Polar Bear Protection Urged

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30634, 28 December 1964, Page 11

Polar Bear Protection Urged

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) FAIRBANKS (Alaska), Dec. 27. Polar bears are becoming a matter of international concern.

Recently the United States Secretary of the Interior (Mr Stewart Udall) included the polar bear on his list of animals threatened with extinction.

Senator E. L. Bartlett, of Alaska, however, has said that he will press for an international treaty to protect the polar bear. Three years ago Senator Bartlett carried on an elaborate correspondence with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game about the big animals.

“My fears were pacified at the time,” he said. “But since then the hunting pressure has increased and I believe it is time we took some positive steps toward a treaty.”

The Senator said he hoped an international agreement could be worked out between the United States, Canada, the Soviet Union. Norway, Sweden and Denmark (for Greenland). The polar bear ranges hundreds of thousands of square miles on the ice of the Arctic Ocean.

In Alaska the hunting pressures against the polar bear have become particularly acute. The price of a “guaranteed kill” has dropped from 2500 dollars to as low as 500 dollars.

From villages on the northwestern Alaska coast hunters with aircraft have doubled, tripled and quadrupled. In many cases they fly far beyond the international date line to seek out trophy-size male bears.

It has been reported that light planes of American hunters are tracked by radarscopes on either side of the Behring Strait. If the hunters fly too close to the Soviet’s 12-mile offshore limit, American radarscopes become thick with the specks representing Russian interceptor planes. Polar bear trophy-hunting is

abhorred by Eskimos for what they consider the inhumane aspects. Sometimes the aircraft hunters chase the polar bears over the ice floes until the animals are exhausted. Then the plane lands and the hunter jumps out to shoot the bear.

Others, it is reported, shoot directly at the animals from the planes. Alaskan regulations have no effect outside territorial waters.