Frozen Fury: Desperate Icelandic Polar Bear’s Tragic Quest for Food Ends in Fatal Confrontation

ⓒNewis A polar bear that washed up in Iceland was eventually killed while searching through a rubbish bin in a private home.

According to foreign media reports such as the British Daily Guardian on the 20th (local time), a young polar bear weighing 150 to 200 kg was shot and killed by the police on the 19th in a village in the Westfjords of Iceland while rummaging through rubbish. a song near a villa.

The elderly woman who was in the villa at the time was so afraid that she locked the door and hid. The police decided to kill the polar bear because it was deemed a threat to humans.

In Iceland, bears are classified as a protected species, but can be shot if they pose a threat to people and livestock.

Westfjord police chief Helgi Jensson said, “We didn’t want to kill the polar bear either, but we had no choice because the bear was very close to the villa and there was an elderly woman in the villa.”

The polar bear’s carcass will be taken to the capital Reykjavik and used for research purposes.

Meanwhile, it has been eight years since 2016 that a polar bear has been seen in Iceland.

Although Iceland is not polar bear habitat, there are rare cases of polar bears floating down from Greenland on drift ice. In 2008, two Greenland polar bears were seen in Iceland.

Experts believe that as the habitat of polar bears decreases due to global warming, the number of sightings on land has increased. A paper has been published showing that the possibility of polar bears climbing into private homes has increased, putting humans and polar bears at risk.

According to a study published in the Journal of Wildlife Science in 2017, a total of 73 cases of polar bear attacks were recorded in Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia, and the United States between 1870 and 2014. Of these, 15 occurred in a row during the last five years of the survey period.

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