Polar Bears in the cross-hairs of Trophy Hunters

Packing heat on polar bears from Salon.Com, By Katharine Mieszkowski
It's not just the Bush-Cheney oilmen who don't want to list the polar bear as threatened. It's also the trophy hunters and Inuit tribes.
If your idea of a good time is paying $25,000 to journey to the frozen north in Canada to shoot a polar bear -- making you one of the more than 50 American "sportsmen" who do so every year -- you're not happy about the lawsuits and recriminations over whether the Bush administration should grant new protections to polar bears. After all, those darn regulations could interfere with your bringing home a furry white rug for your living room floor.

In the reams of press about the increasing deaths of polar bears, the role of trophy hunters and the Inuit who help them is often missing. In the Canadian territories where the polar bear lives, the government sets quotas for the number of bears that can be hunted each year. The Canadian Inuit, who are paid by hunters to help them stalk the bears, and American hunting associations have become vocal adversaries to environmentalists and Congress members who in recent months have battled the Department of Interior, with its Bush-Cheney oil connections, to safeguard the polar bear.Today, there are between 20,000 and 25,000 polar bears worldwide, according to the World Conservation Union Species Survival Commission's Polar Bear Specialist Group, which lists the species as "vulnerable." Between 700 and 900 polar bears are shot every year, the majority of those taken in Canada, according to Andrew Derocher, a biologist at the University of Alberta, who chairs the Polar Bear Specialist Group. Of the approximately 600 polar bears shot in Canada, about 15 percent of those are killed by sports hunters, many of them American, who pay between $20,000 to $35,000 for the chance to do so.

Should the species be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, American hunters could still go to Canada to try to kill them. But the hunters would be less likely to make the journey because they'd face more problems importing the head or hide. And, really, who wants to shoot a polar bear if you can't mount its ferocious, teeth-baring head on your den wall to show off to your buddies? "They would have no incentive to kill the creature if they could not keep the trophy," says Michael Markarian, executive vice president of the Humane Society of the United States. "It's all about putting the bear skin on your living room floor, or the polar bear head on the den wall. They want the spoils of the hunt, and the bragging rights."
Cruel bastards!