The "Bearness" of the Polar Bear

Earlier, I talked about the two native bears to the United States - the brown bear and the American black bear - and how many zoos took in orphaned or nuisance bear cubs.   There is, of course, a third bear native to the US, assuming that you remember to count Alaska.  That is the polar bear - though plenty of people seem to forget that it's a bear.  Certainly I've come across many zookeepers, curators, and directors who can't seem to get that into their heads.

The polar bear is a legal and logistical challenge for many zoos, because the US Government doesn't treat them like other bears - it classifies them as marine mammals, which makes them subject to a whole host of other laws and regulations, from acquisition policy to transport to water quality.  It's probably part of the reason that you don't see polar bears in roadside zoos like you do brown and black bears - way too much trouble, too much paperwork, and too much expense.  The costs of the pool and water filtration systems alone can be exhausting to deal with.

Polar bears are closely associated with the water.  Even their scientific name translates to "Sea Bear" or "Maritime Bear."  As a result, most polar bear exhibits are built as people imagine the arctic - the main feature is a pool, usually with underwater viewing these days, while the land area is meant to look like ice.  Ice isn't a practical building material, so what it really often ends up being is rock or concrete, sometimes painted white to resemble glaciers, all framing the pool.  I suppose if  you took a quick photograph of a polar bear in the wild and compared it to a zoo exhibit, they might look close enough - a harsh, seemingly barren landscape, and then the water.  Just because that's what it looks like, though, doesn't mean that it's what it should be.

I'd never really thought about polar bear exhibits much until I read Colin Tudge's Last Animals At The Zoo.  In it, he summed up the problem with polar bears succinctly by stating that they are NOT furry seals.  They are bears.  They do, as Else Poulsen would say, bear things.  Tudge described how a polar bear at one European zoo was allowed into the brown bear exhibit.  It romped in the grass. It dug in the dirt.  It even (with a little difficulty) climbed a tree.  

We typically don't think of a species as "new," but evolutionary speaking, polar bears really are "new" animals.  They evolved quite recently from a population of brown bears that were cut off by an ice age and adapted to life in the frozen north.  They still are very  much bears though, and are closely enough related to brown bears that they can interbreed easily and produce fertile young.  Those brown bear genes aren't buried too deeply beneath a white pelt and blubber.  In the wild, polar bears at the southern end of their range may wander through fields and forests, snacking on berries when the ice packs and seals aren't available.  That's their home just as much as the ice fields are.

The best polar bear exhibits that I've seen, such as Detroit Zoo and Columbus Zoo, are the ones that acknowledge the "bearness" of polar bears, and give them opportunities to do bear things.  The arctic may be seemingly barren and desolate in many places, but in the wild polar bears roam miles and miles of it.  If they only have an acre or so in a zoo, that space needs to be much more enriching and variable, even if it doesn't match our concept of what a "natural" arctic habitat looks like.  There needs to be a pool, of course.  Swimming is a bear thing - it's definitely a  polar bear thing.  But that's not all that they are, and their habitat should reflect that.  

They're bears, after all - not furry seals.