Baby Polar Bear Melts Our Hearts Like Climate Change Melts So Many Glaciers

After his mom was killed by a hunter, Kali the polar bear was orphaned and taken to the Alaska Zoo. She’s about three months old, and weighs 18 pounds, and is basically a walking stuffed animal.

From Laughing Squid:

After realizing that the polar bear he shot was a mother with a cub, hunter James Tazruk told the Anchorage Daily News that he tracked down her den, crawled inside, and found Kali. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to take you home,” he told the cub, “just don’t bite me.”

Tazruk is a subsistence hunter, the majority of polar bears are not killed for that reason. The relatively small percentage killed by native people who live in harmony with the environment is greatly overshadowed by the catastrophic loss of life due to trophy and pelt hunters, pollution, and global warming — and that’s all on the rise. Anyway, good job everyone at speeding the extinction of polar bears! If global warning doesn’t get them, the hunters will. Now, we can all watch as the final few decline in their zoo cages — and after several desperate attempts to breed them so a few more of their offspring can also live in cages, we’ll finally give up and they’ll all be gone. Scientists expect the polar bear to be completely extinct in the wild by the year 2050, or 37 years from now. No matter how you feel about hunting, that’s fucking depressing.

Gonna watch this video about 50 more times until the rage subsides.

[Update: Seeing from the comments, and upon further research, I see that Tazruk is a subsistence hunter. Apologies for the misinformation, I’ve updated my content to reflect this.]