Polar Bears Are Doing Fine – Except For the Ones Who Are Shot

Polar Bears in northern Canada are doing fine.

Except for the ones shot and skinned and pelts shipped to Asia.

One of the people who oversees an Indigenous hunt of polar bears says the population is doing well, despite heart-wrenching photos online suggesting some bears are starving.

Every year, the Nunatsiavut government awards polar bear licences to Inuit hunters living in the northern Labrador settlement area.

The Inuit set a quota of 12 polar bears this winter. Nunatsiavut wildlife manager Jim Goudie said all 12 were taken within the first seven days of the season.

A 2007 study showed that there were roughly 2,150 bears in the Davis Strait region, which was nearly 1,300 more than previously thought. A new study is currently underway to determine if that trend has continued. (pbsg.npolar.no)

Goudie said it’s just the latest evidence that polar bears are on the rebound in northern Canada — a trend he said officials have been recording for years.

“There are lots of signs of bears,” he told CBC Radio’s Labrador Morning. “Lots of bears and a continuation of what we’ve seen over the last three or four years.”

Those who hunt bears are legally obligated to donate any meat they don’t use, but they are free to do what they want with the pelts.

Most opt to sell them to wealthy buyers from Canada to East Asia, and each pelt is embedded with a computer chip to prove it was acquired through a legal hunt.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/polar-bear-population-hunt-nunatsiavut-1.4628156

 

One thought on “Polar Bears Are Doing Fine – Except For the Ones Who Are Shot

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s