Comedy Gold

Ed Morrisey beat me to this story. Which frankly isn't surprising, what with the way I have been feeling the past few days. (My wife and I think I contracted the mother of all cases of flu, but the fever finally broke yesterday). So, it seems that German "Animal Rights campaigners" have decided that a polar bear cub rescued from death by officials at the Berlin Zoo must be killed in order to preserve "proper polar bears" everywhere (we're not making this up, really).

The male cub is the first baby polar bear to survive in Berlin zoo for 30 years. After he was born on December 5 last year, his mother, Tosca, a grumpy 20-year-old former East German circus bear, put Knut and his brother out to die on a rock in the bear pit. Keepers scooped the cubs out of the compound with a fishing net and placed them in an incubator.

Only Knut survived, and was fed with human milk and cod-liver oil every half hour. In the Arctic, the minus 35C (-31F) temperatures destroy viruses and bacteria and make it easier for cubs to live. Knut has been brought up as a pampered baby. He is fed chicken purée, was given his own Christmas tree, sleeps with a teddy bear, plays with a football and his pony-tailed keeper strums Elvis Presley songs to improve his mood. The keeper, Thomas Doerflein, says the cub falls asleep when he sings You’re the Devil in Disguise.

The German capital has made Knut into a kind of mascot and even quality newspapers have been keeping a regular Knut diary. “We Need You Knut”, says graffiti on walls. The zoo has allowed Annie Leibovitz, the New York photographer, to snap the cub for an international anti-greenhouse-gas campaign to illustrate the melting of the icebergs. Out of 70 cubs born in captivity over the past 50 years, only 34 have lived. Now it could be curtains for Knut.

“Hand-feeding is not appropriate to the species and is a grave violation of the animal protection laws,” said Frank Albrecht, an animal rights campaigner. “Legally speaking, the zoo should kill the baby bear. Otherwise it is condemning the bear to a dysfunctional life and that too is a breach of the law.”

The director of Aachen zoo, Wolfram Ludwig, also believes the Berliners made the wrong decision in saving Knut: “It is not correct to bottle-feed a small polar bear. He will always be fixated on his keeper and will never grow to be a proper polar bear.” Knut, he argues, should have been killed when Tosca rejected him. “One should have had the courage to kill him much earlier.”

Leipzig zoo showed the way last December by injecting a rejected baby sloth with T61, a poison that kills in two seconds. The argument used by Leipzig and specialists such as Rödiger Schmiedel, the head of Germany’s Bear Foundation, is that it is impossible to domesticate a wild animal so it is better not to start. But the “save Knut” faction could yet win the day. The cub is due to be presented to the public this week after reaching the critical weight of 8kg (18lb), at which he is deemed strong enough to face TV cameras. It will then be even harder to dispatch him quietly with a T61 jab.

“The humanisation of this bear has to stop as soon as possible,” said Wolfgang Apel, the head of the German animal protection league, “but he has a right to live.”

Now what is really disturbing here – well aside from the fact that some humans who champion "animal rights" would rather kill animals than save them, is that some zoos are already practicing this. They are killing animals in order to save them. We'll just let the readers figure that logic out on your own. It escapes us completely. Perhaps it would be a good idea to start a campaign to save the animal right campaigners, too? Hey, fair's fair, right? (And, no. That does not mean we're advocating offing them. We're more humane than they are.) We have a lot of fun with the Animal Uprising™ theme around here. That doesn't mean we advocate killing animals because they are not animal enough to suit us.