Picture the scene. Every weekday, between 9am and sunset or 7pm, whichever is the earlier, people stand in solid blocks. More often than not, they seem to be staring at nothing. Then somebody shouts, “She’s getting up!” The throng presses forward. “And there’s the baby!” Whereupon one hears that curious, thin shriek that also happens when the bride appears at a film star’s wedding.
This could well become reality in a couple of months when a fluffy white child star makes their public debut at the Highland Wildlife Park. But it’s actually the Observer’s 1950 report of the crowds that thronged for Brumas, the first baby polar bear successfully reared in Britain. Brumas inspired such passion that London Zoo’s annual attendance rose from one million to three million. Celebrated in books, postcards and toys, she died aged just nine, about half the average life expectancy in the wild.
If the currently nameless cub tucked in its private den in Scotland could open its gorgeous dark eyes, it might want to look away now: the life of an extravagantly adored baby polar bear is unlikely to be long or happy. Our kindest incarceration makes the planet’s most formidable land carnivore as fragile as a butterfly.
Before the new cub’s mewlings were detected in mother Victoria’s den at the Highland Wildlife Park before Christmas, the last British-born polar bears were Millie and Jason. They came into the world to a similar fanfare at Flamingo Land, North Yorkshire, in 1992. Aged 18 months, they were wrenched from their mother, sedated and dispatched to a fate unknown at a Japanese zoo.
Just over a decade ago, an international outpouring of baby bear mania followed Knut and his twin’s abandonment by their mother in Berlin Zoo. Hoiked from their cage with a fishing net and hand-reared, Knut’s twin died, but the survivor became a global star alongside his devoted keeper, Thomas Dörflein, who heroically hand-fed him milk and porridge for 150 days straight. As Knut grew up, probably believing he was a small furry human, another keeper described how the young bear would “cry” when starved of human attention. The zoo decided Knut would benefit from being separated from his principal keeper; a year later, 44-year-old Dörflein died. The screaming crowds had long departed when Knut died of an obscure autoimmune disease, aged just four.
At the height of Knut’s fame, which earned the zoo upwards of €5m in extra visitors, cuddly toys and T-shirts, there was just one polar bear left in a British public zoo. This female, Mercedes, lived alone after her companion, Barney, died in 1996 after choking on a plastic bat thrown into the pen by a young visitor to Edinburgh Zoo.
Around this time, zoos appeared to realise that the game was up: no amount of Prozac – as administered to Gus, a male polar bear and obsessive swimmer at New York’s Central Park Zoo – could compensate for a typical zoo enclosure being one-millionth the size of a polar bear’s wild home range. In 2003, Oxford University biologists found that infant mortality for captive polar bears was around 65%. Those that survived spent a quarter of their day engaged in the kind of pacing that any layperson realises betrays a disturbed beast.
So Britain’s last captive polar bear was moved to a far superior, much larger enclosure at the Highland Wildlife Park. Then, to the dismay of animal welfare campaigners who pushed for her relocation, the superior enclosure encouraged the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland to restart a captive breeding programme.
The efforts of the Highland Wildlife Park keepers to ensure their new star is not one of the 65% seem far more sensitive and effective than what went before. There’s total privacy for mother and cub until they choose to emerge. The male bears, a threat to the cubs and a source of stress for the mother, are housed on the far side of the park. Gone are concrete pens with painted Arctic scenery; our new child star will have tundra-like grassy space and plenty of privacy away from the crowds.
Everything, it might be argued, has changed since the bad old days. Everything, that is, except our response to these irresistibly lovely babies. Just as in 1950 or 1992, in 2018 we will flock to adore this cub – pointing, cheering, flashing our cameras. No matter how much the young animal hides from us – just as the Observer noted Brumas did back in 1950 – our proximity will change its behaviour as surely as a human child star is transformed by excessive human attention.
This cub may become an ambassador for climate change (do we need captive ambassadors when we can capture the wild so vividly on film or virtual reality?) or a healthy cog in a robust captive breeding programme, insurance for the catastrophe of allowing 26,000 wild polar bears to disappear from our planet. But ultimately, it is a victim of our adoration. And until we stop flocking to cast our own eyes upon this baby’s swimmingly dark ones, zoos will continue to breed such victims.
• Patrick Barkham is a natural history writer for the Guardian
