Outrage over China’s polar bear hotel
A new hotel in China where polar bears are on display has outraged animal activists who say it’s nothing more than a prison
IF YOU thought the world couldn’t get any weirder, there’s always something that can boggle your mind. Like the Polar Bear Hotel, where a pair of threatened bears are on permanent display for hotel guests whose rooms overlook their tiny enclosure. The R210-million hotel, located in the bitterly cold northeastern province of Heilongjiang in China, opened in March to full bookings – and outrage from conservationists and animal lovers.
Under the glare of bright, warm lights, the bears are enclosed in a small space with two little pools, fake icicles, fake snow and floors painted white to resemble sheets of ice.
In the wild, polar bears, who are world’s largest land predator by mass, can travel up to 350km in long-distance swims.
Users of Chinese social media have been up in arms about the hotel, describing it as “a panoramic prison for polar bears”.
The hotel forms part of Harbin Polarland, dubbed the world’s first polar performing-arts amusement park, on the Chinese-Siberian border.
The 16-hectare attraction, which opened in 2006, is operated and owned by the Dalian Sunasia Tourism Holding Co Ltd and has established itself as a winter wonderland attraction for tourists.
There are no wild polar bears in China and many of the park’s attractions and exotic animals have been imported to the area, including its performing beluga whales.
Using marine mammals in shows is a practice that’s been outlawed in many parts of the world, where “whale jails” are seen as cruel and restrictive.
Now the hotel and its bears are coming in for a bashing. But the management is unapologetic. “The polar bears are there to keep guests company during their stay,” spokesperson Yang Liu says.
“Whether you’re eating, playing or sleeping, they’ll keep you company.”
The hotel’s 21 bedrooms were booked out at a cost of between R4 060 and R4 900 a night for its trial opening.
Video clips from the opening show guests standing at floor-to-ceiling windows in their rooms overlooking the bears’ enclosure.
Liu says the enclosure is safe and suitable for the bears. “It’s only part of the their total enclosure. They’re let outdoors when temperature and air quality permit.” But critics remain unconvinced. “These bears belong in the Arctic, not in zoos or glass boxes in aquariums – and certainly not in hotels,” says Jason Baker, senior vice president of animal rights group Peta.
“Polar bears are active for up to 18 hours a day in nature, roaming ranges that can span thousands of kilometres where they enjoy a real life. The hotel is out of place in today’s increasingly aware world, and is built on the suffering of intelligent, social beings who are denied everything natural and important to them.”
THE Polar Bear Hotel isn’t the first such exhibit to spark outrage in China. In 2016 a polar bear named Pizza was dubbed “the world’s saddest polar bear” after he was removed from his mother in the aquarium where they lived and put in a glass cage in a Chinese shopping mall.
More than one million people worldwide signed petitions and 50 non-profit organisations sent a letter to Zhu Xiaodan, the governor of Guangzhou Province, asking him to remove Pizza from the centre.
The bear was later moved back to the aquarium and reunited with his mother.
China has often faced global criticism for animal rights’ abuses, including the use of endangered species in traditional medicines; and the treatment of animals in zoos, circuses and increasingly shopping malls.
“Gaps in China’s wildlife protection law allow businesses to exploit animals without any concern for their welfare,” a spokesperson for the China Animal Protection Network told news agency AFP.
There are also no laws in China that require facilities to consider the welfare of captive animals – which means there’s no legal incentive for facilities to treat animals humanely.
The bears in the Polar Bear Hotel are 18-year-old male Bering and his sister, Malygin. They’re two of a set of triplets – their other sibling, Sedov, is held in a Russian safari park.
The hotel enclosure, Bear Conservation UK says, is too small for the animals, which are constantly kept indoors and are displaying signs of zoochosis – repetitive behaviour displayed by animals in captivity, caused by stress and depression that can lead to premature death.
The organisation describes the enclosure as totally unsuitable accommodation for the bears. “From the comparatively small amount of information we have on this location, and from the study of photographs, this seems to be one of the worst polar bear exhibits operating at present.
“It needs to be closed down
TThe bears are constantly caught in the glare of bright, warm lights and are showing signs of stress. unless the owners can be persuaded to invest a significant sum in creating a new habitat for these two polar bears.
“We have no information of the feeding, exercise, medical and enrichment regimes at Sunasia and are endeavouring to obtain further details.”
HERE are about 26 000 polar bears left in the world, and experts predict the species could be extinct by the end of this century as a result of melting sea ice, which could lead to starvation and reproductive failure.
The bears are spread across 19 subpopulations, from the icescapes of Svalbard, Norway, and Hudson Bay in Canada to the Chukchi Sea between Alaska and Siberia. Their endangered status is “vulnerable”, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.
As they’re often unable to find enough food on land they hunt from sea ice, staking out seal breathing holes in the ice, waiting for hours for a blubbery meal to break the surface – but as that sea ice declines because of climate change, so too will polar bears.
“It’s been clear for some time that polar bears are going to suffer under climate change,” Péter Molnár, a biologist at the University of Toronto Scarborough in Canada, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
“But what wasn’t fully clear was when we’d expect major declines in the survival and reproduction of polar bears that could ultimately lead to their extirpation. We didn’t know whether that would happen early or later in this century.”
In a study published in Nature Climate Change, led by Molnár, it was found that bears will be affected under two greenhouse gas-emission scenarios.
Researchers found that if emissions continue at the current rate, polar bears will likely only survive to the end of the century in the Queen Elizabeth Islands in the Canadian Arctic.
“If greenhouse gases are moderately mitigated, it’s still likely that the majority of polar bear populations in the Arctic will experience reproductive failure by 2080,” according to the study.
“Even if we mitigate emissions, we’re still going to see some subpopulations go extinct before the end of the century,” Molnár says.
“But we’d have substantially more populations surviving by the end of the century, even with reduced reproduction, compared with a business-as-usual emissions scenario.”
One thing remains clear: keeping the endangered creatures in malls and hotels for people’s amusement isn’t going to keep them alive any longer.
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