Brave villagers armed with nothing more than flare guns and a digger have been attempting to drive away more than 60 polar bears from their small Russian village of Ryrkaypiy.
Incredible footage shows three men firing flares at a pack of eight bears close to the Arctic village of Ryrkaypiy, far eastern Russia, amid fears they may try and eat some of the 766 villagers.
At least 63 bears have descended on the village to feast on seal carcasses, and rangers have stepped up efforts to frighten the bears by shooting flares, reports the dailymail.co.uk:
screen shot onlyPatrollers insist this action is needed to keep the villagers in Chukotka region safe from the predators as they could ‘wound or eat humans,’ but since posting the video online an unsurprisingly ill-informed response from an ever-‘woke’ public has rolled in:
One idiot wrote: “What if it fires right into a bear’s eye?”
While so-called Polar Bear expert Anatoly Kochnev also chimed-in: “You could have just pulled the seal to drag it away, but for some reason you opted for crowding around a bulldozer and shooting.”
But ranger on the ground, Maksim Deminov, hit back: “When hungry, they can wound or eat a human. There were a couple of incidents in the past before our patrol was formed.
“We have already stopped a couple of their attempts to get inside the village.
‘We must be on duty constantly.”
And Deminov insisted: “There is no harm caused by the flares.”
Opinions are circling the web claiming these bears venturing into the village is a sign of climate change, and that a mild winter has driven them all to the brink of starvation. But this simply isn’t the case.
As Zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford writes on her website polarbearscience.com: ‘A little research would have shown that this sort of event is not unusual for this village, there is adequate sea ice off the coast to allow polar bears to hunt for seals if they choose to do so, and the photos provided do not support the claim that almost all of the polar bears “appeared to be thin.” Similar incidents happened in 2013 and 2006. Increasing numbers of Chukchi Sea polar bears is the most plausible explanation for the recent abundance of bears at this village.’
Backing up Crockford’s explanation is the fact that polar bear numbers continue to climb:
According to Dr. Jay Lehr: ‘floating ice (pack ice) is not melting significantly and polar bears are thriving. Indeed, the number of polar bears has quintupled in the past 50 years from about 5,000 to about 25,000 today’. While Crockford herself has recently put that number even higher, claiming that approximately 39,000 exist in the wild: ‘My extrapolated estimate of 39,000 (range 26,000-58,000) at 2018 is not only plausible but scientifically defensible.’
Who are you callin’ skinny…?’
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