Flying Bullets and Melting Ice: Say Goodbye to the Polar Bear

Last week at a United Nations conference, sixty-eight countries voted against a measure that would have helped ensure the survival of the polar bear. This voting block, which included Spain, the United Kingdom, Japan, New Zealand and the Netherlands, was enough to stop a proposal put forward by the United States that would have saved thousands of polar bears from a preventable death over the next decade. And while the debate raged over the threat of melting ice and its relevance to commercial trade in wildlife, in the end the red-herring of climate change was used as an excuse to continue the lucrative business of shooting polar bears for hides, parts and trophies.

The primary threat to polar bears is loss of habitat due to climate change — a complex and long-term threat requiring difficult decisions and costly strategies to address. However, the commercial trade in polar bears not only results in over three hundred bears being killed annually, but also serves as a cover for a black-market in polar bears that have been poached in countries like Russia. This number does not even account for the hundreds of polar bears that are killed by wealthy sport hunters from the United States and Europe who travel to Canada to kill bears for mounted trophies every year, The Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the backdrop of the UN conference, explicitly exempts trophy hunting from commercial trade restrictions despite the Convention’s mandate to protect species from extinction due to over-exploitation.

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