Letters to the Editor

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Letter of the day: Bear facts about rescue

Posted: 07/12/2011 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Capturing wild Manitoba polar bears and forcing them into permanent and irreversible captivity -- the premise of the new polar bear facility at the Assiniboine Park Zoo -- should be an embarrassment to every Manitoban (Zoo prepares to take in polar bears, July 8). I write this as a former president of the Zoological Society of Manitoba.

Polar bears are the world's widest-ranging land animals, with home ranges measuring thousands of square kilometres in size. Like whales, they are spectacularly unfit for lives in captivity, regardless of the size of the enclosure.

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At a time when zoological facilities around the world are shunning the capture of wild animals for exhibit, here we are building a $50-million Arctic exhibit with wild-caught polar bears as the centrepiece. How does this make Manitoba look?

Calling it a polar bear "rescue and rehabilitation" facility is factually incorrect. There is no "rehabilitative" value in capturing wild polar bears and putting them in zoos. Nor is there any known program for successfully rehabilitating orphaned or captive-born polar bears back into the wild.

Any wild polar bear unlucky enough to end up in this facility won't be "rescued" in any sense of the word. We thought we were "rescuing" Debby when she was an orphaned cub. But what we really did is sentence her to 42 years of profound boredom -- and repetitive rocking and pacing (animal-welfare scientists call them "stereotypies"), coping mechanisms commonly exhibited by animals driven crazy by captivity. All for our viewing pleasure.

If we loved Debby, let's honour her memory by leaving polar bears where they belong -- in the wild. If the government of Manitoba is truly bent on having polar bears at the zoo, there are plenty living in substandard conditions in foreign zoos that we could take in. That would be a true rescue.

JOHN YOUNGMAN

Winnipeg

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 12, 2011 A11

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