But That's What Polar Bears Do!

I've always found the whole media circus around "Knut the Polar Bear" intensely stupid, particularly because I knew from the start how it would end once the animal had ceased to be a cute little pup ignorant but sentimental spectators could fawn over. As this BBC story shows, what I anticipated is precisely what has come to pass.

Germany's celebrity polar bear Knut has triggered a new controversy by fishing out 10 live carp from his moat and killing them in front of visitors.

Critics say Berlin Zoo should not have put live fish inside Knut's enclosure. But German media report that the carp were put there to eat up algae.

There is speculation that hand-reared Knut killed the carp just for fun.

[...]

Knut is now more than a year old and has grown overweight.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine news website reports that Knut "senselessly murdered the carp", fishing them out, playing with them and then leaving the remains.

That this should be making the news as a "controversy" tells you just how stupid and out of touch with the realities of the natural world far too many people are. "Knut" is a f***ing POLAR BEAR, people, a vicious and efficient KILLER by nature: this is not something the animal can help, it is in its nature, and no amount of hand-raising or mass adulation could ever have stood to change this in the least. No one is surprised when a domestic cat is found killing birds in trees, but we act shocked when a member of a completely undomesticated species does the equivalent? This makes no sense at all.

Why people insist on confusing the wild animals which exist out in the real world with the anthromorphized drawings in Disney cartoons is beyond me, and while I don't agree with those who called for this bear to be allowed to die as a cub - there just aren't that many polar bears left out there in the wild to simply throw one away - I will at least give the proponents of such a course of action credit for retaining their detachment and objectivity when the rest of the world was allowing itself to be carried away by a cute face.

Comments

[Ross]

Have you watched Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man" about the 'bear activist' Timothy Treadwell, who ultimately got eaten, along with his girlfriend, by the creatures that he thought were his friends? It illustrates an extreme form of the anthropomorphising tendency.

[Abiola]

I haven't seen the movie yet, though I keep hearing great things about it: what keeps me from actually watching it is that I fear watching this Treadwell guy's foolishness will have me so annoyed that by the end I'll be actively rooting for the bears to rip him apart.

The scary thing, though, is that with the media circus around first "Knut", and now "Flocke", and who knows what other animal down the road, the likelihood of another fatality a la Mr. Treadwell is probably very high. All it would take is one sentimental dope (of which there are so many), one slip of attention, and before you know it ...