Polar bear orphan saved from death by a caring hunter

[emad]

The Times January 28, 2006


Polar bear orphan saved from death by a caring hunter
From Jeremy Page in Moscow



AN ORPHANED polar bear cub is to be flown to Moscow Zoo next week after a hunter in a remote Siberian region nursed it back to health from the brink of starvation.

The seven-month-old bear was found being attacked by dogs after it wandered into Billings — an isolated settlement named after the British explorer Joseph Billings — three weeks ago. “He was moving with great difficulty and couldn’t eat at all,” Grigory Tynaurgin, a Billings resident, told the television station Rossiya. “Dogs had surrounded him and weren’t even barking. We put him in a tarpaulin — he didn’t even resist — and took him away on a snowmobile.”

The villagers put him inside a diesel-powered electricity station, the only large, warm place in the village of 300 people where temperatures have plunged lower than minus 50C (-58F) this month. The cub’s normally white fur had become covered in soot and grease.

Aleksandr Mashkov, the local hunter, fed the bear by hand until it was strong enough to walk, then put food through a hole in the wall.

“I fed him walrus meat and seal fat,” he said. “Seal fat and skin — they’re a polar bear’s favourite food

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2012949,00.html


AHHHHHHHHHHH!
Sorry no pic.

[RebelOne]

1. That's a rarity. A hunter with compassion.

[BikeWriter]

2. Excuse me? Most hunters are interested in conservation...

Some are almost human. :sarcasm:

[Dave Reynolds]

4. That One

is in the implacable "hunters are scum" camp, and therfore not worth the effort. Fundies is as fundies does, ya know.

[BikeWriter]

6. We've had it out (again) with a rabid anti-hunter on my own forum...

I looked up the last hunting thread we had. He'd flounced out for a couple of months after it. That was one year ago, almost to the week.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. What a great story, my dear emad!

Thank you for posting it......

:hi:

[Deja Q]

5. He'll raise it then shoot it for dinner when it's grown.

No different than what farmers do with pigs and cattle.

[DS1]

7. Do you even read before you post, or do you simply blab out the first

thing that pops into your head?

[BikeWriter]

8. Uh, it's being adopted by a zoo.

[skygazer]

9. I don't know why people think a hunter can't have compassion

Do people think farmers have no compassion? I suppose there are those who do think that.

Having grown up in farm country where most of the citizens hunted as well (and not to hang trophies on their wall but to feed their family), I know differently. I've raised animals for food - every one of them had a name, a lot of affection from me, veterinary care when needed, good food, good care, comfortable pasturage and a quick death as free of pain and fear as possible.

To equate people who hunt for food, or farmers who raise their own livestock to a mass-production slaughterhouse or wasteful trophy hunting shows either a high level of ignorance or a deliberate desire to see only what one wants to see.