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First Ever Wild Grizzly/Polar Hybrid Shot
tavilach writes "Jim Martell has a license to hunt polar bears, but when his latest kill had "white fur [that] was spotted brown and it had the long claws and slightly humped back of a grizzly," officials seized the body in order to conduct DNA tests. These tests confirm that the dead bear had a polar bear mother and grizzly father, the first documented grizzly-polar hybrid in the wild. This was lucky for Jim, who was facing a fine and jail time for possibly killing a grizzly. Scientists who would have liked to study the bear are not so lucky."
Some details for your consideration:
Inuit communities are allowed a certain number of polar bear tags each season, based in part on the idea of sustainable yield (how sustainable I can't say). This is in recognition of the importance of the polar bear hunt in their traditional culture.
Each community decides how to allot their tags. Some places use all of the tags internally for subsistence hunting. Others sell a portion of them to big-game hunters, which brings a lot of money to the community. This is arguably a more efficient form of subsistence hunting: What's a better use of the resource, a) killing a bear and eating it or b)selling the chance to shoot a bear to a rich hunter and then spending the tens of thousands of dollars raised on feeding your community? Tags for outsiders are only available through the Inuit communities.
And yes, it's true that polar bears are dangerous, and anyone working in the arctic needs to carry a rifle in case of emergency encounters. Government research projects are extremely touchy about this (my wife's been up a few times) - spotting a bear anywhere near a camp results in the camp being moved rather than risk the death of a bear or a human. However, the suggestion by another poster that the hunt is necessary to keep communities safe is bullshit. Which is not to say nuisance bears won't get killed, but it certainly won't be part of the hunting tag system.
yp.
It sounds like you're not so much pissed that a trophy hunter shot it, but that a wealthy trophy hunter shot it. This is class envy masquerading as ignorant environmentalistm.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
So it's apparently legal to shoot polar bears in Canada, despite the fact that they're considered one of the animals facing increasing threats in the future from withdrawing sea ice?
It's only illegal to kill something pointlessly if you're not rich enough to waste 45,000 dollars to do it.
That's your lesson for the day boys and girls. Everything is moral if you have enough money.
I'm not entirely opposed to hunting, but he'd better eat that fucking bear.
The ______ Agenda
Then why not make the areas where polar bears live off-limits to humans?
Because then the bears breed and expand their population, which expands their territory and suddenly the bears are threatening our enclaves again.
I believe that the limit is something around a hundred bears a year. That's why you get the rich 'big game hunters' as they're the only ones who can afford the resulting high fees.
If an animal species is being driven to extintcion due to habitat encroachment by humans, then it's only reasonable that humans stay off that species' natural habitat.
They're not endangered, though their population density is tiny. And their 'natural' habitat is anywhere there's food, minus areas where more warm climate adapted bears take the territory.
IMHO, a polar bear is justified in killing a human because it's in his nature, but a human is supposed to be "rational", which means, logical reasoning should prevail over his instinct to kill.
We haven't wiped out the Polar Bears entirely, nor that many other large species recently in the northern hemisphere. I'd tend to say we are controlling it, and death/predation is both part of nature and man.
I don't read AC A human right
Hey, need a reminder? It's freakin' 2006! You wanna know what it can do? Just clone the fucker! :P
What's really interesting is, because of that, wolf-dog hybrids are more likely to attack humans than wolves. Wolves, while sometimes willing to attack human-sized prey when pretty hungry, like deer and even cows, have had the fear of humans genetically instilled into them, and thus a human being is literally the last thing they will attack for food. All the ones that were willing to attack humans got killed ten thousand years ago.
Dogs, OTOH, are not generally willing to attack any prey larger than themselves. Note I said prey. Even vicious tamed dogs don't eat humans. Dogs, however, aren't afraid of humans at all, and hence feral ones will attack humans. So a wolf-dog hybrid is basically a dog that comes pre-feraled.
Coyotes are a different story, as are foxes. There are reports of interbreeding, and some species even seems be the result of interbreeding in the past. But they don't appear to breed with wolves/dogs normally or easily.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
As others have pointed out, conservation biology says that this cross is a bad thing, meaning it has very low value and should not be protected. See controversy over the conservation of various big cats through cross-breeding for more info.