A polar bear that washed ashore in Iceland was eventually shot and killed after rummaging through trash cans in a home.
According to foreign media reports, including the British daily Guardian, on the 20th (local time), a young polar bear weighing 150-200 kg was shot and killed by police while rummaging through a trash can near a villa in a village in Iceland’s Westfjords on the 19th.
The elderly woman who was in the villa at the time was so scared that she locked the door and hid. The police decided to kill the polar bear, judging that it was a threat to people.
In Iceland, bears are classified as a protected species, but can be shot if they pose a threat to people or livestock.
“We didn’t want to kill the polar bear either,” said Westfjords police chief Helgi Jensson, “but the bear was very close to the cottage and there was an elderly woman there so we had no choice.”
The polar bear carcass will be transported to the capital Reykjavik for research purposes.
Meanwhile, this is the first time a polar bear has been sighted in Iceland in eight years, since 2016.
Although Iceland is not home to polar bears, they do occasionally drift in from Greenland on ice floes. In 2008, two Greenlandic polar bears were spotted in Iceland.
Experts say that as global warming reduces the polar bear’s habitat, sightings on land have increased. There was even a paper published that said that hungry polar bears are more likely to climb into houses, putting both humans and polar bears at risk.
According to a 2017 study published in the Journal of Wildlife Science, a total of 73 polar bear attacks were recorded in Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia, and the United States between 1870 and 2014. Fifteen of those attacks occurred in the last five years of the study period.
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2024-09-24 18:39:40