This Heart-Wrenching Footage Of A Polar Bear Will Literally Ruin Your Entire Day
A footage of a starving bear started to go viral on the internet and it became a symbol of the climate change. A polar bear is seen slowly walking, crawling and dragging her legs on a dry land, starving herself for so many days.
The video was taken by National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen in the Baffin Islands, Canada.
“When scientists say bears are going extinct, I want people to realize what it looks like. Bears are going to starve to death. This is what a starving bear looks like,” Nicklen said in an interview with National Geographic.
The bear moves slowly, her leg muscles weakened by muscle atrophy, she’s starved but still tries to find food on a human dry land to try to feed herself, although the search was useless. She didn’t find any. The simple, slow movements were the final moves that she made, and she collapsed to the ground, fully exhausted.
It’s not atypical for polar bears to go without food for months waiting for the ice to coldify and the seals to return. Climate change is prolonging the time of cooling and they search food for a longer time that they could make it while being hungry, also prolonging the time when they can stay on land extending their fasting season and, for many, engendering their demise.
It was a very hard, gut-wrenching moment for Nicklen because there was nothing he could do when he found her. It’s illegal to feed polar bears in Canada, and even then he hadn’t had a seal meat in storage which would have done little in the long run to sustain the dying creature.
The best he could was to prevent the bear from dying in pain. That he did do – a once powerful, half-ton creature now dragging its feeble legs is a frightful reminder of the situation. By sharing the story of this one polar bear, he hopes to convey a larger message about the Earth warming.
“There was no saving this individual bear. People think that we can put platforms in the ocean or we can feed the odd starving bear. The simple truth is this – if the Earth continues to warm, we will lose bears and entire polar ecosystems,” wrote Nicklen on his Instagram. He also said that the bear was not of old age, and certainly died within hours or days from this moment.
“But there are solutions. We must reduce our carbon footprint, eat the right food, stop cutting down our forests, and begin putting the Earth – our home – first.”
Credit: National Geographic
Source: IFL Science