Police have shot and killed a polar bear that came ashore in northwestern Iceland, the first sighting of a polar bear there since 2016. It might have hitched a ride from Greenland on a floating iceberg.
Police have shot and killed a polar bear that came ashore in northwestern Iceland, the first sighting of a polar bear there since 2016. It might have hitched a ride from Greenland on a floating iceberg.
Humans have lived in polar bear territory for centuries though. So we know it’s possible. Shooting endangered animals on sight because you don’t want to learn how to co-habitate a region is just peak shitty human.
And they’re bears they can absolutely find other sources of food without killing humans.
How the fuck do you imagine “co-habitating” with polar bears??? That’s like starving a wolf and telling it to “co-habitate” with a baby.
Yes, it sucks that we have forced polar bears out of their natural habit and that they now have to hunt humans for food, however if something starts hunting humans for food it’s just gonna get killed.
Nobody in the article said it was hunting humans. That’s pure exaggeration and fever dream shit from the comments section. This entire fucking comments section just assumes polar bears prefer to hunt humans.
Brother you are literally required by law to carry a firearm in svalbard if you go outside of longyearbyen because if polar bears. Its pretty shitty if iceland(400k people) suddenly have to deal with the mess.
Really because Flying Squid’s link only recommends them. It requires a method of scaring them off. And life happens. We don’t have a right to just exterminate everything inconvenient around us.
Yes, and those people all have guns to shoot polar bears.
https://www.sysselmesteren.no/en/weapon/
That says you’re supposed to scare them off first. Shooting them is a last resort. Not the first resort. In Iceland they made it the first resort by law. That’s the issue.
So you want a non-native animal with no suitable habitat and no food source other than humans to be given special preferential treatment over the humans that happen to live there, allowing it to roam and maul at it’s leisure while people politely try to shoo it away from the child buffet?
You have zero context and zero knowledge of the situation, the country or that environment but sit there on your high horse pretending to be morally superior to the people in actual mortal danger.
They are not in any more danger than other places that live with polar bears. That’s the point. They have the same situation but a different, worse, standard for dealing with it.
Also it’s a bear, it can fish on the coasts, in rivers, and hunt other animals just fine. It’s not some horror movie monster just coming after people.
Polar bears aren’t native there, and you have no idea what the natural area is like. It’s an island built on fishing, all the towns are on the coast, where the bears would like to hunt. Polar bears don’t live there, because it’s not an environment that can sustain them, and the biggest native wild animal is the arctic fox. Rest is all farm animals with some reindeer introduced to the highlands in the 70’s for game/sport hunting.
You’re arguing from pure ignorance.
Lmao. Pure ignorance, from the “just shoot them all” crowd. Excuse me if I don’t accept that there’s no other possible way to deal with the problem.
Got it. As long as the children have a way of scaring off the hungry polar bear when it gets to the school playground, no worries.
Presumably that’s the responsibility of adults.
I see, so post multiple guards around any place children might be just in case the rare polar bear makes landfall on Iceland so it can get scared away instead of mauling children.
Very reasonable.
How do the Scandinavians do recess? Surely they do and they don’t have a magic no polar bear fence. These are solved problems.
Yes. They solve it by shooting the polar bears.
Obviously there’s more to it than that. The literal government website you linked requires non lethal means to be carried.