Animal Advocates Watchdog
Martin Mittelstaedt
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published on Friday, Mar. 05, 2010 8:45PM EST
Last updated on Saturday, Mar. 06, 2010 11:31AM EST
.A cross-border battle is looming over polar bears, the Arctic giants that provoke passionate reactions in both Canada and the United States.
The U.S. wants to ban the trade in polar-bear body parts, a proposal that will be considered at a meeting beginning next week of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Canada, the only country allowing the sale of bear skins and trophy hunting of the animals, is trying to defeat the proposal.
The looming dispute over the species that environmentalists have made a sentinel of climate change is already taking on a no-holds-barred intensity.
Animal rights activists in the U.S. just issued a study claiming that stalking the big carnivores for trophies is a marginal economic activity benefiting only a handful of people, and asserting that widespread hunting of the animals is only a recently adopted part of Inuit culture. Inuit who organize trophy hunting, it suggests, are violating their culture's tradition of respect for animals.
Nunavut's government, meanwhile, is trying to head off criticism that it is showing lax oversight of its bears. It announced a big cut in the number of the animals it will allow to be killed each year in the Baffin Bay area, where biologists have been alarmed by years of overhunting by residents of the territory and nearby Greenland.
Saying it is reacting to “the urgency of the conservation concern,” Nunavut will reduce the numbers killed annually from 105 to 65 over the next four years. The current population in the area is estimated at about 1,500. Large numbers of the animals have been killed in recent years under a mistaken assessment that there were at least 2,000. The announcement wasn't timed to affect the U.S. trade-ban proposal, said Stephen Pinksen, director of policy at Nunavut's Department of Environment.
The study critical of trophy hunting – from the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the Humane Society International – said the practice nets Nunavut Inuit communities only about $1.5-million, or less than 0.1 per cent of the economy. The U.S.-based groups also said only a few dozen people, “at most,” benefit from the hunt.
Trophy hunting was developed in the 1980s by local governments to promote tourist revenue, and the bears were not widely taken by Inuit before the arrival of Europeans, it said. “It's not part of their culture. This is something that was developed within their culture,” said Rebecca Aldworth, director of Humane Society International Canada.
The flurry of action comes just as the international community is to consider the proposal to ban sales of polar-bear parts under the UN's convention on endangered species. If adopted, the U.S. recommendation would allow other countries to block the import of bearskins and trophies from Canada. The U.S. wants more protection for the species, based on estimates by its government biologists that populations could crash by two-thirds by 2050 because of declining sea ice.
There are about 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears in the world, most of them in Canada but also in Alaska, Russia, Greenland and Norway. Canada disputes that the bears need more protection: Environment Canada said in an e-mail that “Canada's polar bears are not threatened by trade.”
Mr. Pinksen said if the ban reduces trophy hunting, there will be no impact on bear numbers because the overall harvest won't change. Currently, Inuit can choose to use their quota to accommodate trophy hunters, or hunt the bears themselves. He said if fewer are killed by trophy hunters, Inuit will offset the reduction by increasing their share
A polar bear mother and her two cubs walk along the shore of Hudson Bay near Churchill, Man. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward
