Posted on 09/16/2022 5:18:11 AM PDT by marktwain
Far above the Arctic Circle, on December 18, 1983, a man was attacked by a sow polar bear and her cub, without provocation, on King Christian Island. Colleagues were able to stop the bears from killing and eating the victim. A colleague drove off the bear using a front-end loader in spite of repeated attempts by the sow to retake possession of the wounded man. The arrival of a pickup truck with an armed passenger resulted in the sow being wounded and both bears were driven off. The man survived.
The incident was revealed in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) response obtained by AmmoLand from the Department of the Interior.
Because the names of the people involved have been redacted, pseudonyms have been used to make the account more readable. Panarctic Oils was conducting an exploration of arctic resources in 1983. One of their bases was on King Christian Island in the Canadian arctic.
FOIA, Incident 30, Panarctic Oils Limited, King Christian Island December 18, 1983, Canadian arctic.
Pseudonyms:
From the FOIA, as reported by bear researchers, with pseudonyms added and lightly edited for clarity:
It was dark outside. At 12:45 a.m. Dave and Joe went to dump the garbage and pump water. Joe was getting ready to pump water when Dave came walking around the corner with a polar bear right behind him. Joe started running to camp and looked back to see Dave fall. The bear had swatted him across his buttocks causing him to fall down.
(Excerpt) Read more at ammoland.com ...
The public now knows of it because of an FOIA done in 2022.
Interesting news item. Mother Bear protects cub, attacks man in wilderness. Hardly the stuff of headlines however.
Polar bears in the arctic? No wonder they kept it secret. /sarc
Twenty years back, a sow polar bear made it South to Ft. Yukon, Ak. It was strolling around the village and two local Indians took off after it with an AR 556. 30-30s and military rifles (sks) are traditional hunting guns in rural areas due to price. They killed it outside the village, I myself saw pictures from their relatives. We’ve killed grizzly bears with 308s a few times.
Wrong. Read the article.
Furthermore, it is unresolved why the incident was repressed for so many years:
This correspondent has been unable to find any contemporaneous articles published about the incident. It has all the ingredients for a great human interest story, a giant predator preying on humans; the struggle for survival; a hostile, dark, cold environment, heroic actions by the victim’s colleagues, man and machine against the predator in a scene similar to that in the movie “Aliens”. If any readers find a contemporaneous account, please let us know of it.The Panarctic Oil company had been fined $150,000 by the Canadian government, for dumping oil residue and garbage, which had no environmental effect, according to the court, in January of 1983. The corporation was still on probation in December of 1983, so it likely worked with the government to repress news of the polar bear attack. Bear researchers knew of the incident in 1988.
This was a predatory attack.
Bears get hungry.
Exceptions are areas where food is available in abundance, such as areas where salmon spawn.
One motive may be the incident shows a sow polar bear with a year old cub in an unprovoked, predatory attack.
That is contrary to the narrative of the peaceful polar bear.
Right?! That escaped me. ROFLMAO!
In the Polar Bear’s defense, the man had called her an insulting, racist name before she attacked.
With no skin, it looks a lot like an alligator, but I suspect it is a small whale.
Thats one of them Polar Crocodiles.
Evil White men attacking and injuring a poor Polar Bear that was simply trying to feed itself and it’s child!
Why was it kept secret? Because the bear was under 18?
FOIA? why was this hidden, i am confusion...
There are several possible motivations.
1. The Canadian government, in 1983, was run by Pierre Trudeau, in the Liberal party. They are the party of gun control. They likely did not want an example where a gun was used defensively during a polar bear attack, to be spread about. The attack could likely have been stopped much earlier, if the workers were allowed more than one gun on site.
2. By 1983, the polar bear had been placed on the endangered list. Unprovoked polar bear attacks remind people that polar bears are dangerous. With the Liberals in power, they may not have wanted to offend animal rights extremists, who tend to vote Liberal in Canada.
3. While bear researchers knew of the attack in 1988, it runs against the narrative of the "harmless" polar bear, as mentioned in the above comments.
OK, because, canaDUH...
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