Packing heat on polar bears

It's not just the Bush-Cheney oilmen who don't want to list the polar bear as threatened. It's also the trophy hunters and Inuit tribes.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Read more: Environment, Politics, News, Animals, Global Warming, Katharine Mieszkowski

AP Photo/David Zalubowski

New polar bear protections could mean fewer rugs like this in the United States.

March 17, 2008 | If your idea of a good time is paying $25,000 to journey to the frozen north in Canada to shoot a polar bear -- making you one of the more than 50 American "sportsmen" who do so every year -- you're not happy about the lawsuits and recriminations over whether the Bush administration should grant new protections to polar bears. After all, those darn regulations could interfere with your bringing home a furry white rug for your living room floor.

In the reams of press about the increasing deaths of polar bears, the role of trophy hunters and the Inuit who help them is often missing. In the Canadian territories where the polar bear lives, the government sets quotas for the number of bears that can be hunted each year. The Canadian Inuit, who are paid by hunters to help them stalk the bears, and American hunting associations have become vocal adversaries to environmentalists and Congress members who in recent months have battled the Department of Interior, with its Bush-Cheney oil connections, to safeguard the polar bear.

Today, there are between 20,000 and 25,000 polar bears worldwide, according to the World Conservation Union Species Survival Commission's Polar Bear Specialist Group, which lists the species as "vulnerable." Between 700 and 900 polar bears are shot every year, the majority of those taken in Canada, according to Andrew Derocher, a biologist at the University of Alberta, who chairs the Polar Bear Specialist Group. Of the approximately 600 polar bears shot in Canada, about 15 percent of those are killed by sports hunters, many of them American, who pay between $20,000 to $35,000 for the chance to do so.

Should the species be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, American hunters could still go to Canada to try to kill them. But the hunters would be less likely to make the journey because they'd face more problems importing the head or hide. And, really, who wants to shoot a polar bear if you can't mount its ferocious, teeth-baring head on your den wall to show off to your buddies? "They would have no incentive to kill the creature if they could not keep the trophy," says Michael Markarian, executive vice president of the Humane Society of the United States. "It's all about putting the bear skin on your living room floor, or the polar bear head on the den wall. They want the spoils of the hunt, and the bragging rights."

In fact, hunters earned the right to import polar bear heads and pelts through their own lobbying. These days, you can't go to Japan and buy endangered-whale meat, or to Canada and purchase a seal skin, and bring those animal parts back to the United States. Until 1994, under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, polar bear heads and hides were treated the same way. Then, sports hunters persuaded Congress to let them bring their bear trophies home, and a loophole was written into the Marine Mammal Protection Act to accommodate them.

"The trophy hunters made the argument that they had all these polar bear trophies in storage in Canada," Markarian says. "They had shot these bears legally in Canada, but they were forbidden from bringing home the head and hide." Congress took pity on the trophy hunters and allowed them to bring their souvenirs home. "Unfortunately it has now served as an incentive for more Americans to kill more polar bears in Canada," Markarian says. In the last decade, more than 800 permits have been granted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to import polar bear heads and hides to the United States. The agency does forbid the importing of some trophies from animals shot from polar bear populations it deems vulnerable, but it approves the overwhelming majority of requests.

With the polar bear listed in the United States as threatened, American hunters would face new hurdles in importing them. The prospect of losing revenues from hunters has the Canadian Inuit worried and has caused them to break ranks with their traditional environmental allies. Mary Simon, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, a Canadian organization representing some 40,000 Inuit, has accused environmental groups of "using the polar bear for political reasons against the Bush administration over greenhouse gas emissions, and as Inuit we fundamentally disagree with such tactics."

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