![]() ![]() Baby polar bears are almost insufferably cuddly, and their black button eyes and snow-white fur make them ideal inspirations for stuffed-animal dolls. It is highly unlikely that the word “cute” was popular with Arctic explorers or whalers, but once the general public was able to see a baby polar bear, everything changed. Sometimes bears were captured and brought back to European menageries or zoos, where they were exhibited to visitors who looked upon the great white bears as emissaries from a world where the sun shines dimly for half the year and the land is made of ice. The first Europeans to visit the desolate homeland of Ursus maritimus shot them whenever an opportunity presented itself. They occasionally killed and ate it, but only after the bear spirits had been appropriately propitiated. The Inuits - then and now - feared and worshipped the bear. Somewhere along the line, the proto-Inuits also assigned to the ghostly white bear supernatural qualities - it was surely the Lord of the Arctic, as mere humans could never be, comfortable in a perpetually frozen world. The earliest human inhabitants of the Arctic regarded Nanuk first as a dangerous predator, then as a rival hunter, and lastly as an animal to be hunted for its red meat and white coat. Like the bears themselves, the first men to see polar bears were probably swaddled in heavy furs. ![]()
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