Cuddly polar bear Knut tries to eat 3-year-old boy

Sure polar bears look cute when you play with them and they don’t grow up to be kittens. The once cuddly bear now weighs over 315 pounds and has six inch claws and apparently an appetite for small children.

Fortunately for the youngster, six inches of glass capable of withstanding a mortar attack separated him from the jaws of the world’s most famous captive bear.

The child should have had some real fear, as the youths in San Fransisco found out when taunting a tiger last year. Two polar bears mauled and killed an 11-year-old boy who climbed a fence at the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn with two friends and then sneaked into the polar bear enclosure.

Four police officers shot and killed both of the bears as the animals tugged at the dead boy’s body, said the city’s Parks Commissioner, Henry J. Stern. The police said it took 20 blasts from 12-gauge shotguns firing rifled slugs and six bullets from a .38-caliber revolver to bring down the animals, which stood 8 feet tall and weighed more than 900 pounds.

Knut was rejected by his mother at birth in December 2006.

Some animal rights activists said it would be better for him to die than to be weaned by mankind. “The zoo must kill the bear,” said spokesman Frank Albrecht. “Feeding by hand is not species-appropriate but a gross violation of animal protection laws.”

Animal rights activists argue that he should be given a lethal injection rather than brought up suffering the humiliation of being treated as a domestic pet. But Albrecht and other activists fret that it is inappropriate for a predator, known for its fierceness and ability to fend for itself in the wild, to be snuggled, bottle-fed and made into a commodity by zookeepers.

When Knut was born, his mother ignored him and his brother, who died. Zoo officials intervened, choosing to raise the cub themselves.

Raised by hand the polar bear cub became a national attraction earning nearly ten million dollars in revenue for the Berlin zoo.

Even his keeper who raised the cub feeding it by hand is afraid of being anywhere near the large bear.

In the wild polar bears weigh up to 1300 pounds and eats mainly on seals, young walruses, and whales, although it will eat anything it can kill and is an opportunistic feeder. Polar bears are enormous, aggressive, curious, and potentially dangerous to humans. Wild polar bears, unlike most other bears, are barely habituated to people and will quickly size up any animal they encounter as potential prey.

In all of Canada, only seven people have been killed by polar bears in the past 30 years.

In the U. S. (Alaska) during the same time period, only one person was killed.

In all of recorded history, only 19 people have been killed by polar bears in Russia.*

The bears are losing the war against humans though, about 500 bears are killed per year by humans across Canada.

Data on Bear Attacks

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