Iceland Killed a Visiting Polar Bear

Polar bears have it rough these days. They are the nominal poster child for global warming for a reason, suffering from declining sea ice and other loss of habitat that makes finding food and surviving in the far north more and more of a challenge.

So when a solo polar bear likely floated its way on some wayward ice from Greenland all the way to Iceland, shooting it dead seems a less than ideal welcome. And yet.

“It’s not something we like to do,” said the local police chief in a town in the northwest of the country, in what one can only hope was a certain degree of understatement. The police consulted the country’s Environment Agency, according to the Associated Press, and a decision was made to kill the tourist. Polar bears are protected in Iceland, unless they pose a threat to people or farm animals; this particular bear, likely hungry after a long voyage, was foraging around outside a woman’s house, and the authorities decided its proximity to people met that criterion.

Bears do not visit Iceland often; this was the first sighting since 2016. There is an impressive record of such sightings dating back to when humans first showed up on this volcanic rock in the North Atlantic in the 9th century, totaling only around 600 bears. The chart of those sightings, courtesy of the Icelandic Institute of Natural History, raises one important question: What the hell happened in the late 1800s?

Icelandic Institute of Natural History

In any case, the polar bear death raises again the uncomfortable question of how to manage potentially dangerous wildlife that increasingly comes into contact with humans through no fault of their own. Polar bear attacks documented across the Arctic countries where they are native, though rare, have increased over the last few decades, potentially because they move off the disappearing ice and toward other sources of food.

The AP notes that after two bears came ashore in Iceland in 2008, a task force set about determining what to do about it; among their points against repatriation was that the specific population of bears these likely come from in eastern Greenland is fairly healthy. An IUCN task force on polar bears, meanwhile, currently says that population’s status is “unknown,” and that the sea ice they rely on is decreasing by more than eight percent per decade.

The global population of polar bears is hard to count precisely, but is likely in the mid-20,000s. It is currently considered “vulnerable,” in large part to climate change, but bullets are apparently also a threat.