Icelandic Police Shoot First Polar Bear Seen There Since 2016

ICELANDIC POLICE SHOOT AND KILL FIRST POLAR BEAR SEEN IN COUNTRY SINCE 2016

Polar bears are pretty scary (if you’re a human). And if you disagree, you’re quite possibly the kind of touron who hassles bison, and gets too close to (smaller) bears in the wild. Because there’s not a more formidable predator on land, anywhere. And that means when a polar bear sees any other living thing on land, it looks like it as possible dinner. That includes you. So polar bears should be feared, with cause. But it’s still sad to hear that the first polar bear seen in Iceland since 2016 was just shot dead by Icelandic police. My knee-jerk outrage was quickly overcome with the logic as to why.

POLAR BEARS ARE DEADLY, HUGE PREDATORS, AND HAVING ONE IN YOUR BACKYARD IS A MAJOR THREAT

An old friend of mine who did summer professional fishing in Alaska years ago told me how you had to take a large-caliber handgun with you just to walk thru the fishing village, as bears were attracted to the fishery. And those bear, while large and scary, were a lot smaller than any polar bear. He made it clear that anything smaller than a .45 would only piss the bear off and make death more painful. Clearly, this concept stuck with me. So it does make sense that an incredibly rare sighting of a polar bear in northwest Iceland was cause for alarm, with a deadly police response.

Black Bear Attacked 10-Year-Old in Connecticut Backyard

YES, POLAR BEARS ARE PROTECTED IN ICELAND, BUT NOT WHEN THEY’RE NEAR ANY PEOPLE

An older woman saw a polar bear going into her garbage and called her daughter in Reykjavik for help; her daughter then called in the Icelandic police, who arrived on the scene and killed the young bear. And yes, Iceland does give polar bears protected status as they are so rarely seen there. But that protection doesn’t extend to when these giant bears are near people. And rarely seen means really rarely seen. In the last 1,000 years, polar bears have only been seen in Iceland 600 times. But with the loss of sea ice, hungry polar bear sightings are likely to increase in Iceland and elsewhere.

Just consider that between the years 1870-1914, Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia and the United States saw a combined 20 deaths from bear attacks. And 15 of those fatal attacks happened in the last five of those years. That is likely to get worse, and soon.