Well this looks a little crazy but I kind of like it too. It is an old video that was just posted on the internet. In it, a Norwegian fisherman, Ragnar Thorsen, feeds a polar bear some salmon sandwiches and (apparently) talks about how you can gauge which polar bears are dangerous and how they are really not as bad as they are made out to be. All of which is pretty much true – although the bear that he feeds looks like a young male, who are kind of the most curious/dangerous polar bears around – I probably would have stuck with the old bear at the start of the video… instead of feeding the young polar bear. Plus, I am not sure I would classify the bear’s behaviour as ‘nice’ but looks like they had fun so whatever.
There are more than a few feeding polar bear stories from Churchill as well. In the late sixties/early seventies when polar bears were just being ‘discovered’ in Churchill a bear named Linda was hand fed by photographer, Fred Bruemmer, and essentially developed a bit of a friendship with him.
There was a young bear that hung out behind the Churchill Rocket Range in the early seventies. He was fed by the caretaker – there are even pictures around with the bear (about a two year old cub) sitting on the kitchen counter, posing in a fireman’s hat and another series of the caretaker having lunch with the bear. When I asked if that wasn’t dangerous, his family said that he always carried a broom in case he had to chase the bear out the door. Fair enough.
Len Smith, the originator of the Tundra Buggy, had an old male polar bear that would play a game with him in the early days of polar bear tourism. The back deck of the first buggy was flat and when Len would go out to sweep it off, this old bear would come over and steal his broom. He would then carry it a few feet away and then drop it, waiting until Len came out and, if i remember correctly, traded a sardine or two for the broom… something like that anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, there are bad stories about feeding polar bears but there are many more like this where fed bears did not end up as dead bears. Its a complicated thing…
Norwegian Fisherman Feeds Polar Bear – This is the English google translated webpage… the wording is a little mangled but the video is neat.
