Polar Bear Attack in Norway Sparks Facebook Debate
Last week 17-year-old Horatio Chapple was killed by a polar bear while on a youth expedition to the arctic. Since then many have expressed their sympathies, however, on social networking sites many others have expressed outrage.
Posters on Facebook have ridiculed the young man for being in polar bear territory and inadvertently causing it to get shot to death by another young man trying to defend the group from the attacking bear.
Many of the posts are unsuitable for publication, but following are a few that give an idea of the sentiment surrounding the debate:
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One Facebook page entitled, “R.I.P. Horatio Chapple and the Polar Bear” has a mix of posts paying condolences to Horatio and his family and posts saying that killing the polar bear should not have been an option, since it was only a bear doing what bears do in their natural habitat.
The administrator of the page posted, “I just have to say that poor horatio and all but POOR LITTLE BEAR TOO PEOPLE! i made thid page so that we could respect BOTH....(mainly poor bear killed for no valid reason) ok! Lol.”
“RIP bear...,” posted David Thomas Gittins, from London. “Doing a totally wild natural thing when a bunch of Londoners came on his ground with no respect for nature.”
On another page named, “Team Horatio Chapple Polar Bear,” the pro-bear feelings continued. Steph Gogarty, from Cavan, Ireland, said, “RIP Polar Bear!! They (the youth group expedition) should respect home!! It’s not your fault! The bear shouldn’t have been killed because they shouldn’t have been there!!”
Other comments were much blunter – and often vicious. Many comments were laced with prejudice against Horatio’s supposedly wealthy background. However, despite the insensitive “trolling,” the amount of comments that showed anger regarding the polar bear’s death underlies a growing concern for the environment and endangered species like the polar bear.
People seem to feel that the bear should not have been killed on principle – that killing it in its natural habitat is an offense to the natural instinct of an animal and that nonviolent measures should have been prepared in advance for a possible attack, namely using tranquilizers instead of bullets to subdue the bear.
Whether or not tranquilizers were an option – and even if they were, to expect the shooter, who was also attacked by the bear, to consciously make such a decision during a situation on such a chaotic level – we might never know. Nonetheless, the opinion that the expedition group is at fault is definitely held by quite a number of people.
And while the reaction – ugly as it may seem – is misplaced, a positive can be taken from it: people do care for the environment and how it is being affected by how we live. They may express it in abhorrent ways, but there is a concern, nonetheless. And while some have simply posted ignorantly on Facebook, others have been incited to look deeper into the causes for the decline in polar bear populations, including climate change, which scientists blame for a decline in seals, polar bears’ main food source, as well as the increase in polar bear drownings, a result of them having to swim longer distances in search of food.
Indeed, Erik Nygaard of the Svalbard Island’s governor’s office said that an autopsy of the bear showed that it had little body fat and an empty stomach, suggesting malnourishment at the time of the attack, according to German news website, Deutsche Welle.
