Please Don't Kill Me

I don't apologise for anthropomorphising a plea for clemency by this baby polar bear who was the only survivor of a litter of 2 cubs abandoned by their mother.

So-called animal rights activists had called for the cub, later named Knut, to be put down on the basis that in the wild Knut would never have survived and it was unnatural to raise him in the company of humans.

That is as much bollocks as I've ever heard. Extrapolating this line of reasoning (it doesn't deserve to be called "logic") , this would equally be a justification to euthanise human orphans but we don't do that do we? Why not? Is it because the value of a human life is more valuable than that of a polar bear? On what basis might such a decision be made? Is there a possibility of a species bias? Please don't be mistaken. I'm not pro-life neither do I unconditionally support the pro-choice movement although I am more sympathetic to the latter.

In my post on PETA, I blogged about the need to exercise stewardship over animal resources and given that polarbears are close to, if not already endangered, there is all the more reason to protect the genetic diversity of the world's polar bear population by not culling Knut.

In any case, the Berlin Zoo disagreed with the animal rights activists and decided to raise Knut. A good decision, if there ever was one.

At the Wolong Panda Reserve in Chengdu, Sichuan, baby giant pandas are routinely raised by humans. The keepers there have found that where pandas give birth to more than 1 cub, the mother panda may either abandon all or all but 1 of the cubs. To avoid this from happening, the keepers at Wolong practice cub-swapping where the mother panding is given a different cub every week. She probably realises that it's a different cub because it smells different but it seems to work. Perhaps pandas can only cope with raising 1 cub at a time.

In any event, the cub(s) which is/are not being looked after by the mother panda is/are raised by the keepers. Eventually the pandas which are born at Wolong are released into the wild.

In theory, if it works for the pandas which are arguably more endangered than polar bears, there is no reason why it shouldn't work for polar bears. I accept that pandas and polar bears live in very different environments and a polar bear who hasn't learnt to hunt for itself will have a grave problem being released into the wild after having lived its life up to that time in a zoo. Pandas don't have this problem. Bamboo doesn't run away and the pandas don't need to learn hunting skills as such but also face the threat of a shrinking habitat in the same way polar bears do.

Apart from the rational arguments not to put Knut down, there is undoubtedly the strong emotional appeal of a furry baby animal which for convenience, I will refer to as the "cuteness factor". Jack Dee in one of his stand-up routines made the point very well. He was taking the piss out of Animal Hospital where a snake had been brought in for treatment after it had been run over by a car. Jack made the point about how the driver shouldn't have stopped after running over the snake but ought to have reversed and run it over again to make sure it was quite dead.

For most humans, furry animals tends to have a higher cuteness factor than the scaly, slimy ones and baby furry animals tend to have the highest cuteness factor. This is probably something to do with our genetic heritage so that adult humans will form emotional bonds with their young and to some extent, this instinct seems to make us predisposed to forming emotional bonds with the young of other mammals as well.

It's perhaps for the best that Knut was allowed to live. The German public seem to be enamoured with him and he's now a (minor) celebrity in Germany and arguably around the world as his story was carried on most of the major Western news networks. It can't be a bad thing for the zoo to see an increase in visitor numbers, even if most only go there to see the baby polar bear.