"trophy hunters should be gone for a start" .. i'm rethinking that impulsive reaction ..
For thousands of years, Inuit hunters have stalked polar bears across the Arctic, killing animals they revere to keep themselves, and their culture, alive.
PAUL WATSON / TORONTO STAR
Inuit feel pressure to cut quotas. Lootie Toomasie, left, heads a hunters and trappers organization; Sam Nattaq shot his first polar bear at age 12.
By: Paul Watson Star Columnist, Published on Sun Nov 08 2009
IQALUIT, NUNAVUT–For thousands of years, Inuit hunters have stalked polar bears across the Arctic, killing animals they revere to keep themselves, and their culture, alive.
Now the movement to stop climate change has adopted polar bears as furry symbols of global warming's perils, making Inuit feel endangered by moves to protect their prey.
Canada is home to two-thirds of the world's polar bears, animals that are still central to the Inuit way of life long after snowmobiles replaced dog sleds as the chief means of chasing their quarry.
"We harvest more polar bears in Nunavut than the rest of the world combined," said Drikus Gissing, Nunavut's head of wildlife management. "Our annual harvest is between 450 and 500 bears a year.
"For us to justify a level like that, we need to put a lot of emphasis on research. And we believe the harvest is sustainable. We believe we have a very good management system to support it."
But climate change is warming the bears' habitat faster than anywhere else on Earth and some scientists say many are starving because it's harder for them to catch seals, their staple food, as ice sheets melt.
Inuit hunters insist those experts have it all wrong because they are using computer models based on outdated data and ignoring the traditional knowledge of people who share the land with wildlife.
Inuit fear pressure from conservationists will lead to polar bear prohibition, and turn Inuit hunters into international pariahs, as east coast sealers have been demonized by the campaign against killing baby harp seals.
"If that happens, we will still continue to hunt in traditional ways, for food only, while the hide will be our clothing," said Lootie Toomasie, who heads the Nattivak Hunters and Trappers Organization in Qikiqtarjuaq, a hamlet on eastern Baffin Island.
"We will kill anyway because it's our culture. We need to hunt polar bear meat. Once we haven't eaten it for a long time, we miss it. Just like if you haven't eaten steak for so long, you miss it."
The debate over polar bear numbers has heated up because the government of Nunavut is considering a possible cut in the quota that can be killed in the Baffin Bay region.
Polar bears live in genetically distinct groups, or sub-populations, that migrate across home ranges. When Baffin Bay freezes over in winter, the territory's bears usually head east to Greenland and return to Canada for summer, Gissing said.
While computer models suggest the Baffin Bay polar bear population is being over-hunted, the number of polar bears across the Arctic has more than doubled over the past 30 years to 25,000, Gissing said.
Greenland and Nunavut set separate hunting quotas for the polar bear population that migrates between the two territories. One option in front of Nunavut's Wildlife Management Board is to cut its quota from 105 bears to 64. Greenland's hunters are allowed to kill 68 polar bears.
On October 30, federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice agreed with Greenland and Nunavut to set up a commission to protect and manage shared polar bear populations in Baffin Bay and the Kane Basin. But the memorandum of understanding, signed in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, doesn't guarantee the three governments will agree on what's in the best interests of polar bears.
Under a 1973 agreement to protect polar bears, experts from Canada, the U.S., Denmark, Norway, the U.S., and Russia monitor efforts to conserve 19 distinct groups of bears roaming in Arctic nations.
In July, the Polar Bear Specialist Group's experts concluded that only one of those subpopulations is growing, while three are stable and eight are declining. There wasn't enough data to assess the health of the other seven groups.
"The total number of polar bears is still thought to be between 20,000 and 25,000," the specialist group added. "However, the mixed quality of information on the different subpopulations means there is much room for error in establishing that range.''
Toomasie and other Inuit hunters say they are not only seeing more polar bears, but the animals are becoming more aggressive, attacking camps and communities.
As Inuit argue with their government over quotas, the U.S. has raised the stakes by calling for a ban on international trade in polar bear products, which some experts see as a bigger danger to the animals' survival than climate change.
On October 16, President Barack Obama's administration said the U.S. will join 175 countries that have signed the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species to close their borders to polar bear products.
Inuit leaders quickly called on Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government to defend the hunt, an important source of income in isolated Arctic communities, where jobs are scarce and living costs painfully high.
"In Canada, our management system is based on conservation hunting, which involves regulated sustainable harvest," said Simon Awa, Nunavut's deputy environment minister. "This helps protect polar bears, in part by maintaining their cultural and socio-economic value to people in Nunavut."
Foreign sport hunters pay $25,000 or more to Inuit guides for the chance to bag a polar bear under a quota system, which also provides food and income from sales of trophies, clothing, and other items made from harvested bears.
A hamlet allowed to hunt 30 polar bears typically sets aside 10 for sport hunters, raising around a quarter of a million dollars for a community desperately short of jobs and money, Toomasie said.
Washington banned import of polar bear trophies into the U.S. last year, and Nunavut's sport hunting business lost American clients.
Hunters continue to come from countries such as Mexico, Spain and France, but they would likely stay away too if the U.S. succeeds in banning the global trade in polar bear parts, turning their trophies into contraband.
The last count of polar bears in the Baffin Bay region was carried out in 1997 and Inuit hunters insist that computer models built on that study are full of holes.
It is based on a technique called mark-recapture, in which all polar bears spotted along a designated stretch of coastline are shot with a tranquilizer dart. They are marked with ear tags and lip tattoos.
The process is repeated for several years, and scientists use the percentages of tagged polar bears that are recaptured, and others caught for the first time, to estimate the total population and how fast it is reproducing. When the last study was completed 12 years ago, scientists calculated there were 2,074 polar bears in the Baffin Bay region.
The research also concluded the bay's polar bears are among the world's most productive, reproducing so rapidly that the group could withstand a loss of around 120 each year to hunters, Gissing said.
But by the year 2000, Greenland was allowing hunters to kill close to 200 of the animals annually, or 10 times the figure initially reported when Canadian authorities calculated hunting quotas for three Baffin Bay communities, Gissing said.
Flawed estimates, based on the misreported Greenland numbers, pushed the annual loss of bears to double the number scientists considered sustainable, he added.
Greenland imposed quotas four years ago to steadily reign in its hunters, and voluntarily banned all exports of polar bear products. The combined Baffin Bay region hunt has dropped down to around 174 polar bears a year, Gissing said.
"To sustain that, you need more than 2,000 animals in that population," he added. "When scientists took the Greenland harvest plus our harvest, and put that into the (computer) models, the population has actually declined to about 1,500."
Inuit don't trust the rejigged numbers. Gissing says "the only way we can know exactly what's happening with the population is to actually go back and get a new study."
But a new, 3-year study would cost around $3 million. Nunavut's government, which already spends $1.6 million a year on polar bear research, has trouble paying for costly social problems such as a shortage of housing and health care facilities.
"I think more money is being spent presently on meetings to talk about polar bears than what is being spent on actually managing the species," Gissing said.
Nunavut's Environment Minister Daniel Shewchuk will make the final call on quotas in the coming weeks, after reviewing advice from the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board. Awa, his deputy, called the Baffin Bay hunters' threats to ignore any reduction "worrisome."
"If there are violations of our wildlife laws, then our department will meet its legal obligations and conduct an investigation," he warned.
The most pessimistic studies of climate change predict the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free during summer within 20 years.
Conservationists worry that vanishing multiyear ice, or ice that has survived at least one summer melt, could decimate polar bears because they hunt, give birth and raise their young on sea ice.
But Inuit hunters say polar bears can survive without thick, multiyear ice. "Thick ice is not good for polar bears to hunt on," Toomasie said. "They only go walking along the shore, along thin ice, looking for seal holes."
The search for food often draws bears to Inuit hamlets and camps, where they can be shot as "defensive kills" that are deducted from the communities' quotas. Ending sport hunting would remove any incentive to hold fire, Awa said.
"With no economic benefit to harvesting polar bears, and no incentive to deal differently with problem bears, polar bear kills may actually increase," he warned.
Cape Dorset, Nunavut, Canada (c) 2009 Anthony Speca
March 6, 2013 · by Anthony Speca
A proposal to prohibit international commercial trade in polar bears would do little to protect an already well-protected animal further, but much to damage Inuit economic rights and interests.
Next week, beginning on March 3, the international community will formally consider a US proposal to apply the strictest possible controls on cross-border trade in the pelts and other parts of polar bears. If this proposal is accepted, the not-yet-endangered polar bear will join presently endangered animals—elephants, pandas, whales and so on—listed on Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Trade in “Appendix I species” is permissible only in exceptional cases, such as for scientific research. Trade for commercial purposes is prohibited.
Polar bears are currently listed on Appendix II of CITES, which allows international commercial trade where the exporting country certifies the legality and sustainability of the harvest. About 80% of polar bear products enter the international market from a single country—Canada, which is also home to a similarly large proportion of the world’s polar bears. The US proposal to “uplist” polar bears under CITES looks unavoidably like an implicit indictment of Canadian polar bear management practices.
The Canadian federal government treats polar bears as a species of special concern under the Species at Risk Act. Provincial and territorial governments restrict the polar bear hunt to aboriginal peoples—particularly Inuit, whose homelands host the majority of the world’s polar bears, and who traditionally hunt them for food and fur. To uplist polar bears would essentially be to ban Inuit from earning income from their hunt, either by selling polar bear pelts and other products internationally or—in communities offering a sport hunt—by outfitting and guiding foreigners who purchase quota to acquire trophies. Inuit leaders have spoken out against the proposal.
In fact, there seems to be little reason for the USA to worry that polar bears will be hunted to extinction to satisfy some unfettered international demand. First, international trade in polar bears is minuscule. As the USA noted in its proposal, CITES data show that only about 700–800 of the worldwide population of 20,000–25,000 polar bears are harvested annually. According to the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG), a part of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, this harvest is sustainable—at least so far as the very patchy population counts show, and with exceptions only in a few sub-populations. Only about 400–500 harvested polar bears go on to enter the international market annually in the form of pelts or other products. Poaching is a problem in parts of Russia, but it’s not a general concern in either the USA’s or the PBSG’s view.
Second, as a signatory to the 1973 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, the USA is aware that polar bears have enjoyed stringent international protection from hunting for at least four decades. Under the Agreement, the five “range states” with polar bear populations—Canada, Denmark (for Greenland), Norway, the USA and the USSR/Russia—collectively outlawed the hunt except by “local people using traditional means in exercise of their traditional rights.” Given the distribution of polar bears and local people in the Arctic, this means in effect that Inuit take most of the small harvest.
Third, the 1973 agreement complements strong domestic controls offering additional protection. Norway completely prohibits killing polar bears except in self-defence, as did the USSR/Russia before opening an indigenous hunt in Chukotka in 2011. Greenland doesn’t allow sport hunting, and it protects polar bears in a national park covering nearly half the island. The USA itself has banned the import of polar bear products since 2008, when it designated polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act—a move that closed a unique exception in the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act allowing the import of pelts from legal trophy hunting in Canada.
Finally, insofar as the USA condones the traditional harvest of polar bears by Alaskan Inuit, it presumably understands that Canadian and Greenlandic Inuit will continue to do the same, in accordance with their aboriginal rights and to the full extent permitted under domestic laws. James Eetoolook, Vice-President of Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated, has pointed out that international trade offers Inuit hunters an opportunity to extract additional value from the polar bears they would harvest for food and fur anyway. With pelts now trading at over $5,000, and sport hunters paying about $20,000 for guide, license and kit, the polar bear hunt can provide much-needed income in some remote Inuit communities.
So what’s actually motivating the US proposal to uplist polar bears under CITES? The USA recognizes that the polar bear population is healthier now than it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when hunting was mostly unregulated. However, the PBSG forecasts that the polar bear population may decline by 30% or more due to vanishing sea ice, which polar bears need as a platform for stalking seals and other prey. Concerned that climate change could push polar bears toward the brink, the USA argues that international trade simply adds unnecessary further pressure—especially if appetites grow for polar bear pelts and other products.
As a rationale for a CITES uplisting, projecting future declines in the polar bear population due to climate change leaves quite a bit of room for doubt. The international community has already rejected this line of reasoning once, in 2010, when the USA first proposed uplisting polar bears. Even the CITES Secretariat itself recommends rejecting the renewed US proposal, stating “An Appendix I listing would not appear to be a measure proportionate to the anticipated risk to the species at this time.” Some prominent wildlife advocacy organizations, such as Traffic International and the World Wildlife Fund, agree.
But you don’t have to discount the PBSG population forecast—or even be a climate-change sceptic—to wonder what value there would be in uplisting polar bears. The issue isn’t so much whether climate change threatens polar bears—a seemingly plausible concern at least in the longer term, if climate change isn’t halted. Rather, it’s whether this threat is effectively addressed by eliminating a tiny international trade in the by-products of a traditional aboriginal hunt that will continue in any case.
All the same, the EU countries, which voted in a bloc against the first US proposal, are reportedly mostly inclined to support the second—despite efforts by Canadian, Nunavut and Inuit officials and leaders to persuade them otherwise. With EU member state votes behind the proposal, it stands a good chance of passing. Canada, Greenland and Norway, which lead opposition to it—and the Inuit, who will bear its potentially pointless economic consequences—may be forced to live with a ban that does little to protect polar bears further.
And this is the crucial point. Put another way, the USA is asking the international community to sacrifice Inuit economic rights in order to compensate—or, more accurately, in the somewhat dubious hope of compensating—for environmental damage caused more or less entirely by non-Inuit. If polar bears are threatened, it’s because the carbon-intensive industries and lifestyles of Southerners threaten them. Yet as a result, Inuit Northerners will have to forego their own interests in favour of a well-meaning but misguided attempt to manage the consequences.
This story has been told before. After European and American whalers nearly extirpated the bowhead whale from the North Atlantic—not to mention other great whales from the world’s oceans—the international community came together first to curtail whaling, and later to ban it outright. Canadian Inuit, who had no responsibility for the slaughter, had to push Canada hard to recognize their aboriginal whaling rights. They eventually received a very strict quota of a single bowhead every two to three years in the eastern Canadian Arctic. This quota is only now being cautiously revised upward to three per year, after the Department of Fisheries and Oceans admitted in 2008 that it had underestimated the population by an entire order of magnitude. Inuit had long maintained the estimates were too low.
Like the other great whales, the bowhead remains on CITES Appendix I, even though it is not considered endangered today. The worry is that any renewed international trade in whale products, however small and tightly controlled, would ultimately create consumer demand “detrimental to the survival of the species.” Canadian Inuit sculptors working in whalebone, for instance, cannot sell their art in the major markets of Europe and the USA because no whale products may be legally imported there for commercial purposes.
The US focus on climate change and sea ice notwithstanding, similar fears over the dead hand of the market also appear behind the uplisting proposal. Dan Ashe, an official from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, told the Canadian Press, “When we create markets for rare animals, history tells us that ultimately those markets are difficult to stop once they are established and people are making money.” This seems tantamount to saying that Inuit will inevitably act like the indiscriminate old whalers once did, if they’re given the chance to continue earning income from what can hardly be described as a free market in polar bears.
Ashe was probably referring to research by the Natural Resources Defense Council showing great increases in the number and prices of polar bear pelts marketed over the past five years. In its proposal, the USA also highlighted Nunavut’s decision in 2011 to increase the polar bear quota in western Hudson Bay against the advice of the PBSG, but in accordance with Inuit traditional knowledge.
Yet considering how narrowly the five range states limit the harvest, which remains within tolerable levels, there seems no reason to believe that these increases presage a collapse of the conservation ethic among Inuit lured by the prospect of monetary gain. Nunavut deducts even defence kills from total hunting quota—kills that the World Wildlife Fund is sensibly cooperating with Inuit communities to lessen.
It’s difficult to understand, then, what the US proposal to uplist polar bears would accomplish, besides avoidable injury to Inuit economic rights and interests. For its own part, the USA has been careful to ensure that further protection of polar bears doesn’t interfere with its own economic interests in oil and gas development off Alaska. When it designated the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act—under legal pressure from Greenpeace and other environmental organizations seeking to use the legislation to stymie development in polar bear habitat—it made explicitly clear that its decision would not impose further burdens on energy companies than contemplated under the existing Marine Mammal Protection Act.
A cynic might forgivably conclude from all this that the USA is redoubling its efforts to secure a CITES uplisting for polar bears in order to appear environmentally pious while doing little actually to protect polar bear habitat from development, or to rescue the sea ice from climate change. An Inuk cynic might add that the resulting damage to Inuit economic rights is a price the USA and its supporters are willing to see paid.
Some Inuit leaders certainly have taken an archly cynical view. Speaking for Nunavut Inuit on the US proposal, Eetoolook has charged, “There’s people in the world that probably want to see the extinction of the Inuit because they hunt animals. Hunting has been our tool to get an income. It’s kind of hard being Inuk sometimes when people that don’t know anything about wildlife try to tell you you’re overhunting.”
Now, Inuit surely don’t claim a monopoly on understanding wildlife, though their very deep knowledge of animals is ignored far too often. And probably very few people indeed, if any at all, wish Inuit to go extinct. But given the casual way in which some governments and environmental organizations seem to treat Inuit rights to hunt and profit from the animal resources of their homeland—seals and whales as well as polar bears—it’s hard not to think that they do harbour a kind of wilful blindness to Inuit cultural survival.
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