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."

Comments

Canadian Polar Bear Hunt

[yankpop]

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.

Re:Pathetic that this animal was shot...

[Brandybuck]

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.

Re:A reasonable altyernative

[Firethorn]

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.