Stray polar bear shot and killed in Iceland
After initially losing sight of the polar bear spotted near Thistilfjördur fjord in east Iceland in the early afternoon yesterday, police and three hunters tracked it down by the abandoned farm Ósland around 4 pm and killed it. Ósland is only a few kilometers east of the farm Saverland where the polar bear was first spotted. “It was rather small and I thought it looked dreadfully tattered,” Svanhvít Geirsdóttir of Saevarland told Morgunbladid. … Police never considered other options than to kill the animal. An attempt was made in 2008 to catch a live polar bear but to no avail. Afterwards a task force was established by the Environment Ministry to determine how authorities should react the next time a polar bear came ashore in Iceland. The task force’s conclusion was to kill all polar bears spotted in Iceland for three reasons: they are dangerous, they are not at risk of extinction and it is too costly to save them, as Hjalti Gudmundsson from the Environment Agency of Iceland, who was a member of the task force, explained on RÚV’s news magazine Kastljós last night. … The slain polar bear was such a young animal that police fear another bear, an adult, might be on the loose in the area. … The polar bears that come to Iceland usually originate from Greenland. They drift with sea ice and can also swim long distances. Biologist Thórir Haraldsson told RÚV that with a warming climate and continued melting of the sea ice in Arctic regions, more polar bears can be expected to arrive in Iceland than in previous decades. …
