New bear cub is cold comfort

John Muir, the Scot who taught white Americans essential truths about their own landscape, said of the polar bears he watched off the north coast of Alaska that “they move as if the country had belonged to them always”.

I thought about that while I was reading a newspaper report about the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland’s hopelessly misjudged publicity campaign with which it celebrated the birth of a polar bear cub in the singularly un-Arctic-Ocean-like surroundings of its zoo, a little to the south of Aviemore.

Treating it as if it was a soft toy, they have invited you and me to choose a name for the cub from a shortlist of four it has helpfully compiled.

You have until Thursday, incidentally, to vote.

The four names are Winnie the Zooh, an obscure Pictish name meaning Bear-Behind-Bars, a Gaelic name meaning Rip-Off Bear, and Cash-Cow Bear. I will be voting for Winnie the Zooh because the whole scheme was obviously dreamt up by a bear of very little brain.

Also because, as homes for polar bears go, life behind bars in a field off the A9 is the polar bear equivalent of Eeyore’s Gloomy Place.

The publicity language has all the hallmarks of the RZSS’s giant panda project, in which captive breeding is the excuse used to justify a very impressive money-spinning project.

The Highland Wildlife Park’s own website includes this remarkable claim:

“Our pioneering captive polar bear management programme closely mirrors what happens in the wild, and this birth shows our approach is working.”

Here’s what happens in the wild, as described by Barry Lopez, American nature writer of distinction, in his landmark book of 1986, Arctic Dreams:

“The ice, despite its occasional vertical relief, only compounded a sense of emptiness in the landscape, a feeling of directionless.

“The floes were like random silent pieces of the earth. Our compass promised, if called upon to do so, to render points on a horizon obliterated in slanting snow and fog…The bear turned in the water and regarded us with irritation…he veered toward a floe.

“In a single motion of graceful power he rose from the water to the ice, his back feet catching the ice edge at the end of the movement. Then he stepped forward and shook. Seawater whirled off in flat sheets and a halo of spray.

“His head lowered, he glared at us with small, dark eyes. Then he crossed the floe and, going down on his forelegs, sliding head first, he entered the water on the other side without a splash and swam off.”

In the wild, the polar bear is also the ice bear.

“His world forms beneath him in the days of shortening light, and then falls away in the spring,” wrote Lopez.

In the wild, the polar bear is also the sea bear. In 2008 a radio-collared bear swam more than 400 miles to find sea ice, the increasing scarcity of which drives the species towards climatechange-induced extinction. The cub, with which it began the journey, failed to make it.

Lopez wrote: “In our three days of diligent searching in this grey and almost featureless landscape of ice remnants so far off the coast, we had seen but two seals. We were transfixed by the young bear.

“We watched him move off across the ice into a confusing plane of grays and whites…A snow shower moved through and when it cleared we could barely make him out in the black water with field glasses…A young and successful hunter, at home in his home. He had found the seals.”

If you do decide to nip up the A9 to visit whatsisname, the new-born polar bear cub that will never smell the sea (£16.50 if you book online), what part of whatever it is you see do you think will closely mirror what happens in the wild?

Surely we should be turning our backs on zoos in the 21st century. The idea of presenting their “living collections” of incarcerated animals as public entertainment and calling it education is fooling no one.

Captive breeding, if it has a role to play in any kind of conservation project to help stave off extinctions, should only happen in the country where there is a problem,.

Where, for example the polar bear is “a young and successful hunter, at home in his home”, or where “they move as if the country had belonged to them always”.

You still have time to vote to name the zoo bear at the Highland Wildlife Park, and just in case you hadn’t noticed, the four names I mentioned above do not constitute the approved RZSS list. But if you do vote, all you will be doing is playing their publicity game, and helping to fill their coffers.

So here’s a better idea, go online and watch Dr Jane Goodall’s Earth Day message instead.

We should be turning our backs on zoos

The cub, seen here with its mum at the Highland Wildlife Park, is the first to have been UK for 25 years. born in the