While leading tourists off the MS Bremen cruise ship in Norway, a guard was attacked by a polar bear. Another guard reacted quickly and shot the polar bear, killing it… and triggering international outrage.
The German Hapag Lloyd Cruises company has seen worldwide condemnation for invading the bear’s habitat, leading to its death. An example:
POLAR BEAR SHOT DEAD BY NORWEGIAN CRUISE SHIP INVADER-WHY DID THEY HAVE TO BOTHER THIS NOBLE CREATURE? IS THE ENTIRE WORLD DISNEYLAND? https://t.co/6gGsc8wiE5
— Michael Savage (@ASavageNation) July 30, 2018
Reminder-
The polar bear was NOT on the cruise ship
The bear was in its natural habitat
The tourists/cruise guides got dangerously close
The bear lost its life https://t.co/Z3OswtgOgJ— Stephanie Ruhle (@SRuhle) July 30, 2018
People – “polar bear guards” – were sent ashore before the disembarking to clear the area where the tourists were to leave the ship. A group of four of them had taken that duty, which generally consists of making loud noises and determining if any of the bears are inclined toward being combative. Only after they had chased all of the bears away were the tourists allowed to leave the ship – and only then with a full complement of twelve guards.
The guards missed one of the bears as they cleared the area. That bear, seeing the tourists, decided to approach. The guards attempted to frighten it away, but it had decided to attack. Only after one of the guards had been attacked, wounding his head, did another guard shoot the aggressive bear. (NBC)
While it is undeniable that the bear’s territory was encroached upon, it is worth noting a related story. From CBS News, on July 5
A 31-year-old father was killed this week in a polar bear attack while protecting his children in Canada’s northernmost territory of Nunavut. Gibbons’ uncle Gordy Kidlapik, said Gibbons was enjoying the day with his children when a polar bear began stalking or charging toward one of the kids, The Canadian Press reports. He told his children to run to a boat while he put himself between them and the animal.
The kids made it to the boat, and one of the girls radioed for help.
“We actually heard the call for help,” Kidlapik said, adding, “It was terrible to listen to.”
That happened near the Inuit village of Arviat, in what is undeniably human territory. Here are the outraged tweets about it:
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Okay, then!
Polar bears are massive predators whose population dwindled perilously low because of overhunting. This was remedied by putting them into a protected status, and their worldwide numbers have expanded dramatically. The exact growth is impossible to determine for a variety of reasons including the animals’ roaming habits, coloration and the uncertainty of earlier estimates. it is known, however, that independent groups using similar estimation techniques in the 1950s/1960’s and 2000s/2010s have placed the numbers at more than double what they were at the time of their peak hunting. (Factcheck.org)
The argument for listing polar bears as endangered is predicated on one reason only: global warming. (polarbearsinternational.org) The argument is that as warming increases, their available hunting grounds will dwindle, which will decrease the amount of prey available to them, which in turn will decrease their numbers. Even accepting all of this as fact for the sake of argument… a concession many would dispute… it indicates that, at best, polar bears run the risk of becoming endangered in the future; at the moment, the hunting grounds are not dwindling and therefore their populations are not declining.
As their numbers increase, polar bears are competing for food sources and are encroaching on territories… both that of humans and that of other bears.
This is also not the first time guards have had to shoot an encroaching bear. On July 9, 2016, the EGRIP (East Greenland Ice-Core Project) was taking core samples. Their stated reason was to check if global warming had damaged polar bear habitats. It was a big ironic, considering what happened:
Early Thursday morning a polar bear approached the EGRIP camp. All 16 gathered in the strong main Dome and managed to scare the bear away. The polar bear, however, settled 1 km from camp and observed the camp until 22:00. Approaching again we had to shoot the beautiful bear with the permission of the Greenland Authorities, as the hungry bear, 400 km from the coast could not be scared from camp.
Unlike the one on Saturday, it hadn’t even attacked anyone. They shot it when it was more than a half mile away, because it was dangerous. Here are the outraged posts from Twitter (note the ones from Michael Savage and Stephanie Ruhle):
"Let's get too close to a polar bear in its natural environment and then kill it if it gets too close". Morons. https://t.co/FEPt0sYOtF
— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) July 29, 2018
Apologies. That was from famed comedian Ricky Gervais about this latest attack. He didn’t tweet about the EGRIP shooting… nor did anyone of note, as Twitter searches for “Eastgrip polar bear shooting”, “EGRIP polar bear shooting”, “Eastgrip polar bear shot” and “EGRIP polar bear shot” all call up zero results.
An aggressive bear is dead, even while the bear population soars, and at least one human being’s life was saved as a result. The same people who complain about this do not show any concern when similar bears kill a father protecting his daughters, nor do they complain when a bear is proactively killed by environmental researchers.
