How do they know the Bear was starving? Was an autopsy performed after the bear died? I need to watch the video 😆
Edit the bear is foaming at the mouth he looks sick...he may be dying but there could be so many reasons why...
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Exactly. My family and I went through the sadness of watching one of our pet cats wasting away to starvation a couple of months ago, despite the abundance of food that was available to him. He would meow for food all the time, but then just lick the surface without swallowing when you gave it to him. It turned out that he had intestinal cancer that was preventing him from eating. He only survived for his last month or so because the vet prescribed prednisone and my wife and I were loading him up with fluids under the skin and force-feeding him with baby-food and pureed cat food in syringes three times a day. In the end, even that care wasn't enough. He couldn't even stand under his own power and looked just about as emaciated as that bear when we took him to the vet for his last visit.
Just yesterday, we had to put down a nine year old German Shepherd Dog because of a degenerative condition that prevented her from moving around very much (probably hip dysplasia). She developed compression sores, and those got infected. If she had been a wild animal, she would have been unsuccessful at hunting and starved to death months or years ago.
It is heart breaking to see, but animals have been getting sick or injured and starving to death since long before climate change became a concern. If I had to guess, I'd bet that the bear was far more likely to be starving as a result of a more traditional illness or injury than from climate change.
I grew up on a farm and saw many sick animals that looked like they were starving to death. I find the video pulling at emotions without any data, big red light for me!
The sad music that accompanies the video is telling. Also, look how (s)he is opening/closing the mouth repeatedly from 0:35 until the end. A bear is not a dog, but I found this, Causes of Dog Opening and Closing Mouth Repeatedly
Causes include:
Between that and the foaming at the mouth that you noticed, I think it's very plausible to think that the underlying problem here was some sort of illness. Too bad NatGeo apparently didn't bother to get a veterinarian's opinion.
I know but it's really sad to see a wild animal suffering...I grew up in the wild and it's tough. Nature is divinely indifferent to the cycles of birth, death, and illness....unlike us humans.
Clearly the bear was hungry, and whether or not its suffering was ONLY due to hunger, we know many bears are dying of starvation because of studies like this: “In 2002, a World Wildlife Fund report predicted that climate change could eventually lead to polar bear endangerment or extinction. Even then, the report found that polar bears were moving from ice to land earlier and staying on land longer, unhealthily extending the bears' fasting season. By the end of summer, most bears studied by the World Wildlife Fund showed signs of starvation.”
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/12/polar-bear-starving-arctic-sea-ice-melt-climate-change-spd/
The bears hind end was damaged, he/she may have gotten into an accident of some kind and can't hunt. He or she could be very old, they only live 15 years in the wild...It's rough out there! As for climate change, it's always changing. When I was growing up we where heading for a mini ice age.
My ex husband hunted bear and cougar with hound dogs, over in the Eagle Creek Wilderness area near Mt Hood Oregon and I grew up playing in the wilderness. Just taking a walk without being aware can get you killed. It's that way for wild animals as well. You don't live long out there, it is kill or be killed.
My family also went fishing up in Alaska, ice growth and decline has many cycles within cycles and we humans have short attention spans and don't live long enough to figure out the cycles unless our elders remember. All our elders that held that information are dead and now we have to depend on deceptive government, politicized science, and scientist that need to pay their mortgage.
What I don't like about anthropomorphic climate change is carbon credits giving those who can afford to buy credits the right to pollute. Which has nothing to do with saving the polar bear and everything to do with controlling our global markets killing off our small businesses and giving the transnational corporations a free playing field.
Carbon credits are, like most government regulations, a well-meaning attempt at dealing with a tragedy of the commons - the polluting of a common resource (the atmosphere) that no one person or country owns and yet we all depend on.
A brief rundown in case you're not aware - a tragedy of the commons is a type of market failure - where the free market fails to price something (fossil fuels) high enough to accurately reflect all the negative costs it has on market participants (or innocent bystanders).
In my opinion governments stepping in to raise the price of carbon emissions won't go as planned (stakeholders will corrupt the process somewhat), but we should attempt to achieve a net positive result.
As for climate "always changing", time frames are important. What do you mean that when you were growing up we were heading for a mini ice age? According to indicators like tree-rings and ice layers the planet's climate has been fairly stable since the last mini ice age in the 16-1700s.
The have been more and more polar bears each year. They are not at threat at all.