It's OK, though, its for the child... er, the BEARS

We’ve all heard it before. Heartstring-tugging entreaties and pleas to give a little more money, or time, or whatever, to some charity because, after all, it’s for the CHILDREN!

Or politicians asking for more tax money with similar justifications. After all, how many of you hate children so much that you cannot spare an extra cent or two to help the poor, helpless waifs get a refill on their bowl of porridge?

It is good business for organizations that rely on charitable donations in order to exist, to render heart strings tugged, and to convince you that, if you don’t give your money to them, that horrible, horrible things will happen to innocent children.

Or to polar bears.

Yes, polar bears. Cute, cuddly-wuddly polar bears. Yeah, those would be the same ones that would disembowel you so quickly that you wouldn’t even know it had happened until he had eaten a good half of your leg.

Case-in-point, the WWF commercial I saw last night right after I got finished re-wiring my master bathroom so that it actually had functioning outlets that would fire up a hair dryer without popping a breaker. A handsome, baby-faced young actor (no clue who) narrates the heart-rending tale of the desperate polar bear’s plight. “There are only 25,000 polar bears left in the world today,” the young narrator tells you, as if that number is supposed to be critically low enough to spring you to action, grab your checkbook, and start writing (HOLY SHIT Martha! That’s only one per day for the next 70 years, assuming that they don’t reproduce at all!). The video clip accompanying this stark narration is a mother and baby polar bear (phew, I guess they are reproducing, then. I’m so relieved!), laying on a smallish piece of ice, drifting in the ocean. Eventually, the mother takes to the water, leaving her baby stranded on the ice behind her! (oh, the INHUMANITY of these polar bears!) Fortunately, the baby seems to learn to swim in enough time to take to the water after his mother (whew!), so that he is not abandoned on the ice flow. They swim about 50 yards to the pack ice, and the entire saga is over (rather anticlimactically, I might add. Even I can swim 50 yards!) However, the whole scene is accompanied by sad music, so one can only assume that their plight has only just begun (what next? Killer whale attack?).

Several things occur to me at this point.

1.) 25,000 is not a small number. That’s a lot of bears. More so, than, say, anytime since we’ve been keeping track of their numbers, and a lot more than in the (much colder) 1970’s, when only 5,000 bears were thought to be left in the world. So, over the past 30 years, which are the years that global warming has been the worst, they’ve quintupled their population (go figure). It is estimated that the artic couldn’t support a whole lot more bears than are there now. This isn’t the California Condor, with only a few breeding pairs left, or the North American Bison, who’s numbers dropped into the hundreds. This is 25,000 animals.
2.) The idea that polar bears now become stranded on ice flows now, and did not in the past is ridiculous. The bear’s name, Ursus Maritimus should lend a bit of a clue to it’s natural habitat. Some even consider them to be marine mammals. They can swim huge distances, and do so regularly. The mother and baby in the video in this commercial are doing what they do, every day. This was not some precarious, dangerous situation for the bears. This was probably something that they did on purpose in the course of a typical day of seal hunting.

So what does it mean for a “cause” that has taken up the polar bear as it’s raison d’etre when the polar bear isn’t in any measurable peril in any world other than the virtual world of computer modeling that says that they are? Sea ice extent in the Arctic is already back to 1979 levels, after a record low (since we started tracking levels in about, well… 1979. Hmmm) in 2007. Of the 19 distinct polar bear populations, somewhere between 2 to 5 of them are declining (depending on who you talk to, but if there is argument, the decline must be pretty slow for at least three of them, right?), 3 are increasing in population, and the remainder are stable. So do we get to stop worrying about polar bears yet?

No? Why the hell not?!

I think that if this is going to be the cause that the WWF wants to hang their hats on, it is THEY who are endangered, because me thinks that this global warming thing is going to dry up right quickly in the next ten years, just like the predictions that we would have an ice-free North Pole this year (guffaw). Tell me that there are not better things for the WWF to be spending their time on. African rhinos are in big trouble. How about Asiatic Leopards? The Mekong Catfishes? You can’t tell me that there aren’t any other critters in more need than frigging polar bears, of which there have never been more since we started keeping track. Oh, you say that they aren’t as cuddly-wuddly as polar bears? Go snuggle up to one and see just how snuggly it really is. I’ll bet you don’t do it again, either, whether it be through painful education, or total eradication. Once you’ve been digested, maybe you can tell us how SOFT his frigging fur was…