Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Polar Bear Attack - A Bad End to Polar Bear Camp

Episode Date: November 27, 2020

Wes finally gets to talk about the polar bear, which, alongside literally every other, is his favorite animal. A small group of young campers head up to an archipelago off the northern coast of Norway, only to end up on the wrong end of the Arctic predator/prey dynamic. ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes, sleep number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now everything's on sale during our Memorial Day event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses for a limited time. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a sleep number store or go to sleepnumber.com. Sleep number, to a good life sleep. Hey everyone, welcome back to Tooth and Claw, the show where we talk about the most intense real wild animal attacks and what we can learn about how to avoid, prevent, and survive them. We're going back to our roots this time with an episode on polar bears, which is what Wes refers to as, quote, probably his favorite animal.

Which is what he says about every animal, but what would you expect from a professional wildlife biologist, right? He does love bears, though. Quick example. I once saw Wes name the flavor of every color of gummy bear straight from. his memory. Craziest thing I ever saw. This story really is a good one though, as far as cautionary tales go. So give it a listen before your next family outing up to the Arctic Circle. Also, help us out by subscribing to the podcast and rating it. It does give us a boost in the almighty and unknowable podcast algorithm. Thank you. All right, let's get to the story this week on polar bears. We're back. We're doing another episode. We're just pumping them out now for you guys. Jeff, Mike, and Wes, for those who might be tuning in for the first time.

What's up, everybody? Yeah, we should probably introduce ourselves again. I'm Wes. I'm a biologist. I'm Jeff. I'm Wes's brother. I'm Mike. Full-time bad boy. Mike, you had a week off from us. Was it nice? It was great. I spent a lot of time sleeping. Yeah.

The only symptom I developed with COVID was being overwhelmingly tired. You're a pretty tired guy to begin with, too. I'm always napping. Yeah. Always napping Mike. Yeah. I wanted to really get into the hibernation state of mind because we're talking about. Polar bears.

But first, I actually wanted to do a quick update because last episode we mentioned that we were going to watch Jurassic Games. Right. So guys, do we recommend the movie? I do not recommend the movie Jurassic Games. I recommend watching like the first half hour, 40 minutes. I'd recommend watching the trailer. Oh, yeah. That's a good.

Well, yeah. I heard some stories about how they mistreated the dinosaurs on set. It was really bad. I think the first 15 minutes is like, oh, this is a fun movie. I'm going to have a really fun time with this. Like a really fun bad movie. And then it just turned into like a bad, bad movie. And it had like an 80% on Ron Tomatoes,

which just goes to prove that Ron Tomatoes is absolutely worthless. Well, so if any of you guys are looking to get into the business of being a screener, rider, there's a future for you. Just put it that way. It's a low bar. You can clear that bar, I promise. Yeah. Yeah, anyway, speaking of hibernation,

we are talking about another bear species this week. We're actually talking about the bear species that I've done the most work with in my career so far, which is polar bears. Have either of you seen a polar bear in the wild? No. No.

No. Okay. They're hard. They're hard to see. They're up in the Arctic. Not that many people have seen them. I've only seen a handful, and I've spent eight years working in polar bear.

So they're a tricky animal to see. Well, there's only like eight of them, right? We'll get to how many polar bears there are. But we are going to talk about a pretty famous polar bear attack. It's one that was in the news a lot when it happened. It was kind of in the modern age, so, you know, there was a lot of news about it. And it was an attack in 2011 in Svalbard, and it involved a group of young explorers that were... You want to tell us where Svalbard is?

Yeah, we're going to get to that. Spalbard is one of those. places that when you are a polar bear biologist, you hear about all the time. So it seems like it's a place that everyone knows because you're constantly hearing about it. But then you realize that it's not. It's very, uh, it's very remote and not that many people know about Swalbard. So Swalbard is a small archipelago, which just essentially means a group of islands. It's about halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole. It's home to about 3,000 humans and about the same number of polar bears. Does that the name of the country?

Svalbard is the name of the group of the islands. It's technically part of Norway. Gotcha. Yeah. So Svalbard was discovered in the late 1500s. It then became a whaling settlement for like 200 years. I don't think there was any indigenous people on it or anything. It was just kind of out in the middle of the ocean.

Then after the whaling industry crashed, it shifted to trapping. Then finally to coal mining in the 1900s. And then it was essentially just kind of like a no man's land. Like it wasn't really owned by any country. and then in the 1920s, the Svalbard Treaty gave Svalbard sovereignty to Norway. So now the economy mostly revolves around tourism and research. Most of the residents in Svalbard live in the capital city of Long year buy-in. Long-year buy-in.

Yeah, exactly. So the story we're going to talk about involves some kids that were attacked in Svalbard. Now, these kids were part of the British schools' experience. Exploring Society. Now, that society was founded in 1932 by a member of Captain Scott's team. Do either you know who Captain Scott is? I forget his first name. I want to say it's Francis, but I don't know.

Wasn't that Francis Cook? No. So he was kind of similar in that he was an explorer, but Scott was one of the guys, one of the first guys to get to the South Pole. He like barely was the second guy, I believe. Yeah. And he actually... I've heard of the South Pole.

Yeah, you've heard it South Pole. Perfect. He was the second dude to get there, I think, and he actually returned there on another expedition, and then his whole crew pretty much died. There was a few survivors, and one of the guys that founded this British school's exploring society was one of the people from his crew. So pretty much this is just a society. From now on, we're going to call it the BES, just because it's easier.

The BSE was formed to give young people in the UK an opportunity to go on these real-life scientific expeditions. with this hope that they're going to challenge themselves physically, mentally, just learn a lot about themselves, see a lot of personal growth. Like the Boy Scouts. Yeah, but it's more like you pay a bunch of money to go on like one expedition. Like this particular expedition, I think they paid like 3,000 pounds each to just go for like a month, which is a pretty good deal to, I guess, be in Svalbard for like a month and learn all this stuff.

Now, unfortunately in 2011, these participants in this BSCS X, uh, expedition got much more than they bargained for. They were challenged in ways that they really weren't expecting. They got their money to be challenged. Yeah, they did. Okay, again, Swalbard's home to about 3,000 humans and about the same number of polar bears. So there's a lot of polar bears in Spalbard. As I mentioned, as a biologist, you hear about it all the time because it is one of the best

places in the world to go to see polar bears, to research polar bears. And it's really beautiful, too. It's like the Arctic that I've gone to is really flat and just kind of tundra. Svalbard has this really incredible kind of topography with all the mountains and the bright blue glaciers. And it's just one of the, it's like when you think of the Arctic, you think of a place that looks like Svalbard. Okay, so a little bit about polar bears. Polar bears are the world's largest bear. They're the only purely carnivorous bear.

They primarily feed on seals, occasionally on other Arctic mammals. So if they can get like a narwhal or a beluga or something, they'll kill those too. Or if they live in places where people kill whales, they'll eat all the whale parts that the people leave. Can narwhals do any damage with that tooth horn that they have growing out? They probably could, but not to a polar bear. Because they're like, when the polar bear gets them, they get them usually in these things called polenia, which is essentially like a spot in the ice that hasn't frozen and a bunch of, like narwhal will be in it. and so their heads are out of the water

and the polar bear just kind of grabs them and throws them on the ice. If they were in the water with the narwhal, then it might be able to get them with it. Scientists don't really even know what narwhals use their tusk for them. Narwhals are like, whenever I see one on a show I'm watching,

I'm just like, it's cool that this animal exists. Yeah. They're an animal that we forget about. I think they use that horn to like hit doorways so they don't balk their head on the way through them. Oh yeah. Well, they're always under the ice too.

so maybe... Yeah. Scraping it along the ice. Yeah. That's what did I say. That's what I meant. You said doors. Okay, yeah.

I misspoke. No, I think that's actually really... You know, it could be. We'll get back to... We'll get back to Narwhals. Yeah. At some point, maybe. Probably not.

Anyway, they are the biggest bear. Males can get up to 1,700 pounds. They're generally like 800 to 1,000 pounds on average. And about 5 feet high at the shoulder. So they're really big. If they're standing on their feet, feet, they can be over 10 feet tall. It's like the biggest bear in the world right now, would it be a polar bear?

It'd be a polar bear. Okay. Females, the biggest wild bear, at least, so it's really like the fed grizzly bears can get really big, but like the biggest wild one's polar bear. Females are about half the size of males, and that means they're one of the most sexually dimorphic mammals in the world. Do you guys know what sexually dimorphic means? I can figure it out.

Context clues are helping us out a little here. Okay. It means they like sex. a lot. It does not mean that, but I figured you'd probably go that direction. It transforms in sex. No. What it means is that the males are, males or females are much bigger than their mate. So in our case with polar bears, the males are much bigger than the females. So generally I do this biology bit a little bit more in the middle and stuff, but I kind of wanted to give it to you guys now so that you understand a little bit more about what polar bears are

capable of. All the other bear species we talk about are mostly omniborous. and they're mostly eating plants, you know. Polar bears are the only predatory, or purely predatory bear. They're only eating meat. And so if you are being stalked by a polar bear, if you're having kind of issues with a polar bear, it means it's probably trying to eat you.

So they're very different. You react to them very differently than any other bear species. So is this expedition of kids mainly just going to the island to see polar bears? No. They're going there for a lot of different. reasons. It's kind of an expedition to look at geology, to see wildlife, but it's mostly just

like trekking around and seeing stuff. It's almost like a survival thing, like how long can we be out in Svalbard? Spalzac. Yeah, it didn't. From what I read, there wasn't like a really clear cut reason that I could find for why they were there. I think it was just like, let's go out in the wilderness for a month and learn about ourselves kind of thing. I have a quick theory I want to run by you. You being a bear expert. Uh-huh. Just a theory. You know, the Danish pastry to the bear claw?

I do. I'm familiar. I think they're modeled after polar bear claws. You want to know why? Why? Because the icing on top. I apologize. Yeah, no, that's great.

Just get it out before the story, you know, get it out. Yeah. All right. So Swalbard, last thing about Svalbard, it really is prime polar bear habitat. It is changing really quickly. and at this point in 2011 it was already changing really rapidly. So bears that had been acting the same way for hundreds of years, or millions of years, but hundreds of years that we were there too,

are starting to act differently. And that's something important to remember in this story. A little bit of foreshadowing. Got it. Okay. So on July 23rd, there's 80 participants in this B-S-E-E-S expedition. They arrive in Svalbard on the 23rd. their plans to explore the island for five weeks.

They're learning about geology, biology, all the stuff we talked about, and also testing just kind of their endurance. They're given basic training on Arctic survival, and they're even giving training on what to do if they encounter polar bears. Now, that training involved a little bit of rifle training, and as well they learned how to use pen flares, which is essentially just like, I've had these before with me. They're like a little cylinder that you pull on it and it shoots a flare,

and sometimes they scream too as it shoots out. And bears don't like them. They don't like the gender reveals, but it's scary, though. It's just a red flare. It shoots out a bear. Bears don't care for them. They don't like screaming fireballs at them. They also learned how to use a bear tripwire system,

which was essentially a tripwire that they'd set up around camps. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that system. We're actually going to talk a lot about it. All right. Okay, so midway through the trip, a group of 11 students and two instructors, so out of this group of 80, this smaller group of 13 decides to make an overnight trip to Von Post Glacier. And it's an area that's known for frequent sightings of polar bears. So they break off to do kind of their own little camp up there,

and they camped on a snow bridge near the glacier. And after arriving, the boys and the two expedition leaders quickly set up their five-tenths, and they set up this trip-line that I mentioned. And that trip-line's intended to warn campers of approaching bears. So it essentially consists of a wire. And then that wire has like four corner posts. And when it's activated, when something crosses that wire, it activates essentially what's like a shotgun shell that only has gunpowder in it. And that explodes. And it's so loud and surprising that any bear that trips it is going to run away.

And it also wakes up everyone in the camp. So it's exactly what it sounds like. It's trip wire. Now, they had been given an incomplete setup for their trip wire. So instead of having all four posts, they just, just had three. So instead of making a rectangle, they made a triangle. No way. And then also they had the triangle. They had some problems with the actual fittings for the explosive charge. So they rigged a paper clip somehow to hold those, that explosive charge in. So they really had to

kind of, yeah, they really had to kind of get creative to make this trip wire work. Now, the triangle obviously makes it so, once it gets tripped, the bears way closer to you. Yeah, it makes it. It makes so you don't have as much space for that trip wire. Yeah, exactly. And then the charge being rigged isn't a good thing. So they also had been cautioned by the Svalbard, like, authorities to provide both dog teams and polar bear lookouts while they were camping, but they decided not to use either. It was a really foggy night, apparently. They figured the lookouts wouldn't be that effective. And they also kind of considered them, but then they just thought, like, oh, it's really cold.

We don't want someone sitting out in the cold all night. and they were worried that those people wouldn't be refreshed for the next day to go on their height. So they decided not to do lookouts. This summer serve up the cookout classics, Heinz ketchup and Kraft Singles. Every good burger needs a layer of perfectly milty cheese and thick rich ketchup. We all know it's not a cookout without Heinz and Kraft. Now, in all the articles I read, they interviewed a few of the expedition leaders, and they all kind of talked about how they felt they did everything right.

And that doesn't seem. I know. It doesn't add up. No. And the thing is, there's really, this is one of the ones where I read where I'm like, man, they could have done so much more. Yeah. And I think they had been doing these expeditions for like 40 years.

And I think they had just gone so long without having any problems. They'd just gotten really complacent. And that's like your number one enemy in polar bear country is being complacent. because at that point, you know, you never know when you're going to come across the wrong bear. Right. And if you don't have those protections set up, you're going to run into a lot of trouble. So there's a lot of things they could have done better. We're going to get into those a little bit more after the actual story.

But that little group of boys, they had actually seen a bear through a telescope a few days earlier. And so they were all really thinking about bears. They had bears on their minds as they went to bed on the night of the 4th of August. Patrick Flinders was 16 at the time of the expedition, and his new friend Scott Bennell Smith and Horatio Chapel were both 17. The three boys were part of the expedition to the Vaughn Post Glacier, and their friendship was just starting to blossom as they laid out their sleeping bags in their tent that night. Both Horatio and Scott decided to pick the sides of the tent next to the doors,

and Patrick was in the middle. Now, Jeff, like, we've camped together a million times. I'm always in the middle. You just always want to be in the middle. It's always a Jeff sandwich when we're camping. No, but what I was going to say is, you know, that's a really simple thing that we decide when we're camping. It's just, and it's usually like who you don't want to be sleeping by because maybe someone's snoring or something. But it's just kind of, we just decide and pick.

And it's such a small decision, but it actually ended up resulting in Horatio's death. Oh, wow. Yeah. So around 7.30 a.m. on the morning of all. August 5th, Horatio was just waking up and getting out of the tent to stretch when he was immediately killed by a male polar bear. The bear reared up on its high legs, brought its full weight down on the 6-4 boy, so he's 6'4-4, and just crushed his skull. And then it began to bite and tear at his head with both its teeth and its claws. So within literal seconds, Horatio was killed by

this bear. So he was out of the tent stretching you? It's awful. He literally opened the tent, stuck his head out to get out and the bear was there and killed him. He like sticks his head out and he's like, good morning world. Yeah, exactly. Immediately killed by the bear. Yeah. Wow. So Michael Reed is one of the expedition leaders. He hears some commotion. He hears people start to like scream and yell. And he wakes up to see the bear at the entrance of the tent killing Horatio. So he grabs a gun that was like a group gun that was leaning up outside and he raised it carefully to aim at the bear. He didn't want to hit any of the boys. a lot is happening, so he's being really careful. He pulls the trigger, gun doesn't fire.

Tries a few more times. It's not firing. So the guns that they had with them, all of their guns were World War II era Mouser 98Ks. Huh. Apparently, like bolt action rifles like these are really popular in Svalbard because they're so durable. But at the same time, they're really difficult to load.

They're really slow to load. Oh, no. And they're prone to failure. So Reed attempts to reload and fire again. And he's shouting at these other campers to use their pen flares, but apparently he had stored all the flares in like a separate tent and no one even knew where they were. So the bear turns its attention to read as he's doing all this.

It comes and knocks him down, mauls him on both his head and his neck. And while he's getting mauled, he's reaching up and trying to gouge out its eyes, but he's completely unsuccessful. Now, something we haven't really talked about, and we've mentioned the eye-gouging tactic a few times, we haven't really mentioned that a lot of animals have protection against that. They have, like, certain bone and, like, I can't remember the actual name for it. But essentially, it makes it so if you push on their eye, it kind of just squirts away and it doesn't.

It's not like our eyes where they're really easy to gouge. Their eyes are much harder and much more protected. Interesting. Because they're constantly subduing prey and stuff. So if they were as sensitive as our eyes are, they'd be losing eyes left and right. Like you said, too, like your eyes freeze when you're in the Arctic. Yeah, I froze my eyeball in the Arctic. Yeah.

That doesn't happen to them. No. So they have really, I mean, their eyes are much more durable. So while that is a strategy if you're like at that point and you got nothing else, you might as well try, it's not very successful. It hardly ever works. So Michael Reed, the expedition leader, he's 29. He's being mauled. The other expedition leader who's around the same age, Andrew Ruck, he gets out, he was sharing a tent with Michael Reed. He sees him try and shoot it and then start to get mauled. And he starts throwing rocks at the bear and screaming and the bear runs at him, claws his face knocks him to the ground. At that point, the bear turns its attention back to the tent with the boys in it.

And I imagine that's because the bears realize that's the easiest meal. You know, it's going to head back there. So Patrick's still in that tent. Let's little Patrick, I forget his last name, Flinders. I'm just going to think of Flanders. Flinders. Yeah, Patrick and Scott are still in there. Patrick's the middle guy.

We're going to go to Patrick's view now. Patrick Flanders, he wakes up in the tent to it just collapsing down around him. So he wakes up pretty much after Horatio's already been killed and the tent is now being collapsed in around by the bear. And he, to me, this reminded me of when I was a kid and I thought there was a monster in my room. Rather than get up and turn on the lights and look for it, I would just close my eyes and tuck myself under my blankets and just hope that it wasn't actually there. And that's what he does.

closes his eyes, curls up in his sleeping bag, even though he knows it's a bear, and decides to peek out of his sleeping bag, and he sees the bear inside the tent peering at him just covered in blood. Oh my gosh. Because it had already killed his friend. It's terrified.

Yeah. So he curls up into a ball and starts screaming, I don't want to be here anymore, like at the top of his lungs. And at that point, the bear comes into the tent, uses its claws to grab him by the arm and its teeth, pulls him out of his sleeping bag and the tent. and Patrick feels those teeth crunch into the bones around his elbow, and a claw rakes his eye, and suddenly the Patrick releases, or the Patrick,

suddenly the bear releases Patrick's arm, and he feels his head inside of its mouth. So it's safe to say that the bear didn't care that he didn't want to be there. No, the bear didn't care much for Patrick's feelings. I disagree. I think the bear just misunderstood and was trying to get him out of the tent. Okay. Yeah, yeah, it was being considered.

So, Jeff, you may have heard me talk about this before, and I probably don't really need to reiterate this, but it's a really, that's a really bad place to be, is to have your head inside of a bear's mouth. Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. Yeah. It lines up. If you have the choice, don't. Don't do that. Don't do that.

Yeah. But why I say that is my mentor, Tom Smith, who's done a lot of work on bear attacks. One of his papers, he looked at what your chances of, like, fatality are if you're being attacked. by a bear. And if your head is ever in its jaws, those chances go way up. And that, I mean, that's pretty logical. Yeah. Can you explain that? But he, like, his terminology for that that I always thought was funny is he called that at like a check engine light. Like at that point, you're in some real, real trouble. And again, that makes total sense. But I think it's like, you need a more extreme light. Yeah. Like engine on firelight.

drive for a while if it checked engine light on. That's true. That's a good point. Your engine just exploded light. Yeah. But essentially what he means by that is just that that's really the point where very few people come back from a bear attack is if it's got your head in its jaws, your toast. How did they...

Do you know the percent of people that die if their head is in his mouth? I don't. I could... I should ask Tom. Was there like a control group? They had like people lining up and just putting their heads on the mouth. It was an experimental study. It was very much like combing through.

Gotcha. Okay. So Patrick's head is in the bear's mouth. He hears a crunching noise was actually his skull fracturing. Ouch. Yeah. And he's suddenly deafened by the bear roaring. The bear drops Patrick and runs after Scott. So Scott had gotten out of the tent and he takes off. And this bear is just hitting one after another. It doesn't get them off. It does. Exactly. That's actually like, I know you're kind of joking, but that's totally true. It's trying to neutralize them one by one. And it's kind of like, like if I can just stop them from moving, then I can take my time actually eating them. Yeah.

So it goes after Scott. It takes a swipe at him, breaks his jaw, knocks his teeth out. Their paws are so big. Yeah, they are. And incredibly strong. And Scott falls to the ground.

Now, at this point, Michael Reed, who is the first expedition leader that had been attacked, has gotten back to his tent and he got his rifle. So a different rifle.

He grabs one of the rounds that had fallen to the ground after the other one wasn't working. He reloads it, takes aim at the bear that's attacking Scott at this point, and fires. Finally, the gun works, and he kills the bear. So he's a pretty good shot. Oh, wow, yeah. I wouldn't expect a bullet to take down a point. Yeah, they're a pretty high caliber bullet, and he was a good shot. The entire incident only lasts a few minutes, but the bear's killed one boy, it's critically injured two others, and the two expedition leaders also have

serious injuries. So Patrick remembers waiting for an hour for a helicopter to arrive. The helicopter comes. He overhears the news as like people are talking around him that Horatio had died. And when he overhears that, he actually passes out, wakes up later in the hospital in Long Year buy-in. And he's alongside Scott and the two expedition leaders. Now they're transferred to the hospital in the Norwegian mainland and then they're taken to different hospitals in the UK, kind of in the different parts of the UK that they live. Now Patrick has to... to have shards of polar bear teeth removed from his skull and all four of the survivors made full recoveries but Patrick has some some good facial scarring. It's not nearly as bad as some of the

people that we've talked about but it's um it definitely is noticeable. So the bear was examined and they found it to be about 550 pounds and 24 years old. That's really old for a wild bear and it's pretty skinny too. There wasn't much fat on the bear. So the people that examined it, I would hope they're a polar bear biologist, they said it was likely starving. It was the middle of the summer. Kind of like a cougar attack. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. One thing to bring up about polar bears is most of the places that polar bears live in the world, they have a really interesting kind of seasonality to their hunting, where when the sea ice melts

in the summer, they come ashore and they don't eat. They'll just fast for months while they wait for the sea ice to freeze back up because they use the sea ice to hunt seals. So in these places where they do have to come ashore and they can't go out on the ice in the summer, they're really hungry. They spend months without eating. And this is the middle of August. So this bear has probably been fasting for a couple months. It's really hungry and it's probably looking at different food sources much differently than it would in the middle of the winter when it has really great access or in the spring to seal pups and to lots of other. food sources. So this is a particularly dangerous time for polar bears if you're in the middle of the

summer because on one hand they're not trying to expend much energy, but on the other hand, they are really hungry and they're willing to investigate other food sources. That makes sense. So I'm not sure if this bear was just kind of a normal fasting bear and it was just low on fat reserves or if it actually was starving. Something a little funny about this story before we get to some of the more sad stuff. It gets funnier. Patrick's dad, Terry, you could tell that he was kind of liked being, you know, in the news and stuff. Yeah. And he was really funny, though.

And one of the articles I read, this is a quote from his dad. The article said, I'm just going to read the quote. He said, there were three of them in the tent. This is Patrick's dad, Terry. And I don't really know too much why he chose the other boy. Perhaps he was the closest one. If he looked at Patrick, he was the chubbiest one. He probably had more meat on him.

Bless him. So pretty much he's saying, like, Patrick's, like, pretty heavy set. He's like, I don't know why he picked this other kid because Patrick's fat. He had more to eat. Yeah. And then another article I read said that Patrick credits his parents, Terry and Elizabeth, who are separated and friends for helping him recover. And then it says, former supermarket worker Terry, his dad, had jokingly dubbed his

mutilated son, Quasimoto. Oh, no. And they go on to talk about how, like, Patrick hates that his dad calls him Quasimoto. And then he also said Patrick was allowed to call his dad while he's in recovery. And he was quoted saying, Dad, I've got a bone to pick with you. That bit you did in the paper where you said if the bare-eyed glasses, it would have gone for me because I was the chubbiest. All the nurses have been making fun of me for him. And then I got, I actually, just to kind of hit this home, I have a picture of Patrick's dad and Patrick.

and we'll share this on the Instagram. That's amazing. But it's like him showing off Patrick's scars and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. He's kind of pulling his face tight there so you can't see him quite as much. But we'll put some photos of both that photo and Patrick's total kind of scarred face afterward. That's kind of...

A couple of bears scars is cool. Yeah. So he ended up kind of having like extra skin on his, I think it's on his left eye. and it almost looked like his eyelids like a little bit webbed. It was... Yeah, it was interesting. But I'll put that photo up and you guys can look at it. His scars weren't terrible, though.

So on the other end of things, kind of the more somber depressing side, Horatio's parents are obviously completely devastated. Yeah, it's really sad. Yeah, his... I read a lot about this kid, and it just sounded like he was popular and fun and, like, kind and nice. He wanted to be a doctor,

and he worked at the spinal treatment center that his dad worked at. And he felt so bad for the patience that he decided to like plant a garden and he picked out this whole spot for them. And then he was finalizing plans for this garden when he was killed. So they actually raised a ton of money to build this garden. And it's like a memorial garden for him now. But he was, yeah, he was like a champion rugby player, a water polo, just like really nice.

It was also his family had three brothers. So it kind of hit home for me because we're three brothers. Yeah. And it just seems like they, never got back to normal. It was just like a really obviously devastating thing for his family. It sounds like I know sometimes bear attacks can be really dragged out and awful, often lengthy experiences. It sounded like Horatio's killed fairly quickly. He was. All things considered. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, I mean, not that that's any consolation. I'm not trying to say that, but. No. And that's

pretty typical for an attack like this where there's multiple people around. The bear's going to do, best to quickly, you know, neutralize and dispatch whatever prey it's going for. Right. If it's a person like, for example, like Timothy Treadwell, which I'm sure we'll talk about him at some point. Yeah. It was just him and his girlfriend. And the bear literally just sat on him and ate him for like 15 minutes.

And that was a long. Yeah. And he like bled out. So this, yeah, like luckily was really fast. If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and. your body changes, sleep number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now everything's on sale during our Memorial Day event. Save up to $1,200 on

mattresses for a limited time. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a sleep number store or go to sleep number.com. Sleep number to a good life sleep. But a little bit about what happened afterward. His parents did know that obviously there's risks associated with the expedition, and they were really anxious about polar bears, and they were really relieved to see that BSE had extensive safety protocols and trainings. Now, after his death, they launched an inquiry into that expedition, and then Norwegian government found that there was really a lot of things they could have done better. Unfortunately, they didn't really have a precedent for legal kind of repercussions for people that didn't take the proper amount of bear safety, so they didn't

charge them with anything. Now, I do know there was some lawsuits afterward, but there wasn't really any good information on what happened with those. But personally, as a bear expert and as a polar bear expert, I think these guys really messed up. And I don't necessarily blame the two expedition leaders as much as I blame BSES as a whole. I think if you're in polar bear country, there's just certain precautions you absolutely have to take. For us, that was always having multiple firearms and bear spray. And on top of that, we would leave our snowmobiles running. So if we saw a bear, we just get on and take off.

But not if you're like camping. But we never camped. And that's the other thing too, is like, if I personally was camping in polar bear country, especially in a place that's like in Spalbard known for polar bears, like that glacier was known for polar bears, I'm going to have like an electric fence around my campsite. I'm going to have dogs. I'm going to have a lookout. And I'm going to make sure every single person has some sort of deterrent inside of their tent.

Did the fence even go off? No. So that's what gets me. The triangle, dude, I would go with like a pentagon. Right. Yeah. I would go with like his octagon, many side. And you want multiple charges and you want to, you want to know that it's going to work.

Because that's, and again, like the tripwire is just a way to really alarm you and let you know that it's coming. Yeah. It's not necessarily going to stop the bear. It might still keep coming. Yeah, it probably would. I mean, it's likely that it would, but it's not for sure. So they really had a lot of other options of stuff they could have had with them that they didn't have. Now, one thing that's really interesting is the government of Norway doesn't allow bear spray in their country.

They don't. Oh, really? Yeah, it's illegal in Norway. Is there any reason for that? No. For like use against humans, maybe? They're probably just worried about that. But it is such an effective tool, and it's really, they're really missing out.

out like they really should have bear spray. Missing out on a lot of fun. That applies to Flood Tower, too. To what? What's the country? Spalbard. Yeah, it does. The thing about bear spray is that you can keep it in your tent, it keeps it warm,

it works almost every single time, it shoots a big cloud, it's just so much more effective than anything. And if even one of those tents had to have bear spray in it, this problem, I mean, to be honest, Horatio still might have died because that was like such an unexpected thing. But had they had like dogs or a lookout or something, everyone would have survived. So really a lot of you out there probably are never going to find yourselves in polar bear country. If you ever do, it's a bear that you really have to take seriously.

They're not that aggressive. They don't, they hardly ever attack people. But when they do, it's intense. Like they're hard to stop. Intense. Yeah, yeah, I see what you did. That's not what I meant. But you really do have to be careful.

They're like one of the only, like when I was in polar bear country, they're the one that I always really had to be conscious about thinking about what would happen if we saw one. So again, they're not bloodthirsty. They hardly ever do this. Like these attacks are super rare. You can't really find many polar bear attacks on the internet. But when it happens, it's brutal. And so you want to be prepared for it.

What do the dogs do? They just kind of. They don't like dogs. Yeah. Don't like dogs? No. So if you have enough dogs and they're barking at the bears, the bear's not going to come in.

Did they have dogs? They just didn't take them to the campsite? They didn't have any dogs. With the expedition. Yeah. And again, had they been in this big group of like 80 people, they probably wouldn't have had a problem. But they probably could have like rented dogs from Spall guard somewhere. Yeah.

From Swalbard. Small bard. Yeah, probably. And honestly, again, they were in a small group and that's probably why the bear went to that group. And in a triangle. And in a triangle. You're pretty obsessed with the triangle. Yeah.

I do think though, again, In all these articles, like the guides and everyone was saying, the bear-proof measures are never 100% reliable, but we stand by what we did. And they were saying that the bear that came into their camp was acting abnormally. And to be honest, like, those things aren't really true. A bear in its fast looking for another source of food. And if it doesn't meet any resistance coming into that campsite,

that's not acting abnormally, you know? Yeah. If they were out there firing cracker shells at it and trying everything, they could to deter it and it's still coming, that's abnormal. Right. If it's just sneaking in and nothing stops it and it smells like, you know, something in a tantric. That's, yeah.

That's not abnormal. You got to understand bears are huge. They're not as scared as most animals. Right. They're naturally kind of curious. Super curious. Because they're not going to normally find something that's going to hurt them. So they're going to just check everything out.

Right. They know their top dog. And the other thing, too, is that. people have a lot of confidence in firearms, especially in polar bear country. And a big part of that is because usually when you see a polar bear, you see it from a ways out. And so firearms actually do work better with them

than they would with like a grizzly bear or black bear where they're generally these kind of like surprise encounters in a forest. And that's because it's like flat surfaces, no trees. Right. And it's open terrain and you can see them coming from a while. But if you're in your tent at night, you don't have that anymore. Yeah. Yeah. So a tiny bit more about polar bears. There's 19 subpopulations throughout the Arctic and subarctic. They can travel thousands of miles. They can swim for days. One polar bear swam over 200 miles in one go. With them only pregnant females hibernate and den, the rest of them are out in the winter hunting. I think we kind of already went over the rest of their biology, or at least the things that I think you guys should know. Do you guys have any questions about polar bears?

Why did it swim 200 miles? It was probably just trying to get to a new hunting area. My guess is that it was a shorebound bear where there was no sea ice anymore. And it was tired of fasting. So it just decided to swim all the way out to the ice that was way out north of it. Did they time it? They didn't. Well, actually, they probably did because I'm sure that the way they knew it swam 200 miles had a GPS color on it.

So I'm sure they knew how long it took them to do that. But it wasn't like a stopwatch. It's kind of funny when like a air. animal sets like a world record for like a polar bear swimming because like it's a big deal but like the bear has no idea what it just did it didn't it's just like crawls out of the water and it's like well that took a while it crosses the finish line and it's just like ah that's weird what's that doing what's that doing here animals in the movies and they just have no idea what's going on or horse races they don't know what they're doing yeah I don't want to digress too much though so that's the story it

Again, it was one that really got a lot of press. Really tragic. You know, anytime a 17-year-old kid gets killed by an animal, it's terrible. It's interesting that when we do these stories, the ones where someone dies, it's like the other ones, they're always really jumping to kind of like tell their story and everything. And I would be too. It's like really interesting. And there's a lot of media.

And the ones where someone dies, you get these perspectives from other people. But like the family, like they didn't talk to anyone for years afterwards. And then there's one article with the mom where she finally had an interview. And really all she did was talk about how wonderful of a kid her ratio was. She didn't want to go into like their grief or anything like that. It was just very much about how special this kid was. So it's really tragic. They're really hard to read.

But hopefully the stuff that you guys are learning in the podcast helps you avoid getting in any of those kind of situations. Okay. Questions about the story? Not about the story. What questions do you have? I got a couple questions. Not about the story. Do you want to do them before we get in their categories?

So, you know the Russian bears that played ice hockey? Yeah. Doesn't the natural pick seem to be polar bears? And not what, they use grizzly bears? Yeah, they use grizzly bears. Yeah, it's a bad, I don't know. That's just me. I get what you're saying, because they're an ice bear and they're like really good on ice.

Yeah. Well, that one wasn't an ice bear. So it wasn't, no, it said ice bear. Oh, yeah. I missed. Uh-huh. They actually, so polar bears have this thing on their, on their pads called papilla. which are essentially these little bumps and ridges that allow them to grip the ice really well.

So they're really good on ice. They're built to be on ice. As far as those bears that played hockey, I think it's just easier to get brown bears and to train them. I think they're just like an easier, an easier bear to train and to access. I know there's like a couple trained polar bears out there, but there's not many. You don't think they're better at hockey then. I don't know. It's also pretty inhumane that they're getting bears to play hockey.

It is. to throw that out there. Yeah, don't do it. But so far, we only have one case study. I got to send all my bears back then. Stop this. Junior polar bear ice hockey league I had. Cancel your bear order.

Yeah. All right. Let's get to our categories. So let's start with our favorite polar bear. This can be a polar bear that we've actually seen in real life. This can be from pop culture. This can be from like a song. I'll start us off.

Jeff's going to start a song. All right. I'm pretty excited about this one. Yeah, and it's the icy bear. You love an iceis. Such a good pick. You can see them at Cinemark movie theaters, Ices. Oh, a plug for Cinemark.

Yeah, sponsor us. Well, you can't go to the movies anymore, but. Right, but you can get an icy there. Sure, you can go get an icy. You can get icys at the mall. But anyways, this bear, super cool, wears sunglasses, snowboards on a sheet of ice, which is awesome. Yeah, that's dope.

He wears like a red football-type sweatshirt. I like football. I think he wears a hat sometimes. Yeah, I feel like it's like one of those like logos or mascots that hasn't changed because they're just like, we nailed this. Yeah. The first iteration. We got it. Yeah.

I don't think I've ever been in a place with you where icies are served that you haven't gotten one. Yeah. Jeff, it loves an icy. White cherry or Pinia colada. Oh, the white cherry. If anyone wants to give Jeff a Christmas present. Send him an icy. An icy gift card.

No, just send him one. Just an icy? You can re-freeze it. Mike, what's your favorite? So I actually had a really hard time. I ended up going with the polar bear from the ice climbers stage on Smash Bros. He's got like the pink shorts and the sunglasses on and he's just vibing in the background. Yeah.

Polar bear with sunglasses is a good look. Yeah, it's great. Okay. You guys both picked like pretty radical bears. Mine is just, mine's kind of boring, but I'm going to pick the bear that used to be at the Hogle Zoo here in Utah. Its name was Rizzo, and it actually died a few years ago, but it was just like, I went to the zoo a lot.

I like got to meet that bear before it went out on exhibit, and it was just like a really cool bear that spent a lot of time in the water, and I was super bummed when it died. So I'm really surprised no one with the Coke. I was thinking about it. Too easy of a choice. I'll say as a. As a polar bear scientist, I'm constantly referred to the Coke polar bears for some reason.

Like, people are always like, oh, do you like Coke? And it's just got a little, like, I'm done with the Coke Polar Bears. It's impressive how they got motion capture on those bears to, like, get them all animated. Or just, like, how the bears can drink a bottle of Coke with those big old paws. That's true. For a long time, a lot of bear biologists hated those because they were with penguins, and polar bears don't live with penguins. They live on opposite sides of the world.

But they fix that problem. They're no longer with the penguins. Right. Okay. If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes, sleep number mattresses adapt and shift

to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now everything's on sale during our Memorial Day event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses for a limited time. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a sleep number store or go to sleep number. So the next number to a good life sleep. So my next, or the next category is my personal favorite probably,

which is what would you guys do if you're attacked by a polar bear? So who wants to go first, Mike? Okay. So what I would do is accelerate global warming as much as I could. Carbon emissions, greenhouse gases. Just really encourage people to drive boats and air, like private jets and stuff. Hopefully get them before they get me. The long game.

Yeah. Yeah, and you're just going to get them all. Every single one of them. Right. Global warming, I think, is actually a good thing for polar bears, though. Hear me out. I'm not going to hear you out. All right.

Okay. Jeff, what would you do of your attack by polar bear? Yeah, so I heard that polar bears will cover their nose if they're in the snow. Uh-huh. Because it's, I mean, they'll blend into the snow. The only thing that stands out is their black nose. They cover their nose with their hands. You can't see anything, right?

So I'll wait for them to cover their nose. Okay. And then they've got two less hands because they're already covering their nose. They're just moving with their legs. All right. So then I'm kind of workshopping. No, I like where this is starting, though. Yeah, that's good.

I'm going to comment now on both of your strategies. Mike, yours is just really terrible and morally. Effective, though, right? It's effective, currently killing, you know, thousands and thousands of polar bears. The first, like, answer that worked, though. Yeah, it's, I mean, yeah, it's a long-term strategy that will work. It's a terrible short-term strategy for a lot of reasons. Jeff, yours actually is a myth.

Polar bears don't cover their nose when they're hunting. That's just people have seen them doing that. It's just for them to, like, shelter themselves from the cold sometimes. They'll curl up in a ball. They're not doing that to hunt. Their eyes are black. They actually look pretty yellow when they're moving on the snow. That's not a strategy that they use.

So like they're an awful way. Your strategy, you're still working on it, it sounds like. And it sounds like it won't work. It's not going to work. Yeah, you should start over. Maybe I'll cover my nose. Yeah, you try that. So, sorry, I'm derailing a really important conversation.

Polar bears, I've heard. Is this another myth that their skin is actually? actually, or their fur is black? Or their skin is? Or their skin is? Or their skin is? Okay. Yeah, that's what I was.

A heat regulation thing. And they only look white because of white? To that white fur together. It's like if you take something clear, but then you take a bunch of them and put them together, it looks white. Okay. Cool. Anyway, that fur does get yellower as they get older and so they start to look yellow.

Now, I'm going to tell you guys what you actually should do if you're encountering a polar bear. So first of all, if you encounter a polar bear in the wild, you want to do whatever you can just to get out of that situation. So if you're on foot, back away as quickly as you can, get out of there. If you have a snowmobile or anything else, just get away from the bear. Create some distance is the first thing. You should have bear spray with you. Obviously, if you're in Swalbard, you're not allowed to. If I went to Spalbard, I would figure out a way to get bear spray, even if it's illegal.

Have your bear spray, have it ready to use. if you don't have a way to actually get away from that bear, when the bear gets within 30 feet, spray it with your bear spray. It works well on polar bears. If you are in the Arctic, you have to keep it warm. So it's the one place where I would say, if you're out for a long time, I wouldn't have it exposed to the cold.

I wouldn't just have it like right on my hip. I'd probably have it tucked into a pocket in my coat, which is what I do when I'm in the Arctic. Again, usually with polar bears, you have the advantage of seeing them coming from a much further distance. So you typically have plenty of time to get your bear spray. out and have it ready to go. If you have a gun or whatever, when the bear starts approaching, fire some warning shots. If you have crack your shells or those flares or whatever,

fire them at the bear, do whatever you can to scare it. Now, if everything goes wrong and you don't have any of those kind of precautions or like dogs or, you know, gun or a snowmobile or anything to get away from a polar bear and it attacks you, all you can do is fight back. Because again... Yeah, yeah, whatever. Again, if a polar bear, attacks you, it's trying to eat you. So I read a story where a dude was attacked in like a cabin in's fall barred and he fought it off with an axe and managed to actually stop the attack. Oh, wow. Nice. So there are instances where people have been able to fight back hard enough to where they can stop the attack. But at that point, you're giving up all your control. You're really doing

yourself a disservice. So if you're in polar bear country, just do your best not to get into a close situation with them. Make plenty of noise when you're traveling. Put up perimeter stuff around your campsite if you're camping. Do whatever you can do to stop it. They're an animal where you don't want to do the bear minimum. The bear minimum. You want it to do the utmost to stop it from coming into your campsite or whatever. And if the bear's already on a snowmobile and coming at you fast, you're in trouble. You still get on yours? Yeah, I don't know what to do at that point. I didn't know. Yeah, I wouldn't worry about that. Okay, so I think that's, we've gone over basically what you're supposed to do.

It's super rare that this ever happens. Like, there's a lot of people that live in polar bear country, and these things hardly ever happen. When they do, it's bad. Are there, is there, like, an attack a year with polar bears? Or, like, how many a year? I would, I don't know. I don't think so.

Like, in Svalbard, when this attack happened, it had been 10 years since the last one. Because what, it's like Russia, Spalsberg. I got it that time. It was close. Alaska, Canada. So they're called the range states. So it's the U.S. because we have Alaska, Canada, Denmark, which has Greenland, Norway, which has Svalbard, and then Russia. And I said Canada, right?

Yeah. So, yeah, those are the range states. What was your question? How many attacks a year? Oh, yeah. Honestly, I would be surprised if there was an attack every year. I think it's less. We don't know a lot about Russian polar bears and what's going on in Russia.

Yeah. So who knows how many attacks they have over there. That's probably the place in the world where the most attacks are happening. Russia. Yeah. And do they have the most bears? We don't really know. Okay.

Yeah. We estimate that there's about 20,000 polar bears out there, 20 to 25,000. But it's hard to know because Russia just doesn't really have a good count on their bears. Okay. Okay. So our cage match, Mike. Ccacage match. This is where we talk about how this animal would fail.

in a fight against Nicholas Cage. That's actually a really good idea. They'd win. No, so the cage match is how they would stack up against the other animals that we've already discussed in previous episodes. So we have determined that the tiger is the top dog still. I don't see that changing with the polar bear, but you're going to have to top. I'm thinking polar bear.

Top cat. Just without hearing from Wes yet. Okay. I'm just thinking polar bear. Yeah. So what we're going to do, we're going to let Wes place the polar bear. And Jeff and I, if we're feeling like we need to, we're going to push back a little bit. So amongst all the other animals we've already discussed, where would you place the polar bear? So this is a hard one. It and the tiger are definitely, and we're talking like about our terrestrial animals. Right. Because we're just going to keep like our marine category and our terrestrial category. Polar bears are kind of funny because they actually are a marine mammal. But we're going to say they're terrestrial for the purposes. of this podcast. So they're amphibians?

They spend a lot of time in the water. But we're going to say they're terrestrial. And as far as a polar bear versus a tiger, that's a good matchup. Polar bears actually tend to lose fights with grizzly bears. They do overlap in some parts of their range. And they tend to like run away from those confrontations. And it's just because a polar bear is a much less aggressive animal. It doesn't really want to compete for its food at the same level that a grizzly bear does.

Now, if you have those two in a cage and they're both pissed at each other, polar bear is probably winning because it's just bigger animal. But it's not nearly as aggressive. So that's why I almost tend to still say tiger. Like a big Siberian tiger, I still would almost give it the advantage. I don't know, though. If you have like a full-size male polar bear versus a full-size male Siberian tiger, it's hard to say. I don't know. And what about where are you placing it with the grizzly?

Are you placing it before or after? I'm placing it in a cage match as the victor. So it's a good fight. Tiger, polar bear, grizzly bear. It's a good fight, though, between those three. Right. Their full size, the biggest. I think you're having outcomes in those matchups between those three animals,

you're having outcomes where one wins and you're having outcomes where one dies. The only reason I'm putting tigers at the top is because they're known to kill brown bears, and brown bears are known to run polar bears off of kills. Interesting. So it's hard, though, because polar bears are much bigger than those other two. I agree. Okay. Thanks.

Yeah. Again, no one, please no, never do this. Don't ever make these happen. Well, shoot, now I've got to send my tiger back. Our next category is where you can see them. So Churchill, Canada is actually the best place in the world to see polar bears. There's a whole tourism industry set up around it. You can pay some money to go out either on foot or like in a tundra buggy to go see polar bears.

And they really have got it down to a science to where they don't have incidents or problems. So they've done a really good job with their polar bear industry. It's a place where they're quickly losing their polar bears. So I don't know how much longer that industry will be around, hopefully for a long time. On top of that, you can see him in a place called Cactovic, Alaska, where they feed on whale carcasses. They're starting to be a tourism industry around that. I'm a little, like, ethically, I don't know how great that tourism industry is. On one hand, it really supports a lot of the native communities.

On the other hand, those bears are getting really used to people, which isn't always the best thing for pretty wild bears. Plus, where are they getting all these whale carcasses? So the native communities up there are allowed to hunt a number of bowhead whales every year, and it's a traditional hunt and actually like kind of a, I think a beautiful thing. To kill whales? I don't think it's beautiful to kill an animal, but I think it's cool that they are allowed to preserve a really important part of their culture. Yeah, you're right. I love whales, Mike.

I absolutely love them. You heard my story about staring into its eyes. Yeah, you gaze into each other's eyes. Anyway. And then finally in Svalbard, too. Swalbard's a really great place to see him. And that's the place where you're going to have that really impressive background. too.

Oh, that's like the prettiest place you can see. Yeah, if you're like a photographer going to try and get like beautiful photos. There are things you can do if you go there. Yeah, and Svalbard has like. Northern lights. Northern lights, reindeer, all sorts of other wildlife. They have whales. They have some really cool stuff there.

Okay. How are we messing things up for them? So this is, Mike brought it up already. This is an animal who's kind of become the poster animal for climate change. They are being massively effective. by climate change. It's not at a point yet where we're seeing huge, massive die-offs in polar bears, but what we are seeing is reduced body condition. That fasting period that we talked about is getting longer and longer. So they're having to wait longer and longer to go out and start hunting again for seals.

And they're starting to have reproductive failure to where the females aren't healthy enough to even have cubs. Their body condition is getting worse. We're finding starving polar bears. and it's kind of like, it's not an animal, like some of the other animals we've talked about, they're being like dwindled by poaching. This is an animal where suddenly we're just going to see huge die-offs. It's kind of like how everything was fine on the Titanic until it hit the iceberg.

That's how it's going to be with polar bears. We're going to have a lot of polar bears until suddenly they start dying. Ironically, there wouldn't be any ice for the Titanic to hit. The Titanic will be fine. The Titanic's fine. Polar bears are in trouble. Well, you always see, it really is sad when you see those.

pictures of like a polar bear riding an ice cube on the ocean and it's like where's all the ice yeah the saddest ones are just seeing polar bears like laying on the shore waiting for that sea ice to freeze and i have colleagues that their polar bear populations that they worked on they had years where they didn't see a single cub are they adapting at all like are they going south or north or doing anything different no so that's kind of the tricky thing um there's they like mating with grizzly bears they are and there's a little bit of hybridization that's happening as grizzly bears move further north. Polar bears can't move further south.

They're tied to the sea ice. That's the only way they can get the food that they need to survive. The only food that can feed a polar bear is an animal that has a lot of blubber on it. So they can't just start like eating like Patrick. Patrick and seals. They can't start eating like goose eggs or these other kind of like reindeer or any of those kind of things. They don't give them the energy they need to make it through an Arctic winter.

they need that blubber. Poor Patrick. I looked at Patrick's Instagram and he's like a barber in England. Like he seems like a great kid. They can't just like start on another food source. Like that's evolution. That takes hundreds of thousands of years for an animal to like change that drastically. It's not something that they can just instantly do.

Certain polar bears will adapt. Certain polar bears might survive a little longer. The species can't change that quick. And if they did, they would become a new animal. They evolved from brown bears. They used to be a brown bear. They turned into a polar bear because they started killing seals on the ice. If they went back on land, over hundreds of thousands of years, they'd become a brown bear again.

Are they at all like pandas where we are having trouble? Like if they're in captivity, will they mate with each other? Or do they resist that? They're hard to mate in captivity. And they're not an animal that you can mate in captivity and then like release. Because if their habitats completely destroyed, you're just releasing an animal to die. They're an animal that we are completely destroying their habitat.

Like it is being completely destroyed. A paper came out this year from some colleagues of mine that said that we stand to lose. If things continue as they do, we stand to lose almost all of our polar bears by the end of the century. So there's a few spots in the high Canadian Arctic where they'll still be ice and there probably will be for like another 100 years. But as far as all these other populations, they're probably. not going to make it. So that's really sad. They're in a lot of trouble. Things have to change pretty quickly for them. I'm a very ardent kind of, you know, proponent of really drastic climate change solutions because an animal that I deeply care about is going to die out if we don't do it.

Okay. Our next, that's like a hard one. Our next category, do we like this animal? I'm not even going to I obviously love them. Worked on them. They're one of my favorites. It's hard for me to... I hate that question. Come on, dude. I hate it. You're going to ask. I don't know.

For a while, they're my favorite. Like, when I'm doing a polar bear project, polar bears are my favorite. Right now, I'd probably put them as, like, third. Okay. Yeah. I'm going to put it as 13th. Okay. Polar bears.

So Great White was 12. Uh-huh. So this is one down behind Great White. Okay. I like them a lot. Yeah. That's pretty good. That's pretty high.

There's lots of animals. I've never seen one. Yeah. And there's not very many. That's a weird reason not to like them, but okay. I love polar bears. I think they're incredible. As far as bears go, I think pandas might be more interesting looking,

but I think polar bears are just beautiful animals. There's something like so majestic about them. Yeah. And it's just kind of, they're almost mythological. To someone like me especially, but you see them and they're huge and they're just out in their like uninhabitable otherwise environment. It's just like it's them, you know? They're kind of like the kings of the north, I feel a little way.

I just think they're amazing animals, and I'm going to be real sad when they die. Yeah. Because I don't have faith... John Smith is the king of the north? Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's like a coincidence that every single Inuit community throughout like Canada, Russia, the U.S., all of them. They're like deified. Their central, like, mythological feature was a polar bear, and it's because they are just like an amazing animal. Yeah, they're absolutely amazing.

Yeah. Okay. So that's it for those categories. I think we have a few listener questions that we're going to go over. Jeff? Let's do it. Yeah. Let's see here. All right. So this is going to be for all three of us, Trevin J. Brown. If you could legally... This is his Instagram name. Trevin. You're trying to say Spallbart again? All right. Trevin. It's not your name, Trevin. It's the way Jeff said it. If you could legally and ethically keep any wild animal as a pet, which would you pick and why? I'll start. I'd pick a koala bear because I think they're really cute and soft.

Cool. And I think they'd be easy. You just kind of stick them in a tree and they sleep for like 20 hours a day. Yeah. Mike? I'm going with a more utility-based answer. I'd want a cow because we've gotten into some pretty big arguments about it. cows are easily the most useful animal.

What? What was your argument you could tow your car with one? I'm saying if you needed a cow to pull something, they could. This was an argument you guys had, what, like eight years ago? It's still going to have. Cows very useful, you'd have tons of milk. Great choice. Yeah, it's a great choice.

Thanks. Really boring, but a great choice. Not a great choice. For me, if I just had like access to a ton of land and everything and a pool and all sorts of money, I'd want a polar bear. If I didn't, if I'm like in more like controlled situation, I want a red panda. Yeah. Red panda.

They're super cute. Shoot. They're fun. And soft. And soft. I didn't think this one through it very well. No, you didn't. But we're not giving you a chance to go back.

That's fine. No, I deserve that. Me and Wes are never going to get ours. You that could potentially have a cow. Yeah, you can do it. Go buy one tomorrow. It's ethical. All right.

From Cassie. Our friend Cassie. Animals that used to be in the U.S. but aren't anymore. extinct or ones that left for north or south. Just took off for north or south. Yeah. I'm going to go back pretty far, like, to the Pleistocene,

which is when there was like mammoths and everything. So mammoths are one. A couple that are really interesting is we had a North American lion. It looked just like an African lion. It had like the main and everything. We had those and we actually had North American cheetahs as well. So those are the three. I'm going to bring up.

There's a lot of other ones back then. Mammoths were native to the contiguous. United States? Well, like the land mass of... Wow, that's interesting. Yeah. And since Wes is pulling mammoths, I'll shout out Utah Raptors. Cool. Yeah, it's a long time ago. Yeah, they went south

a long time ago. They don't hear anyone. I'm sure she meant more recent, but those are somewhat recent. When people existed, there was like, or at least our ancestors, there was those animals. That happened in our lifetime? In our lifetime. Yeah, I mean, there's lots of animals that have gone extinct there. I just can't... Passenger pigeons are

pretty close to our lifetime. They went extinct. Oh, I got one for you. Jaguars. We used to have Jaguars, and now that we built the wall with Mexico, they can't get in anymore. Yeah, they used to wander. Trump got that wall built? He did. He's got hundreds of miles, and he

actually built it right across the area where they passed through. And Mexico paid for it. They did not pay for it. How real is the Bear Attack Hugh Glass suffers in the Revenant? This for me? Yeah, and this is from CalP. Cal poke. Calpoque.

Okay. That was a really accurate rendition of like a terror, or like a defensive female bear attacking, a grizzly bear attacking, someone to defend her cubs, hit him really hard, neutralized the threat, was trying to leave,

and then he was suddenly a threat again because he was going for his gun, so she hit him again. That's what happens. They're vicious, they're brutal, but that bear's just trying to make sure you're not a threat anymore

so she can get away with her cubs. Protecting her cubs? Yeah. Okay. And then what do you think when animals are trained for entertainment TV and then act out and attack people? So Mike, you already brought up the hockey bears. Yeah.

That's kind of part of the game, though. Attacking people is kind of, yeah. They get in fights all the time. But they're not attacking people. What do you think of that? Obviously, I don't like it. Which part? Them attacking people.

I think there are people that do a good job of training. animals for movies and honestly the bear. Yeah, I don't have a huge problem with that industry if they do it right because they're usually animals that were orphaned as cubs and for whatever reason couldn't be released and as far as like if they're doing a good job, I'm okay

with it as far as the animal attacking their trainer or whatever, even the best trained animal could do that. And you just have to realize that they're not domesticated. A domesticated animal is one that over like a long time we bred that aggression out of them. A trained animal is a wild animal that you've just managed to train, but it still has all of its instincts

and it still could attack you at any point. So if you're going to get in that industry, you've got to be ready at some point to maybe get attacked by an animal. I'll just say, I read a stat that's crazy to me that there's more tigers in the state of Texas than there are in the wild. Right. And I think that's really sad. Yeah, that is sad. And most of those people are just like collectors. And boxes. They're not like in, Joe exotic. Right. Those aren't movie animals. The movie animals tend to be much more regulated And they usually have to take better care of them Yeah

All right Well thanks Trevon Cassie Cowpoke And who is that last one? And that last one I didn't say It's T-Money Jackson T-Money Jackson Thanks guys We appreciate the questions

All right well I think we should just close like we always Yeah And just kind of say bye Thanks for listening guys See ya