BEWARE OF POLAR BEARS ON HALLOWEEN

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Kids seldom go Trick-or-Treating nowadays. Parents keep children home on Halloween because dangerous human beings might give them poison candy or otherwise mistreat them.

People are nicer to one another the father north one goes, especially in the Arctic region where food is plentiful, if you know how to get at it, and people are few in number, so you know everyone in your community. True, it gets bitter cold at times, minus-50 or so Fahrenheit, but one gets used to it with the right clothes and dwelling.

Of course the main danger to the traditional culture of the Original Americans, who came over from North Asia thousands of years ago to live in North America, is Western Civilization.

Trick-or-Treating on Halloween, a pagan practice tolerated if not condoned by Christianity, is greatly appreciated, however, and that may rarely have genuinely frightful consequences in the Arctic, where the danger is not so much fellow humans as polar bears.

Lest we offend environmentalists, we must say that polar bears rarely attack human beings, and even more rarely eat them. A grizzly bear reportedly attacked and ate a rare part of an environmentalist in Alaska, but that is a different kind of bear, and is no reason to demonize bears in general. If bears attack us, it is our own fault, not theirs, because they are unfamiliar with liberal Westerners so they do not know they should not attack us. Indigenous Arctic people are, by the way, their only natural enemy. Naturally, polar bears may cannibalize each other if they get hungry enough, as do humans.

You see, polar bears prefer high calorie food, the fat of seals being especially nutritious compared to skinny human beings. Their claws can drag a 200-pound seal right out of the water. They may swim over a week at a time for several hundred miles to get food. A fat polar bear capable of standing over ten feet tall on its hind legs was found in Canada, weighing in at 1,700 pounds. An even bigger one was found in Alaska, standing 11-feet tall and weighing over 2,000 pounds.

Encountering a polar bear without a high-powered rifle in your possession can be frightening experience even though they rarely attack humans, so the most appropriate time would be Halloween, in town where polar bears do tend to congregate when they are hungry.

I just watched a professionally produced video by Nat Geo WILD on You Tube starring polar bears on Spitzbergen (Svalbard) killing human beings, a pretty girl and a handsome guy. One woman and one man got away. They made noise, the girls screaming and a man shooting his pistol to make noise, because that is supposed to scare polar bears away. Think again. It was concluded after the attacks that the bears were subjected to human pollution in their adolescence, creating a hormonal imbalance that caused manmade noise to render them plumb loco. The video was so well done in every detail that I wondered who taped the frightful event: A polar bear, or the NRA, for Halloween?

This News Flash just in from Nunatsiaq Online in Canada: Trick-or-treating returns to Nunavut’s polar bear capital , by Sarah Rogers. That would be Arviat, in the most southerly Inuit hamlet, of Kivalliq, which is west of Hudson Bay.

Arviat is, by the way, three degrees south of Nuuk, Greenland, where polar bears, whose range is far and wide, are rarely sighted—a young Inuit man was celebrated by the Inuit community long ago, in 1989, for killing a polar bear in Greenland, which has a very high suicide rate; he killed himself the next day for reasons unknown except perhaps the loss of the cultural identity and love he had enjoyed momentarily.

The children of Arviat have been celebrating Halloween inside for fear of the bears, and are now coming out not to kill bears but to go Trick-or-Treating. Thanks to Halloween lover Alanna Copland, “Arviat’s search and rescue crew, department of environment staff and the community’s 18 firefighters have all signed on to patrol in and around town throughout the evening. ‘I think just having heavy traffic will help,’ said Copland, adding that her nephews are ‘really excited.’ Other parents in the community of roughly 3,000 have responded well to the idea, especially parents of younger children who haven’t yet had the chance to trick-or-treat.”

No doubt the polar bears will be out Trick-or-Treating as well, so we hope that one does not eat a rare treat, a kid with his candy, to make it a really frightful night. The odds are that Inuit lore has a far more terrifying tale to tell the children.

XYX