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Polar bear shot dead after 200-mile swim
guardian.co.uk, Thursday June 5 2008

A polar bear that swam more than 200 miles in near-freezing waters to reach
Iceland was shot on arrival in case it posed a threat to humans.

The bear, thought to be the first to reach the country in at least 15 years,
was killed after local police claimed it was a danger to humans, triggering
an outcry from animal lovers. Police claimed it was not possible to sedate
the bear.

The operation to kill the animal was captured on film.

The adult male, weighing 250kg, was presumed to have swum some 200 miles
from Greenland, or from a distant chunk of Arctic ice, to Skagafjordur in
northern Iceland.

"There was fog up in the hills and we took the decision to kill the bear
before it could disappear into the fog," said the police spokesman Petur
Bjornsson.

Iceland's environment minister, Thorunn Sveinbjarnardottir, gave the green
light for police to shoot the bear because the correct tranquiliser would
have taken 24 hours to be flown in, the Icelandic news channel Visir.is
reported.

Sveinbjarnardottir's account was disputed by the chief vet in the town of
Blönduó, Egill Steingrímsson, who said he had the drugs necessary to
immobilise the bear in the boot of his car. "If the narcotics gun would have
been sent by plane, it would have arrived within an hour," he said. "They
could keep tabs on the bear for that long."

Steingrímsson also criticised police for not closing a mountain road where
people congregated after hearing news of the bear. "There were around 50 to
60 people there watching. The police did not have many options when the bear
ran down the hill, approaching the crowd," Steingrimsson said. "I'm very
unsatisfied that the police did not try to catch it alive and did not close
the road."

The oldest record of polar bears being sighted in Iceland is from 890, 16
years after the first settlers arrived. The last visit was in 1993, when
sailors saw a bear swimming off the coast of Strandir. It was also killed.

Polar bears were frequently tamed during the middle ages, but since then no
bear has been captured alive in Iceland. Receding North Pole ice is
diminishing their hunting and mating grounds and jeopardising their
survival.

A spokesman for PolarWorld, a German group dedicated to the preservation of
the polar regions and the creatures which inhabit it, called the bear's
death "an avoidable tragedy ... another great day for mankind".

This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Thursday June 05 2008.
It was last updated at 16:56 on June 05 2008.