Ironically, just as I was about to remind readers that we are entering the peak period of polar bear births around the Arctic (see previous post, “December is polar bear nativity month”), I came across an article about breeding polar bears in captivity — getting the bears to give birth in zoos.
Hudson the polar bear cub is a zoo-born polar bear. He moved in January 2013 from the Toronto Zoo, where he was hand-raised after being rejected by his mother, to the Assiniboine Park Zoo, Winnipeg. The Assiniboine Park Zoo were also the recent recipients of a cub orphaned when its mother was shot after a polar bear attack in Churchill. Photo from Toronto Zoo.
The newspaper article I saw was all about how technically difficult the generation of polar bear cubs has been for the Toronto Zoo (Canada) but it was the premise for the breeding program itself that caught my attention: to save them from extinction.
The zoo is not waiting until the bears are down to the last few hundred (or even thousands) – no, the zoo is starting now, while polar bears are as plentiful as they have been in the last 40 years, to prepare for their demise.
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