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When environmentalist activists want cuddly creatures for poster purposes, nothing beats Canadian.
Forget our most endangered species like the black-footed ferret and Vancouver Island marmot. They don't stand a chance of becoming fundraiser-worthy victims when there are fuzzy seals and majestic polar bears to protect through international publicity.
The baby seal was the star last month when the Farley Mowat protest ship was seized by Canadian authorities for illegally interrupting the annual hunt.
Partly due to that publicity, the European Commission is threatening to ban all Canadian seal product imports for no apparent reason other than the wide-eyed youngsters are so dang cute and gush blood all over ice floes during a slaughter captured annually on TV.
Now it's the majestic polar bear, granted mostly symbolic protection by Americans this week for being at risk of becoming the highest-profile casualty of global warming as its mostly Canadian domain disappears with the Arctic Ocean ice melt.
Ironically, the polar bear's primary diet is the seal. And it has a particular culinary affinity for the young pups it grabs by the head and chews -- a death surely more prolonged than the fatal whack of a sealer's hakapik.
But the "threatened" status afforded the Canadian great white is interesting for an animal whose Arctic population has doubled to 25,000 bears in the last 40 years, with only two of the 13 pockets of population experiencing any decline.
Yet somehow, despite that population surge and its long history of surviving even warmer climates, the polar bear is now the world's photogenic canary in the global-warming coal mine.
When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service put up its suggestion for a "threatened" designation for the species, the service was swamped with a record-shattering 670,000 responses, or more than 25 for every living polar bear on the planet.
This frenzy of concern forced a reluctant U.S. Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne to announce that he was "compelled" to bestow the beast with the "threatened" status, while taking pains to stress "this listing will not stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting."
In other words, anything done to protect the species won't do any good unless climate change is halted and reversed.
Perhaps the correct picture of the polar bear's plight is, ironically, the notorious shot of a four-bear family apparently stranded and doomed to drown as an iceberg fragment melts beneath their paws.
Unfortunately for those who have used it as the basis for campaigns to save the species from climate change, the interpretation was bogus.
"They were healthy, fat and seemed comfortable on their iceberg," according to its photographer.
In the global-warming coal mine, perhaps the canaries are fat, healthy and increasingly numerous.
Don Martin, Canwest News Service
Published: Friday, May 16, 2008
© The Vancouver Province 2008
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