maybe better off dead than that?