Wagathon | June 22, 2013 at 3:37 pm |
What the heck are you talking about? Whose numbers claim 25 times as many polar bears as there were a century ago? Link? Reference? Cite?
If you’re claiming there were only 1,000 polar bears alive a century ago, you’ve got some explaining to do, because hunts were reporting 600-6,000 polar bears taken between 1916-1967 annually. Polar bear litters are one to three a year — three being extremely rare — and polar bears survive to adulthood in the wild about 1 in four times. Your claim is simply staggeringly unbelievable.
timg56 | June 22, 2013 at 11:25 pm |
Most accounts? Most accounts of whom? Susan Crockford, the arctic canine specialist? Literally laughed out of the room last I heard of her attempting to give a lecture to grad students. Iain from U of A in the 1990s? Taylor? That’s three accounts. Dubious and with inflated levels of certainty not backed by evidence.
Are polar bear populations currently plummetting at the same rate as they had between 100 and 50 years ago? No. Is that ‘doing fine’?
The treaty agreed to restore the numbers, and maintain a census.
Do you see a valid census?
I don’t.
Is 25,000 greater than 100,000?
No.
I’m not about the cute cuddly wuddly bears. The cuddly wuddly bears are a ton of razor-blade-tipped muscle with a land speed of 40 mph and the ability to track tirelessly for three days. They’re dangerous, unpredictable and best kept well away from.
This is not about sentiment or some sense of alarm that they’re verging on extinction.
This is about utter failure of a 40-year-old treaty, and its implication for commercial properties that were intended to be recovered to the level for sustaining a harvest and maintaining healthy levels to among other things control seal populations — which in case you haven’t been keeping track, are out of control.
One of the quickest ways to establish that you’ve lost sight of your own interests is to make excuses for trade partners to let down their end of a bargain. Why you don’t care about your own interests is not my problem. My problem is, if you can’t trust these guys in something small like polar bears, how can you trust them for anything?