Police shot a rare polar bear that they saw outside a cottage in a remote village of Iceland as they thought it posed a threat, the authorities said on Friday.
Westfjords Police Chief Helgi Jensson told The Associated Press that the bear was killed Thursday afternoon in the northwest of Iceland after police consulted the Environment Agency, which refused to have the animal transferred. “It’s not something we like to do. In this case, as you can see in the picture, the bear was very close to a summer house. There was an old woman there,” Jensson said.
The incident
As per Helgi Jensson, the lone proprietor locked herself upstairs due to fear while the bear tore through her garbage. Through a satellite link, she contacted her daughter in the capital city of Reykjavik and asked for help. While most summer inhabitants in the neighbourhood had left for home, she remained there.
A Coast Guard helicopter surveyed the area where the bear was found to look for others but didn’t find any, police said.After the shot bear was taken away, the woman who reported it decided to stay longer in the village, Jensson said.
The fear and danger
Polar bears are not native to Iceland; however, Anna Sveinsdóttir, the head of scientific collections at the Icelandic Institute of Natural History, says that periodically these animals come ashore after travelling from Greenland on ice floes.
Attacks by polar bears on people are unusual, but according to a 2017 study published in Wildlife Society Bulletin, the loss of sea ice due to global warming has forced more bears to land due to hunger, increasing the likelihood of conflicts and raising the risk to both parties. 15 of the 73 recorded polar bear attacks in Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia and the United States between 1870 and 2014, resulting in 20 fatalities and 63 injuries, took place in the last five years of that time period.
With just 600 sightings reported in Iceland since the ninth century, sightings are rather uncommon. Although killing a bear at sea is prohibited in Iceland due to its protected status, it is permissible to kill a bear if it poses a threat to people or animals. According to the institution, the environment minister appointed a task team to investigate the issue of killing bears following the arrival of two bears in 2008.
(with AP inputs)