Japanese police re-abandon bear cub

Last night I saw something shocking on the news. It was a story about a bear cub that had been found wandering alone in the mountains in some area of Hokkaido. Police had temporarily taken charge of the bear cub while people searched the area for hours looking for the bear cub’s mother. They didn’t find the mother, so what did they do? They just plopped the bear back the area they found it. For some reason the police thought their actions were so admirable that they called in a TV news crew to film the ‘release’ of the cub. Last night’s news program replayed old news clip of the bear, which seemed to be depicting the police’s action as some sort of benevolent deed to save the bear.

What happened to the bear cub they abandoned released? It was found dead the next day, right around the place they abandoned released it. What a fucking surprise! How shocking it must have been to the genius police officers and the gifted journalists who believed that dumping a lost bear cub back into the woods where it had been found wandering aimlessly would somehow save its life!

Anyway, here is an article from Mainichi about the event:

Bear cub released into wild dies the next day

SAPPORO — A bear cub was found dead in the mountains on Thursday, a day after police captured and released it.

Police temporarily looked after the cub on Wednesday while members of a local hunting club unsuccessfully searched for the cub’s mother.

But a local hunter found the brown bear cub dead in Sapporo on Thursday morning. A local animal center plans to cremate the bear, which appeared to be about four months old.

“Generally bear cubs can survive without drinking milk for four to five days,” said a curator at the Noboribetsu Bear Park. “But I think the bear died because it was weak after it rained the night after it was released.” (Mainichi)

I read a couple comments on Japanese sites about the bear’s death, and I saw a lot of the phrase ‘しょうがない’(shouganai) , which basically means ‘It couldn’t be helped’. It seems like this attitude, which removes blame from all involved, is echoed in the article above. Oh, ‘the bear obviously died because it rained that night, what bad luck!’. What is this bullshit?

“しょうがないですわな“

I’m not some bleeding heart environmentalist that believes we should save every abandoned baby animal. If nobody had found that bear cub, it is likely that it would have died. It is also possible that all the people involved in capturing the bear cub and searching for its mother actually drove its mother away, as bears try to avoid humans whenever possible. It might have been pretty bad to just do nothing if you found a bear cub that appeared ‘abandoned’ in the woods, but I wouldn’t have such a huge problem with that. What pisses me off is the fact that these Japanese police and the tv news crew made it look like they were benevolent friends of nature saving this bear cub, when in fact they were re-abandoning it and condemning it to death. And if you find the bear dead the next day, at least admit it was your fault that the bear died.

I don’t know what pisses me off more, the stupidity of these police officers or the fact that nobody is willing to admit responsibility. I don’t particulary love bear cubs, but this story made my blood boil…