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Wildlife biologist Lily Peacock takes a blood sample, a procedure seen by some as invasive, but one that helps researchers understand what polar bears need to produce healthy cubs. (Photo: T.F. Donnelly)

As if global warming weren’t enough of a problem, polar bears face a host of other assaults, not the least of which is hunting. By definition, there is no “sustainable” harvest quota for a population already in decline. That seems obvious, right? And yet it also happens to be the wrong answer. When it comes to the science and politics behind hunting, we have to follow polar bears down the rabbit hole once again.

In Canada, hunting rules are determined by individual provinces and territories, so a particularly peripatetic bear in Hudson Bay could wind up being “managed” by Manitoba, Nunavut, Ontario, Quebec and possibly even Newfoundland. Factor in the disparate laws in the other four polar bear nations — the United States, Russia, Greenland and Norway — and you’ve got a recipe for worldwide confusion.

Approximately two-thirds of the world’s polar bears live in Canada, and about 600 are legally hunted here every year. Of that, 86 percent of the hunting occurs in Nunavut. For years, First Nations and Inuit residents of polar bear country have reported increased interaction with bears. More bears are coming into settlements, scavenging garbage, hassling dogs and terrifying residents. But some scientists counter that if bears were doing well, they wouldn’t come around town and, therefore, a greater number of bear encounters is actually evidence of fewer bears.

Inuit and Cree have harvested Hudson Bay’s polar bears for 6,000 years, before climate change was on anybody’s radar. Harvest levels in modern times have ebbed and flowed according to management and political priorities. Between 2004 and today, according to Nunavut’s wildlife director Drikus Gissing, allowable harvest levels in western Hudson Bay dropped from 56 to 38 and then to 16 — a number that was shared between Manitoba and Nunavut and also had to include unplanned “defence kills.” For locals, hunting is important not just for meat, hides and cultural continuity but also as a significant source of income, since some tags are sold to sport hunters for tens of thousands of dollars.

Terry Audla, the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, Canada’s national Inuit organization, says that when it comes to really understanding how healthy the polar bear population is, it makes no sense to pit the feelings and hunches of far-flung conservationists against the direct observations of local people who deal with the bears all the time. As far as overhunting goes, says Audla, “if you’re reliant on something as a source of food, you’re going to make darn sure that you’re keeping that source healthy.” When you live in Resolute Bay, Nunavut, it’s hard to give a lot of weight to a conservation organization in southern California or a worldwide endangered species treaty that is signed in Qatar. “There’s this whole fad down south about the 100-mile local diet,” says Audla, laughing. “Well, we’ve been doing that forever.”

But even local management of hunting is not without pitfalls. While the territorial government in Iqaluit enforces strict rationing laws, hunters in Quebec (where no annual quota is applied) recently killed 90 bears in a single season. As a result, empty-handed hunters in Nunavut felt that their traditional rights were being curtailed. And when you lose the active engagement of the local population, you’re likely to have more polar bears killed rather than fewer. “The Inuit have been respectful of the quota system,” says Gissing. With an annual harvest of around 450 bears in Nunavut, there are only a handful of poaching incidents every year, a far lower percentage than is seen with other biggame species worldwide. But with quotas going down at the same time that locals are seeing more bears than ever, that level of respect is at risk. Mitch Taylor, who spent 21 years as a polar bear biologist for the Government of Nunavut and now teaches at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., believes “local hunters are often better informed than managers and sometimes better informed than researchers on polar-bear trends in their area, and when managers request reductions in quota because of concerns that are ill-founded, those hunters are within their rights to address the misconceptions and clarify what populations really are doing.”

And, to add even more complexity, for populations that are stable or rising, an overabundance of bears might lead to competition for food, decreasing the health of the entire population. In situations like this, limited hunting could improve overall health.

Even Geoff York of the World Wildlife Fund — not exactly an organization known for its wanton blood lust — floats the possibility of killing polar bears as a management tool. “This would be a difficult decision for such an iconic species, but it may become a reality as ice loss outstrips predictions in many regions of the Arctic,” he says. “You may have bears at risk of starving during increased open-water periods. The reality is polar bears showing up in places like Churchill, where you might have increased predation of cubs and more bears starving to death, with people watching and cameras clicking.” And pretty much everyone agrees that rich tourists enjoying their morning lattes on deluxe Arctic extravaganzas don’t want to watch polar bears dying.

Sometimes it feels as though the closer you look at polar bears, the harder they are to really see. Each new bit of evidence seems designed to give another spin on the wheel of public opinion. One recent study says that polar bears have been seen swimming as far as 687 kilometres through open water, which certainly sounds like an ominous sign. Then another study suggests that polar bears could be up to 500,000 years older than previously thought, which means they’ve successfully survived multiple warming periods in the past. So that’s a good thing, right? But then you read the study about mysterious hair loss or the one about how polar bear milk has become contaminated with PCBs and mercury, and you get disappointed all over again.

So bear populations are either increasing or declining. Hunting is either an ecological outrage or a perfectly sustainable aboriginal right. On balance, the majority of polar bear scientists agree that even if the current state of things looks shakily stable, the future for bears is poor. Nonetheless, as long as climate change is political, polar bears will be too. And the tone of the discussion can get downright ugly.

Consider Mitch Taylor’s story. He spent more than two decades as a polar bear researcher and manager for the Nunavut government and has published around 50 peer-reviewed papers. That should garner widespread respect. But Taylor has been highly vocal about his belief that polar bears are mostly doing fine, that cub mortality varies from year to year and that the much ballyhooed predictions of extinction by 2050 are “a joke.” He also alleges that a lot of the “exaggerated decline” is just a way to keep certain scientists well funded and to transfer control of the polar bear issue from territorial to federal hands. In response, Taylor’s critics disinvited him from meetings of polar bear specialists that he’d been attending since 1978. They also like to point out that he’s a signatory of the Manhattan Declaration, which questions the very existence of climate change. But amidst all the heated charges and countercharges, it’s hard to argue the fact that few people know polar bears the way Taylor does. And while it might be inconvenient for current political posturing, there’s no denying that certain subpopulations of polar bears are managing to survive, even thrive.

Unlike some endangered species that can be saved by roping off a grove of trees, polar bears live locally and suffer globally. Although some scientists have suggested creating protected refuges in the High Arctic, what’s really important is how much rain forest the Brazilians will burn in the next 50 years and how many Texans will buy SUVs instead of tuning up their 10-speeds. And few of the environmentalists who visit Churchill talk about the thousands of kilometres they flew to get there or whether a tourist town in the middle of nowhere is part of the reason why the sea ice is melting in the first place.

The current scientific consensus places the worldwide polar bear population between 20,000 and 25,000 animals. Prior to the 1973 worldwide restriction on commerical polar bear hunting, that number was dramatically lower, so low that a meeting of polar bear specialists in 1965 concluded that extinction was a real possibility. Some reports even estimated the number of bears as low as 5,000 worldwide. Yet by 1990, Ian Stirling — at the time, the senior research scientist for the Canadian Wildlife Service and a professor of zoology at the University of Alberta; basically, one of the most respected polar bear scientists on the planet — felt comfortable answering the question as to whether polar bears are an endangered species by stating flatly: “They are not.” He went on to say that “the world population of polar bears is certainly greater than 20,000 and could be as high as 40,000 … I am inclined toward the upper end of that range.” Although old studies are sketchy, clearly more polar bears are alive today than there were 50 years ago, an essentially heartening fact that has not managed to pierce the public consciousness.

The percentage of people on Earth — heck, even the percentage of people in Canada — who have ever seen a polar bear amounts to a rounding error down around zero. In that context, it’s hard to understand what extinction really means. The new inability to see an animal that you never had the opportunity to see before? Of course, the polar bear has intrinsic worth beyond its value to humans, but is it really more valuable than the thousand other threatened species whose names you’ve never heard and whose faces you’ve never seen on a magazine cover? The truth is, the polar bear exists in a space that is as much theoretical as it is tangible. Given current climatological trends, it seems likely that the future of the polar bear is bleak … although its current status is almost certainly stronger than the international conversation would have one believe.

But polar bears don’t think in terms of trends — or politics or marketing or even in time periods longer than the interval until their next seal kill. And while the debate rages and the tourists’ cameras fire away, the polar bears themselves will continue to do what they’ve always done: surviving as best they can in whatever conditions the Arctic throws at them.