Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Polar Bear Attack - The Cold Campsite Crasher

Episode Date: April 25, 2022

What should have been a once in a lifetime excursion paddling around the Svalbard archipeligo turns into a bloody nightmare for two young friends when the bear crashes their campsite and puts its teeth and its claws to work.  ~~ This episode of Tooth & Claw is brought to you by... Vuori: Vuori.com/CLAW Betterhelp: Betterhelp.com/TOOTH HelloFresh: HelloFresh.com/CLAW16 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

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Tooth and Claw. On this one, Wes has another pretty crazy polar bear attack story that he wanted to share with all of us. But before we get to that, we have a really fun announcement that we have been really excited to share with all of you. You'll hear Wes talk a little bit more about it in just a few seconds, but I just wanted to say again real quick right off the top. Thank you so much for all of your support. We really appreciate it, and we hope you enjoy the show. All right, let's go. Hey everyone, welcome back to tooth and claw.

Wow. Wow, you're excited today. Where's all this energy coming from us? I feel like we always sound the exact same when we opened this, so I just wanted to throw them for a loop this once, you know? You're drinking energy drinks. Maybe try changing up, instead of like the volume, maybe change the words up, like, howdy all y'all fellers?

Welcome to Joe Rogan podcast. Welcome. who we are. Nope. Well, we've been teasing big news on this podcast for a little while now, which we always do. We like to tease. We're teasers. But, you know, we can finally announce it. For a while now, we've been looking to partner with the network. We just kind of felt like there's so much that we have to do on our own with this podcast. And we kind of, it's hard not to plateau without some help. And we finally found a network that we're really excited to partner with. So that network is called Q-Code. They specialize in premium audio.

storytelling. They have mostly done fiction storytelling podcasts, but they partnered with talent like Matthew McConaughey, Demi Moore, Ramey Malick, Brian Cox, who is, of course, the dad from Succession that we love. Of course. Hannibal Lecter. Yeah, he was, yeah. He's Hannibal Lecter.

Yeah. In like the 1982, Manhunter, that's right. He's good. Yeah, he is. Anyway, all these crazy big celebrities have partnered with Q-Code, and now we're partnering with them. And we're, uh, Yeah, we're one of their... Add us to the list. Yeah.

We're in their line of nonfiction podcasts, which they're really starting to dive into, and we're really excited to be working with them. So be sure to check out their other podcasts and give them a follow on social media. It's at QCode Media. And then some other news, too. A lot of you have supported us on Patreon. We love you for doing that. Please continue to do so.

With this new network deal, we're also going to be starting a subscription service on Apple podcasts. We're going to be calling that this. tooth and claw gris club. So if you want to get access to our bonus episodes through Apple podcasts, you can do it that way. And we'll have the whole library of our bonus content, plus a little bit more. So that's going to be launching real soon. The same episodes are going to go on to Patreon and Apple subscription. Yep. So that Gris Club over there, you're going to be able to join that if you want, or you can join Patreon. Just whatever floats your boat, you know,

whichever you prefer. Is that Gris Club named after Gris Kid? I don't think so. So, but maybe, you know, who knows? We're really excited. This has been going on for a while now that we've been planning this and working with them on getting it right. And it's really exciting. So there will be a couple small changes. Like you guys are going to, we're going to have some sponsors finally, which we've been talking about for a year and a half now. And, and yeah, and it's, we're going to have more time between the three of us to give you guys better content, different kinds of content, video content, a lot of other things.

So it frees up a lot of time for us to really deliver on the podcast. Cool. Yeah. I'm excited. Yeah, I am too. I'm thrilled. Yeah, I've been looking for a new club to join ever since I aged out of the Mickey Mouse Club. Yeah.

You know? I've been wondering what this big announcement was going to be. So it's cool to finally. Jeff just found out what's going on. Well, Wes knows my signature. You just kind of close your eyes. Yeah. We hang Jeff up in the closet once we're done.

Once it's time to record again, we just sloop him right off the hangar, and yep, he's ready to go. Well, you guys got anything you want to talk about before this story? Yeah, go see ambulance. We talked about it in our Patreon. Jeff can't stop thinking about ambulance. Evangelizing for a Michael Bay film. This is truly the upset of 2022. They're getting free sponsorship for months.

I'm just thinking about it. We not only watched ambulance when you guys were here, but then we doubled down. and watch the island because we couldn't get enough Michael Bay. No, we can't. And that was enough. Like, number one bank robbery movie. I mean, come on. Bank robbery movie?

Yeah. It's point break. Yeah. Yeah, without a doubt. Right? Yeah. I can't. Yeah, that's like in a tier of its own, I think.

And then I would say heat after point break. Really? Yeah. I'd probably go, like, the town. The town's good. That's a good pick. I love a good bank robbery movie. Inside Man's great.

There's some good ones out there. Really makes you feel. like you could go out and do it, you know? More people should. If we robbed a bank, who would be like our hype man that just goes in there and like, everyone shut up and if anyone moves, I'll blow your head off? I mean, you sound like you're doing pretty good. I'm the driver, I think. I'm a little too low key to be in the action like that. I'm going to be the guy that just signed on like that day and everyone's like, I don't know about this guy. Seems a little while. And then I'll just, I'm just gonna randomly kill someone and throw the whole thing off.

Shoot someone who like, we didn't need to shoot them, but you're just like, they looked at you funny. Well, speaking of bank robberies, Wes. Speaking of bank robberies, we're talking about polar bears today. They could probably rob a bank. Yeah, I don't, I don't think so. You don't think a trained polar bear could rob a bank? Probably no.

Okay, well, now you're moving the goalposts a little. You did say trained on that one. I just said a polar bear could rob a bank. I don't, yeah, you're probably right. I don't know how the bank teller would know what the polar bear wants. Maybe if you put like a sign on its neck that said, give me all your money. Maybe he has a crew of humans just with a polar bear. Fair enough.

That would probably work. Okay. Yeah. So we're talking about polar bears and we're talking about them where we talked about them last time. We've done one polar bear episode and it was in a place that's notoriously hard for Jeff to pronounce. So we're going to make him do it again. Jeff? Svalbard.

Spallbard. Whoa. Whoa. He did it. First try. You got it. I didn't look it up. I'm almost disappointed.

I have a bunch of other long names in this that I should have sent to him to make him say. You know, my shower curtain is just like a world map and I'll look at Svalbard. And just say it over and over and over again. Yeah. Don't worry. I'll mess it up again. All right. Anyway, we are going to be talking about Svalbard.

And before we really get into the story, I want to talk a little bit about the conditions of this story. So it happens in late July in Svalbard in 2010. In 2010, in late July in Svalbard, climate change had already progressed to a level where there was hardly any annual ice. So when you're talking about polar bears, it's important to make a distinction between annual ice and multi-year ice. So annual ice is the ice that forms every year and melts every year, and it forms near the coast, and that's kind of where polar bears have the best chances of encountering seals

are right off the continental shelves. And so they really depend on that annual ice that freezes and melts every year. And then you have multi-year ice, which there's some multi-year ice out there. It's typically like more up in the really high, high Arctic kind of by the North Pole. And that's ice that will last year after year after year and never melts. But we're losing that ice really quickly. But because the multi-year ice is over such deep water, there really isn't many seals or great hunting opportunities for bears. So they tend to stick on that annual ice.

So when that ice melts, all those bears that depend on it for finding seals, just hang out on land. Or a few of them will go up to the multi-year ice and hope they can catch the occasional seal. But a lot of them just come on land and they spend most of the summer fasting and just really waiting for the ice to refreeze. I'm going to get a little bit more into like why polar bears, what's happening to polar bears because of climate change. But I just want you guys to realize that because this is late July, that ice has been gone for a little while. And so the bears are pretty hungry. Like they're fasting. The ice is pretty much just like whack-a-mole with seals, right?

We're going to talk about that too. Yep. All right. Well, now I'm excited. We are. Kind of. Not in that exact context, but yes. So our two subjects for this story are Sebastian Plur Nielsen and Ludwig Field.

And they've been planning a high Arctic adventure for years. They're both 22 years old. They've been friends for a long time. And they're about to embark on a journey that had never actually been completed. Their plan was to kayak all the way around the Svalbard archipelago. Oh, cool. So an archipelago is just like a specific type of collection of islands. And that entire journey would be about 1,100 miles.

No one had ever done it in a kayak. Oh, wow. This voyage that they were going to do was going to take them about two months. So in order to do it, they'd been training for years. They'd been paddling kayaks through icy fjords and rivers in mainland Norway. They'd been swimming and freezing water. And really importantly, they'd been training with their rifles. They had talked to a lot of other Arctic explorers,

and those explorers had warned them of the potential danger from polar bears and how typically you have very little time to react to a charging bear. So Nielsen and Field had been practicing like sprinting up hills with their rifles, and they'd load them, they'd control their breathing, and they'd fire at targets. So they really wanted to get good at being in a chaotic situation with their rifle and still being able to fire and control their shots. So that means they like will be taken. breaks on land, I'm assuming.

Yeah, they camp on night every night. They would camp every night on land. And you would be at risk in your kayak. Polar bears are very aquatic. That makes me think of the bi-athlon in the Winter Olympics, where people cross-country skiing and then shoot. And then shoot. But this one's just like running and shooting.

Yeah. They should really incorporate all modes of transportation as an event. So like, you drive your car and then you shoot. Or here's some roller blades and then you shoot. In America, we pretty much do that. Yeah, that's true. The other thing they were doing is while they were traveling, they kept their rifles in a waterproof bag that was right on the side of their kayak, and they just practiced like pulling it out of that bag and having it ready to go.

So they were pretty experienced with their rifles. Okay, so they set out from Svalbard's largest town, which is Long Year Buy-in, on July 5th, 2010, and they averaged about 15 miles a day on their kayaks. So by the end of July, they had reached one of the northernmost islands in the Svalbard archipelago, which is called Nordaustlandet, Nordauslandet. On this particular day, this island, Nordauslandet, in the high Arctic, was seeing some really blustery weather, and these really rough seas and the high winds forced them to retreat to the shore

and find a place to set up their camp. And they found this really prominent feature that was called Extrimhukin, and they decided to make camp on a nearby beach. And I think that name means like an extreme place or something like that. And they even joked with each other as like, oh, something extreme might happen here. And they were right. Something extreme was going to happen.

All right. So, Jeff, to your early question, like, they would pitch their tents on land every night. They couldn't sleep in their kayaks. It was way too dangerous if, like, wind kicked up or something. So every night they would come on shore and they'd pitch their tents. So they're not, like, open ocean. There's, like, land along most of their route. It's a collection of islands, and they were just going right along the perimeter of the island.

So they were always close to land. Yeah. They pitched their tent on a rocky beach, and then like they did every single day when they pitched their camp, they rigged up a tripwire perimeter fence about nine feet from their tent. So I talked to one of my friends that spent a lot of time working with polar bears in Svalbard about these tripwire fences. And he said that they don't really produce these anymore. So all of the ones that people are using in Svalbard are really old, like decades old. And a lot of them are from the military. And what they are is it's a tripwire that has corner posts.

and on those posts there's an explosive charge that the trip wire feeds into. So when something trips that wire, that charge goes off, it makes a really loud noise, which would potentially scare the bear. And then it also warns the people in the tent that something has passed their perimeter. So that's the whole plan. It's an effective alarm clock and explosion. It is. And they hoped it would give them time to grab their rifles is what they wanted.

In my mind, though, I'm thinking like nine feet from their tent, If the bear were pretty determined and it just pushed through that wire, they only have seconds to get to their rifle before it's actually in their tent. So I would want that trip wire out a little further. And then most people, if you're adventuring in Svalbard during the time when there's a decent chance of you running into a polar bear, you typically want to go with guards. So whether it's someone from your party or someone else, someone should be doing constant watch for polar bears and you should be trading off shifts. and then they should be armed with rifles and flare guns and all the different things you need to get everyone woken up. Before we get further into the story, I did want to do some polar bear biology.

This is an animal I worked with pretty extensively. I did about seven years on a polar bear project. They're really just amazing animals, so I've got a lot to say about them. But I hope you guys find it interesting because I think they're one of the most fascinating animals out there. Yeah. One thing about them, do either of you guys know what the polar bear scientific name is? Ooh, ursus arctus. Close.

That's something like that? That's a brown bear actually. Oh, man. Yes. Jeff, any hints? Any ideas? Ursus Blanca. No, that's also a good guess.

It's ursus maritimeis. Mike, can you guess what that might mean? It's like seafaring bear or something like that? Sea bear, exactly. They're found in five different countries around the world. Canada, Norway, Russia, Greenland, and the U.S. Greenland's technically owned by Denmark, but those. Those are the five different countries they're found in.

Something I wanted to talk about a little bit is polar bear evolution. So I don't think we got into this in our last polar bear episode. But it's likely that during a warmer period in the Earth's history, a long time ago, a million or so years ago, a group of brown bears had moved north because the ice had melted and it freed up some hunting opportunities for them up north. And then it got cold again and they were trapped up north, like this whole population of brown bears. and they were forced to start figuring out ways to live in an arctic environment.

So they had to rapidly evolve to survive up there. And those changes happened in just a couple hundred thousand years, which is really, really fast when you're talking about evolution. Usually evolution takes millions of years to make big changes in an animal, and this happened really fast. So these brown bears, the ones that were lighter color, were probably naturally favored through natural selection, The ones that could easily break down fat because they were eating really high fat content were favored.

And natural selection started changing these bears very quickly, and they turned into polar bears. Cool. So that's how we got polar bears. They're actually a really, really close cousin to brown bears or grizzly bears. So did panda bears get kind of caught in between a cold and warm place? And that's why they're half white and half black? I don't think so. But that's a good question.

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So adaptation is short-term changes for a species to suit its environment. So like if a black bear learned like, oh, it's really easy for me to get into trash cans, that would be an adaptation of that black bear. Evolution is a long-term change that occurs at the genetic level for better functioning and survival. So if, say, that same black bear learned how to really get into trash cans and it then passed that information onto its offspring and those offspring passed on to their offspring, over time that becomes a genetic change. And that's what evolution is. And you start to develop traits that help you exploit that food source or do whatever. So polar bears, the modern polar bear, as we know it, is only about 480,000 years old, which is pretty new as far as species. go. Yeah, that's really interesting. So, some of the things that they evolved to be this perfect

Arctic predator. They have two layers of fur to keep them warm. There's a dense undercoat of shorter fur and then longer guard hairs on top. Those guard hairs are hollow and transparent and they help to scatter and reflect visible light, which actually is what gives them their white appearance. They have the thickest fur of any bear species, which helps them stay warm, and then they also have black skin that absorbs a lot of energy from the sun. Probably the most important thing to help them stay warm is a really thick layer of fat. So that layer of fat can get up to five inches thick.

And that's really important, especially when they're swimming, because their fur doesn't, it absorbs water and it doesn't really, it's not great for keeping you warm in the water. But fat is. Okay. How about their ears? What are their ears like compared to other species of bears? They're a lot shorter.

And that is an adaptation because the more surface area you have, on appendages and whatnot, the easier it is for it to get too cold. Oh, yeah. The fact that their ears are shorter and closer to their head helps them stay warm. Cool. Helps for circulation and everything. So they have huge dinner plate-sized paws. Those paws help them walk on the ice without breaking through, and they also act as powerful

paddles when they're swimming. Their foot pads are covered with tiny bumps called papillet, and those help them grip the ice without slipping. And then they also have two-inch claws that help them to also grip the ice and then to pull prey out of the ice. We've talked about this before. Polar bears are our biggest bear. So adult males on average weigh about 775 to 1,300 pounds.

Females are about half that size, about 330 to 650, which means, Jeff, they're one of the most what, of all animals? Sexually dimorphic. Good job. Yep. Okay. Of all mammals, they are one of the most sexually dimorphic. Of all large mammals. Yeah.

Kinky. As far as how big they can get, research. In the creatures in Canada estimated one male to be over 1,700 pounds. The largest one ever killed was over 2,000 pounds and stood 11 feet tall. So they can get big. I mean, they are the biggest bear. Imagine the cannon balls they could do up. Grizzly bears can't get that big?

No. Codiac grizzlies top out at like 1,500 pounds, which is like almost within the average for a male polar bear. So Codiacs can get bigger than polar bears, but they can't get as big as the biggest polar bears. Right. So they are technically a marine mammal, but they're also kind of considered a terrestrial mammal because they do spend so much time on land. So if you do consider them a terrestrial mammal, they are the largest terrestrial predator or mammal predator. Excuse me. Wait, what, Jeff? Isn't that how crocodiles are? Yeah, that's a good point. Like they are kind of in both. So it's not, it's not a bad comparison. Suck it. Well, I was just, okay, sure, you can take offense when there was none meant to be given. But, uh, uh, you're, I was just making sure you got your question out because I was actually interested. But what's the difference between like, okay, man, now I lost my train of thought.

This is ridiculous. I hate this place. I don't know. It's probably something about amphibians. Was it about them being a marine mammal or a terrestrial mammal? So like what, because I was thinking like the difference between reptiles and amphibians, sometimes the line looks a little blurry. But yeah.

And I don't really know, to be honest. I don't know when something's considered terrestrial or marine. But I do know that if you do count polar bears in that like size of terrestrial mammals, they're the biggest carnivorous terrestrial mammal. If they're a marine mammal, then they're not the biggest because you've got like orcas and sperm whales and stuff too. What about like hippos? Hipos aren't carnivorous. Oh. They're yeah, they like both.

They're omnivores. Yeah, mostly vegetative. Do polar bears like honey? You know, they'd probably eat it. But this is our only bear that is a strict carnivore. So sometimes when they are fasting, they'll eat, like some vegetation or seaweed or those kind of things. But most polar bear scientists, myself included, think that's mostly just to keep their digestive system working and active. It's not so much for the nutrients.

It's more just to like keep things running. They can't survive without me. They don't really drink much at all, right? No. So we're going to get into what they mostly eat. But to answer your question really quickly, they get almost all of their water from breaking down fat of the seals that they eat. So they pull water out of that fat. It's really cool. Yeah. So polar bears are also really tall. Scientists usually measure their height at the shoulder on all fours. So even at the

shoulder, those heights are typically like around four to five feet for adults when they're on all fours. But if an adult male is standing on its legs, it can be over 10 feet tall, which is pretty tall. Like when you see the big mounts of them standing on their legs, they're massive. They can dunk a basketball without jumping. They can. Uh-huh. So they've evolved to eat mostly seals. So in the Arctic, they hunt both ringed and bearded seals, which they need to catch from a platform of sea ice. The reason they're mostly hunting seals is because they need that blubber, that really high energy fat content to survive, to keep them alive during the winter, to just push them forward. The way that they catch those seals, and Jeff was hinting at this with that whack-a-mole comment,

but seals typically cuts like a single seal will typically cut like 10 to 15 breathing holes in the fall in the ice and then they they use like these little sharp claws on their four flippers to cut these breathing holes and then they keep those breathing holes open all winter long so a seal will surface every five to 15 minutes at one of those holes or they use air pockets under the ice but they're just constantly surfacing to breathe and then they go back down So what a polar bear does is they attack by waiting for seals to breathe at those openings. So they'll locate them with their sense of smell, and then they wait for the seals to emerge. So they have to be really smart and really patient. Sometimes those weights can be hours or even days.

And that's their main way of killing seals, is they wait by those breathing holes. Seal pops its head up, it's whack a mole, polar bear grabs it with its teeth and its claws, pulls it out on the ice and eats it. A secondary way. How good are seals it seeing? polar bears since they're white. They do have great camouflage, but they can still see them. Like seals will see them, so the bear has to be pretty quick and pretty careful. And then the seals stay by the ice because that's where their food sources. Yeah. Seals mostly feed on like a

specific type of fish that are going to be found underneath that ice. There's actually a really rich ecosystem underneath sea ice. It involves like these really tiny microplants and vegetative, I forget what they're called, but there's this really interesting food web that works all the way up to polar bears. Good. I'm glad sea ice will always be there. Yeah, it won't, but we will talk more about that. Another way that they can eat ring seals specifically are sometimes ring or ring and bearded seals. They'll be basking on ice and then polar bears take advantage of their sleep wake rhythms. So polar bears will figure out when that seal is actually sleeping and when it's awake and it'll slowly stalk up behind it and grab it on the ice. but that's a bit harder for them because they really have to be patient in that stalking.

It's like you trying to catch a lizard. It is. Yeah, it's exactly like that. An interesting statistic, though, is less than 2% of polar bear hunts are successful. So it's a really low success rate. If you look at like African wild dogs, they're successful in 80% of their hunts. Polar bears are successful in less than 2%. So how often does a polar bear eat a seal?

I believe they have to kill one about. on average every week. But I have to look that up to be sure. When they do kill one, they can eat up to 100 pounds of blubber and a single feeding. That's 45 kilograms. And when the hunting is really good,

a bear will only eat the... Sounds like Mike. Or our cousin Brent. When hunting is good, they'll only eat the skin and blubber and they leave the rest of the seal because it's not even like energetically important to them. So the seal lives then.

No, it doesn't live. But what it is great for, What it is great for is all the other Arctic scavengers. So you've got like Red Fox, Arctic Fox, other bears, birds that'll come in and eat on those seal carcasses. So in that way, polar bears are really important ecosystem engineers because they spread a lot of food out for a lot of other animals. Their best time for getting seals is in the spring when seal pups are being born on the ice and they really just like have a feast. They're just catching seal pups like crazy. If they can find the dens that the pups are in under the ice,

you'll see bears jump up in the air and crush those dens in, and they'll just eat all the pups. It's pretty sweet. So their hearing and eyesight is similar to ours, but their sense of smell is much, much, much better. We aren't totally sure just how sensitive it is, but some scientists think that polar bears can pick up on the scent of a meal from dozens of miles away.

The more common guess is like about a mile, but if it's something big, like say a dead whale or something, There's pretty good evidence that they can pick it up from dozens of miles. There's this anecdotal story of a collared female polar bear who was like 90 miles offshore, and some native hunters killed a bowhead whale and pulled it up on shore, and we're cutting it up. And when that happened, that bear made a beeline and started heading towards shore. So some people think that 90 miles out, it picked up on the scent of that dead whale.

So they're pretty amazing with how well they can smell. Yeah. And that's, so just on that, my last note on that then is if you happen to be camping or adventuring in polar bear habitat, the number one thing you need to think about is scent reduction. Deodorant. Okay. So back to the story. Non-scented deodorant. Honestly, anything you can do to cut down scent.

So the next morning, the two men, Nilsson and Field, they woke up to really high winds and huge waves on the ocean. And they made the decision that they would have to stay put for another day and another night. The weather the next day looked a lot better, so they figured it wasn't a big loss. They would just hang out for one more day. So in camp, Nilsen was cursing his own clumsiness because he had been chasing a tarp that had blown away, and he fell over the tripline,

which is their only polar bear warning system, and the explosive charge had gone off. But luckily, he had some extras of those charges, so he attached a new one to the wire, and he felt really stupid for falling on the wire, but he also was kind of reassured to see that it worked properly. Now, miles away, a large male polar bear was using the strong wind to its advantage. It lumbered along the frigid, ice-free waters of the arctic ocean, and it's raising its nose in

the air, testing the wind, looking for the scent of a dead seal of marine mammal. And with no ice to hunt seals, and the freeze-up still months away, this bear is energy-deprived, it's willing to explore any potential food that it's detected on the wind. Suddenly it stops lumbering, and it raises its head sniffing carefully. An unfamiliar scent wafted into its nostrils, and the bear slowly and methodically started walking in the direction of the campsite. So as the two men lay down in their sleeping bags, they checked to make sure their rifles were within reach and loaded, which was their nightly ritual, and they drifted off to sleep. So the winds howling outside as the bear reaches camp, and slowly it studies the scene and these unfamiliar scents and sights that are piquing its curiosity, and it's unsure whether it's smelling what could potentially be this really treasured midsummer meal, but it's still. not going to turn down the opportunity to check it out. So the bear passes through the trip wire

without making a sound. The explosive charge that Nilsson had reset that afternoon didn't fire. And again, remember, I said a lot of these tripwires are really old. And this bear removes the one warning system that the men had in place. The bear approaches the tent without making a single noise and the men just keep sleeping right through that approach. The smell of the men drifts out from the tent and the bear stands only a few feet away, raises a large paw, and brings a down ripping through the tent wall and exposing the men to the huge carnivore. So Nilsson wakes up immediately. He has a split second to scream bear before the bear springs forward and clamps its powerful

jaws around his head and instantly pulls him out from his sleeping bag. He said he could feel the bear's teeth scraping on his skull and it made a low growling sound as it started to pull him from the tent. So in our last one it was also a tent attack in Svalbard. The boys had a few more seconds to kind of react as the bear to see. decided which one of them to grab. This one, it knocked the tent down. Nilsen made a noise, and it just grabbed him by the head,

immediately pulls him out of his bag and out of the tent. Somehow, this is amazing to me. While this huge bear is pulling him from the tent by his head, he manages to grab his pump action shotgun with one of his hands. Oh, wow. With the other hand, he's beating the bear. Like his head's in the bear's mouth. It's pulling him out of the tent in like one big motion.

And in a split second, he reaches over, grabs the shotgun. gun and then he starts just punching the bear in the head with his other hand. Dude. Now, these seals, the seals that the bear catch it, they weigh up to like 400 to, even up to like 600 pounds if it's a bearded seal. So a puny human like punching him in the head, I don't, he's not particularly puny. We're just all puny to polar bears, but it has no effect. Especially like, if your head is in a bear's mouth, you're not going to be able to get the same

no. Gusto on a punch. No. But regardless, I think even if you're Mike Tyson and you're punching a bear, well, who knows? But it's not going to like register the same way as a lot of the prey that they catch. I want to see someone punch one of those arcade punching bag things with their head in a bear's mouth and see what score they can get. I'd be less interested in the score and more just kind of why that's a thing. LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business.

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Anyway, these punches aren't deterring this bear at all yet. So he's been pulled completely free of the tent, and the bear changes its bite. It releases his skull from its jaws, and it bites into his right shoulder. The bear then lifts Nielsen into the air as if it were lifting a toy, and it shakes him back and forth. Its teeth are sinking deeper on each shake. So as it's shaking him, it's biting harder and harder into his shoulder. And he described that as it was a feeling like there was ice picks just being driven down into his meat and bone and tendons of his shoulder. So then the bear begins dragging Nilsen by his shoulder along the rocky beach down toward the water.

And in this weird moment of clarity, he realizes that he still has the shotgun and that he's holding on to his only hope of surviving this ordeal. And right when he realizes that, the bear shakes him again, he drops the shotgun. And then, like, the bear steps on the shotgun and snaps it in two immediately. No way. Yeah. He knew. And he heard it happen. Like, he hears the shotgun snap in two.

and he just loses all hope in that moment. He knows he's going to die. Field had woken up to Nilsen's scream when the bear grabbed him, and in this chaos, the bear destroys almost all of their gear, everything's strewn about and broken, and Nielsen's being carried out by his shoulder when Field finally finds his grandfather's World War II rifle, which I don't know what these dudes' fascination

with having really old shit in their tent to protect him from polar bears. But for some reason that... I thought you're going to say, field was in the kayak going back to this small bottom. He's out of there. No, he's searching for this rifle and he can't find it anywhere because the bears just created such a crazy scene in the tent.

Yeah, just like destroyed their tent. Yeah. I'd feel pretty bad if I were him. If my friend whose head was in a bear's mouth could find his gun, but I couldn't find mine. Something I thought about too, like before we get too far off on a tangent, just like the crazy Russian roulette of this bear breaking into this tent. And probably just the fact that Nielsen screamed first is why he got pulled out of his sleeping bag before Field.

And that's just got to be something you think about for the rest of your life that my friend got pulled out instead of me and that it was a 50-50 thing. That bear could have just as easily grabbed me and who knows if I would have died. Yeah. Anyway, he's searching for this rifle. His hands are like desperately pulling through all the sand. and suddenly he feels the stock of the rifle. He pulls it out of the sand and he starts yelling Sebastian,

which is Nielsen's first name, and Nielsen doesn't answer. So Field knows that he is already too late or that he doesn't have much time. So the bear has dropped Nilsson about 35 meters, about 100 feet from the camp, and now it's just standing on him. It's raking its claws down his torso and it's putting its huge front feet onto his chest and it's pushing him down into the sand. Nielsen's covered in blood because they really do that. When they grab a seal, they'll just start raking it, trying to kill it that way.

So he's covered in blood, and he's powerless against this bear, and it's pushing its front paws down on his chest, and he's feeling his ribs crack as it's pushing him down into the sand. And he thinks that he's also his necks about to snap too. And as this is happening, suddenly the bear stops, and it turns to the direction of the tent. So Field standing out there with this old rifle, raised and pointed at the bear, and he's got his shaking finger on the trigger.

And he says to himself, he says steady, and he whispers that, and he trains his rifle on the huge animal. And Nielsen, meanwhile, is, like, screaming for his friend to shoot the bear. He thinks he's going to die any minute. This bear's just going to completely crush through his chest cavity. Fiel's about to pull the trigger when the bear bends down, grabs Nielsen by the head, and then stands up straight on its legs, lifting the screaming man up by his head from the ground. So he's like completely in the air and the bear's standing up straight, holding him by the head and his body's like in front of the bear. Using him as a shield? Oh man, this bear. It's my band. Yeah. So Field can like hardly believe his eyes at this point. He's staring at this

10 foot tall bear who's standing up straight holding his friend's head and its jaws and his body's like hanging in front of him. And Nielsen's still screaming for Field to shoot. So Field runs closer to the scene and trying to get this shot where he wouldn't hit his friend. And I'm guessing him running closer to the bear is probably what causes the bear to drop down on all fours. And that actually gives Field a shot at its shoulder. So he takes the shot and it rips into the bear. And the bear drops Nilsson to the ground and then bites into his shoulder again. But now Nielsen's on the ground. Field has a total clear shot at the bear. He pulls the rifle up again. He rips off four more shots straight into the chest of the bear, kills it instantly.

Oh, man. Yeah, quite the ordeal. That's crazy. Yeah, that's crazy. He immediately, which I think was really smart thinking, slams another clip into the gun just in case that bear isn't dead, or in case another bear hears all this commotion and decides to come check out what's happening.

But he runs over to his friend. He sees the bear's dead. He goes to check on Nielsen to see if he's still alive or what's going on. And when he gets there, Nielsen's scalp is hanging loose from his head. I've seen that before in a rodeo. someone's scalp coming completely off. It's really gross and dangling there. And his shoulders completely...

That's another episode. Yeah, we'll talk about that some other time. His shoulders completely torn open. He can see all the bones and tendons and meat in there. And he's covered, his upper part of his body is torso, is covered in deep slashes from the claws. But he is alive. So if he helps him back to the tent, he puts compression...

So far away from hell. Yeah, they got to be forever away. Yeah. So he carries him back to the tent. He puts compressions. pressure bandages on the shoulder and scalp, and he wraps him up in his sleeping bag. He tells Nielsen that he's going to live and that they would get him out of there somehow, and Nielsen's groaning in pain and he's wondering if his neck was broken.

So Field's really worried about blood loss and the cold, and luckily they did have a satellite phone with them. So he dials the number of the hospital and long year buy-in. And he tells the operator that his friend's been mauled by a polar bear. 35 minutes later, a helicopter's in the air, but it's a 90-minute journey to where they were in the north part of Swalbard. So in the meantime, Field's trying to keep his friend awake while he rises in pain. And something that's like a little hard for me to come to terms with is they had morphine. And Field decides not to give it to Nielsen because he's worried that Nielsen might go unconscious and not wake back up.

But I'm just telling you guys right now. By another bear and it'll be more pain or something. He's like, you're not hurt enough. The paramex, yeah. But like, I want to tell you guys right now, if we're ever out and I get mauled by a bear and we have morphine, give me all of it. Like, I want all of it. I don't care if I die. Like, just give it to me.

It's like, why bring morphine on your trip? I know. Like, what could be worse? I know. Like, what could be worth. I do you think I kind of understand his line of thinking? Like, he's probably already on the verge of fainting and never waking up from that again. So, like, I get it.

But at the same time, it's like, I think what he realized is like, help is 90 minutes away. My friend is stable. He's not going to die. We've like, there's no arterial bleeding or anything like that. So, you know, he didn't want to take any risks with potentially killing him. And so I do get it. I'm giving him a hard time here. It probably was the right move.

I'm just authorizing both of you to give me morphine for just about anything. We'll get that in writing and take it down to the notary. Yep. So the helicopter finally arrives. Nielsen's loaded onto a stretcher and onto the helicopter. where they finally give him some pain meds. Once he's at the hospital, doctors operate on his wounds for about three hours.

They remove damaged tissue from his shoulder, his skull, and his torso. And drum roll for what the doctor's going to tell him. They say, another few millimeters, and the bare teeth would have punctured his skull or lungs, probably killing him. Doctors love to tell you that you were inches away from death.

How close to die, they're just pumping themselves up. They are. Well, the one that bothered me about this is like, how thick is your skull? You know, it's a few millimeters. Yes, like, a few millimeters more, and it would have killed him because it would have gotten through his skull. You know, or your ribcage protecting your lungs. Anyway, it's fine.

It's a miracle that he survived. Anyone that survives a polar bear attack. I mean, it's funny to make fun of, but, like, he was really close to die. He was. For sure. The part that made me cringe when I was reading this story, because I didn't know what happened, like in the end, I didn't know if he survived or not, was when the bear was pushing on it on his chest with its front paws

because they really, I mean, if they can crush through ice to get into a seal den, they can crush through your rib cage. And he was lucky that that bear didn't just like fully rear up and do it. It would have killed him. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Shout out to all the doctors out there.

You're doing great work. Yeah, you are. Thanks for your service. I should note that I got all of this information from a few different articles, but the main one was actually one of my favorite. sources, a Reader's Digest article, drama in real life. Yes. And when this article was published, both men survived.

They lived north of Oslo, and they were actually planning a return trip to Swalbard. And when they interviewed both of these guys, their biggest regret was that they had to kill the bear because they both really respect and admire these huge white bears of the north. So I thought that was really cool that they still had such an admiration for an animal that really ruined their trip and Nielsen has scars all over his torso from this whole encounter. So, you know, they made off a lot better than Horatio Chapel, though, the kid from our first story. Yeah, for having had his head in a bear's mouth twice, it seems like he, any, anyone who survives

a bear encounter is lucky, but that's pretty, that's pretty crazy. Well, and this is the biggest bear, and this is the bear that if, and this is something I want to talk about really quick, that people, when they hear polar bear, they always, they are. always assume this is the most dangerous bear. And they're not because they're not territorial. They're not a bear that just tries to neutralize any threat like a grizzly bear does. But when they do attack, and it's really rare, I mean, there's four million people that live in the Arctic. And hardly anyone ever gets attacked by polar bears. But when they do attack, it's almost always predatory. And the bear's going to keep going until you're dead and it's eating you. And so that's why they're

scary to people, but they're not the bear that's most likely to attack you. It's just when they do, it's a mess. I was thinking if that happened to me, I would want you to try to take a picture when the bear had its mouth around my head and was standing up. That'd be a fire Instagram picture. I'm sure why I have my gun trained on it, I've also got my phone out filming it. Yeah, please make sure you get a picture of it. Jeff's always thinking. About the gram. Yeah. They should scope manufacturers should really pair up with like a photography company and like

So the scope can like take a picture of what you're doing. That's Pat. Isn't that? And then we have to see so many, I don't want to see all the different videos and pictures. Well, what about like a bear spray? Bear spray would be cool. Yeah, that's a good idea. Bear spray with a scope.

But I don't want to see hunting rifles with cameras on it. You're right. That was a bad idea. All right. So before we get in that, no, it's fine. That's the end of the story, though. Do you guys have any questions about it? So he made a full recovery, you said?

Made a full recovery. One kind of funny thing is that the way that both of their families found out about this attack was on the radio. A radio story went out pretty quickly that a man had been attacked and they had their names on it. And they were like, that's our guys. You were talking about the part of the story that made you cringe the most, Wes. Yeah. The part that made me feel the most uneasy. And this is really stupid, but I just can't help it whenever this small detail gets slipped in is when someone with like really heavy wounds is also in sand.

Because it's like, oh man, the sand's going to get in there. It's like also his head was in a bear's mouth. But that sand is really what gets me. That sucks. I know. I do think about that. I just want to like really clearly say to you can go to these places. Like you can go to Svalbard.

You can go to the high Canadian Arctic. You can do all those things. but this is a bear that's very curious and it is predatory. So if you do those kind of things, you just need to be well prepared. And for whatever reason, Svalbard and Norway still don't allow bear spray. It works great on polar bears, but for whatever reason they don't allow it. So if you do go to Svalbard, make sure you have some kind of guard system in place, put up whatever kind of perimeter fence you can do, whether that's electric or tripwire or whatever,

just do as much as you possibly can to be prepared for this sort of thing. and scare off any bears that might be curious to check out what you're doing. So that's my advice. I got to get some of those tripwire explosives. Those sound handy. Just send them up everywhere. For the kids outside of your house. Yeah.

Just put them around like your lunch in the office fridge. Me and Jeff once when we were at home for a little while, I think it was during us some holidays. We got really into putting full glasses of water all over the house in places where they tip over, like on top of door. frames and stuff. And we got my parents a lot. And then finally, the best one we ever did was there was a box of spaghetti. And we knew my dad was making spaghetti that night. And he had like a ton of boxes of spaghetti. And we kind of put this one out so we knew it would be the one that he would grab in the pantry. And then we taped a cup of water to the back of it. So when he pulled out this box of spaghetti, the water like soaked him. And up until that point, we hadn't really gotten him.

and then we nailed him with that one. It's so mean, too, because it's like he was making spaghetti for us to be nice. We just, like, soaking with water. It was so funny. Anyway, that was our tripwire system. Yeah, would that work with bears? I don't think so. Just a cup of water?

Put it up on the top of the tent. So when he ripped it open, his paw got all wet? Only if you had a sign that popped down that said, you're all wet afterwards. Yeah. Because then you insult his pride, too. Right, too. Not loving your AT&T or T mobile bill. Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot.

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No surprises. That's Verizon. Best Network based on Route Metrics, Best Overall Mobile Network Performance, U.S. Second Half 2025, all rights reserved. It must provide a recent consumer mobile bill in the name of the person or give me the deal, additional terms, conditions, and restrictions supply. All right. Well, let's do outchees for this story real quick.

All right. So I'll kick it off. Nielsen was the only one that sustained any outchies. And I'm going to give him... And the bear. I'm going to give him seven and a half outchies. Okay. That sounds like the right number.

Yeah, besides the bear. The bear gets 10 outchies. Yeah. Yeah, I'm good with that because, oh, I'm going to go eight. And my reasoning is having to wait 90 minutes for him. help. Yeah. Okay.

That's a long time to wait. Yeah. Plus no morphine. It really could have been like a six, but because of yelled, it was an eight probably. If it's enough morphine, it'd be like a negative two. Yeah. You're just feeling great. This is the best thing that's ever happened to me.

All right. So you guys are going to eight. I'm going seven and a half. I, my reasoning there is just full recovery. Nothing too crazy was eaten or like ripped off. So I'm going. Yeah, seven and a half. I'm sticking seven and we should always prefer.

Seven and a half is terrible. That's bad. Yeah. Like, we're talking like the worst animal attacks here. So like, yeah. We're just saving a little room for people who are like dismembered and stuff.

Right. Like a 10 to me is someone that's like eaten alive over a period of like multiple hours. Is it right? Yeah. Yeah. All right. So that's it for the story. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back with categories.

All right. We're back. Let's get into our categories. So we've been. done polar bears before. So rather than doing your favorite pop culture polar bear, I want to ask you guys what your favorite pop culture Norwegian is or who your favorite pop culture Norwegian is. So I'll go first just to give you an example. Have either of you ever seen the movie or read the book Contiki? No. No. I really recommend the movie and the book, but the movie is like pretty easy. It's it was like from the mid 2000, early 2010s, I'm guessing. But it's about these Norwegian explorers in the early 1900s or mid-1900s that decided to build a raft and just kind of launch it from Peru and see where they ended up because they had this theory that the South Pacific was actually settled by people from South America. And they ended up in the South Pacific. Spoiler alert.

So the guy who kind of put this whole plan together and who's like really just an interesting character in the movie's really good. His name's Thor Heyerdahl, and he is my favorite Norwegian. Thor. Cool. An unexpected Thor. Yeah. So now when you say the movie is easy, what exactly do you mean by that, Wes? I mean, it's like two hours and you're done with it, and it's a fun watch.

Okay. You don't have to, like, stretch out or do any prep work for it? No, it's pretty easy. You might have to read some subtitles. I don't think so, though. Yeah. from the show Vikings. Ragnar Lothbrook.

Good pick. Yeah. He's the perfect actor for him in that show. And then I just really like that show. And me and Wes's aunt traced our heritage back to him. To his brother, to Rollo. Oh, cool. So that's like our great grandpa.

Yeah, great. Great. Yeah, just one uncle. Right? Yeah. You switch who it is every time. No, I don't. I always say Rollo.

I watch the show with And Dorothy. she told me about it. You switch. Mike. So I'm going to get this one out of the way because I know you guys are going to make fun of me because no one's ever heard of this person. I'm just going to have to say it though for all of my Valkyry profile heads out there. Hrist from Valkyryry profile two, specifically the second one. No, I know. I know Hrist. Servant of Odin, goddess of the past. She's so freaking rad. You guys have no idea and you never will. It just makes me a little sad. But I'm just so for, I guess this is more of a normie pick. For some reason when I was,

younger, like around 10, 12, I really, really loved watching world's strongest man competition. Yeah. And like when I was into it the most was when Sven Carlson from Norway, he was the world's strongest. I love that. Yeah. That show, I got to get back into that. But he was super cool.

And he won. I think it was like 2001. He finally won at all. I feel like that show, you just can't keep watching it because it's like you've seen it all. But, like, the first couple times it's like, I can't believe they're doing this, you know? Yeah. I love it.

I want to give a shout out. Isn't the, like, Santa, the, like, Netflix show Clause? Is that in Norway? Uh, it was somewhere in Scandinavia. Yeah. We can say it in Norway. That's an honorable mention. I like that.

I think it was actually based off of Svalbard, like, where they filmed it. Oh, no way. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Cool.

That's allowed. Klaus. Klaus. So, we're going to go and. to our Anaconda scale. I think we can do both guys. So we got Nielsen and Field. I'm going to say Nielsen is a J-Lo ice cube.

I kind of put them in the same boat. Okay. Or no, sorry, Field. Field is a J-Lo ice cube because he kind of saves the day with the rifle. Doesn't ever get hurt, but is there at the right moment. And I think Nielsen is Owen Wilson. You think? Yeah, he just got eaten.

That's pretty much all he did. That's true. That is a good comp. Remind me again, which was the person, who of the two was the one that set up the faulty explosive? Nielsen. Nielsen. Okay. Sure.

Yeah, I'm feeling better about that. Yeah, I'll go with that. Okay. Cool. We're all in agreement for once in our entire lives. I did want to talk about cage match really quick. So we haven't done cage match in a minute. But Mike, do you want to explain what the cage match?

cage matches. Sure. So this is a category where basically we take the animal of the episode, this being the polar bear, and match it up in a hypothetical fight one-on-one versus all of the other animals that we've covered on the show up at this point. So take it away, Wes. So we've had polar bear in there this whole time, but I think we have some new animals that would be a pretty interesting fight for a polar bear that we haven't talked about too much. One of those being a big male silverback gorilla, our grizzly bears, I think are a pretty, good fight for it just because they are so aggressive and territorial. Saltwater crocodile.

Saltwater crocodile is a good one. Hippo. And I think the hippo I think wins. Yeah, never mind. And the orca wins too. But I think those three are the ones that I was thinking about. Our grizzly bear are saltwater crocodile and our gorilla. I think all three of those could be pretty interesting fights.

I think the polar bear probably beats the gorilla. Mostly if it's like a cage match is probably going to beat. the grizzly too, but they're good fights. With like six out of ten times, seven out of ten times? Yeah, I would say like six out of ten. Okay. With the grizzly, seven out of ten with the gorilla. Polar Bear has a good argument for like our top cage match animal.

If you're talking about like a hunger games type cage where it's like a bunch of different environments. Yeah, because it's aquatic and land. Yeah. So I was going to say like with the saltwater crocodile, I think that's where we're, we have our best matchup, because I think if you put these two animals in like four feet of water, you got a pretty good battle on your hands. Yeah.

And my money would probably be on a big saltwater crocodile over the polar bear. But I think you're going to have a really good fight. Yeah, it could go either way. Well, should we make it happen? No, we should. I like that as a future idea to alter the cage match is like a hunger games. Yeah, I like that animal hunger games. Yeah.

All right, Mike, do you have a, it came from Quora segment for us? I've got a couple of good ones, I think. So for those of you who haven't heard this segment yet, it came from Quora. Quora Q-U-O-R-A is like a website slash social media kind of where people can ask questions and then any kind of armchair expert out there in the world can answer them. So you'll sometimes get answers from real experts and they get upvoted and it's typically like the most liked answer, but you also get some pretty wild answers. We like to look for the wild ones.

More of the bottom of the list. We want those armchair experts. I do try to pick ones that could lead to some thoughtful discussion from West, though. So that's a good segue into this first one, wherein someone is asking, why is there no albino polar bears? And David responds, because nobody cares, which is a terrible response. But he goes on to say, it doesn't even make sense, but he goes on to say green polar bears do attract more attention on the other hand. And it turns out that some polar bears, due to some weird algae reaction, can start to kind of take on a green hue to their fur.

Do you know anything about that, Wes? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different, it's just like any animal, like there's any marine animal. If they're in the right kind of water with the right kind of conditions, they can start to get algae on their fur. or on their skin or whatever. And I think it just occasionally happens with polar bears in those perfect conditions. It looks pretty cool if you look some pictures up. But going back to that initial question response, do you think there are no albino polar bears because nobody cares West?

I don't think it's because nobody cares. And I'm not going to say definitively that there aren't any albino polar bears. Would it be hard to tell? Probably, yeah. They would have pink eyes. Yeah. But albinism and probably a pink nose too, yeah. Albinism in bears is pretty rare.

As far as I know, there's been a few black bears that have been albino. It's not, spirit bears aren't albino, by the way. But I don't know of many albino bears on record. And for a polar bear, my guess is then it would change all of its skin from black to pink. And it probably wouldn't survive because they need that black skin for that solar radiation. So I don't. That makes sense. I don't think there probably aren't any albino polar bears.

They probably don't survive. All right, here's one that'll get you guys pretty riled up, I bet. So. Yeah, I'm already riled. Someone asks, do polar bears attack Canadians? Olga says, they prefer Americans, much more fat to get through them through hibernation. That being said, they taste a bit off due to their crappy food standards. I mean, we probably have the highest, like, rate of obesity, but I don't know.

I think that's a sticky situation to get into. Then not tasty. Yeah. That polar bear is, when he bites into me, he's going to get all these lucky charms and all these great little foods. Yeah. Jeff, do you have some listener questions for us? I should. From Patreon.

This is from Jack. Hey, Jack. Jack's an active Patreon or patron. How do you eat Oreos? Take a bite of the whole thing together or pull them apart and lick the cream before eating the cookie. Great question. What do you guys do? So I'm sure you were probably going to reference this, Jeff,

but there was a little bit of a revelation I had watching a clip of Janus and Ted and Gumpo talking about them. I think it was him that tip me off on this, at least. But someone told him to slip a fork through the cream on the Oreo and just kind of like, that's the easiest way to kind of submerge an Oreo fully and leave it in for the perfect amount of time. Because, you know, it always slips out of your fingers and goes into the milk, and then you're like, your gross hands are in your milk now and you don't want that. That never happens to me. What?

Well, it's cool, too, because, like, he's, like, the best basketball player in the world, and he was talking about how growing up he couldn't afford to eat Oreos. So, once he made it in the NBA, he would just eat Oreos every day. And then a fan told him to dip him in milk, and then it was a game-changing for him. You know, for Oreos, like, marketing team, that was such, like, a wet dream for them. Yeah. Because even I was talking about it. Yeah, even us talking about it right now makes me want to eat. Oreos. Here's a bit of a hot take. I think standard cream content is better than double stuff.

100%. I'm an Oreo purist. So to answer the question, standard Oreo, I dip it in milk, and I'd like to use my fingers, like I dip it until the tips of my fingers touch the milk, just barely. Leave it in there for about two to three seconds, pull it out and eat them. It's my favorite treat. Oreos and milk is my favorite treat. I'm just going to say it. Wow. I put a little peanut butter on mine. Jeff will loves some peanut butter on his horse, which it is delicious. You put it in milk then too? Interesting.

Yeah. Huh. I'll try that. I'll try that. Great question. This is from Pete. What animal has the smelliest poop? Polar bears are in the running.

Really? Because it's all this like fat that their body has rendered and it comes out like this thick black tar. And it smells unlike anything you've ever smelled. It's terrible. I would almost, you know, I'm going to say polar bear. Of the poop that I've personally smelled, polar bear's the worst. I guess I just got to get out there and smell some more poop. I don't have a good answer for this.

I had one in the running after Mexico. Your poop? Yeah, you did. That was one of the worst poops that ever smelled my life. It was God awful. Cleared out the hotel room. Okay. And then from Instagram, this is from Bill Lockhart, 89.

What is, in Wes's opinion, the most horrific, vicious attack on a human from an animal? Why? Huh. I have a hard time answering that off the top of my head, and I also don't want to, like, spoil anything in the future. Give a teaser. I would say, of the ones I've heard myself, because I'm so close to it, and I've heard a little bit of the audio, and I've gotten some first-person accounts of the attack scene, the Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend account,

like that attack, them being eaten alive by grizzly bears, is one of the hardest ones for me. Okay, let's just leave it that, because we're going to tell that whole. Yeah, and I have his autopsy photos. So all those things combined is, yeah. Oh, wow. Did he sign them? And we don't know when we're telling it, so sorry,

to keep you guys waiting, but that's how the world works, you know? Yep. Did he sign him? All right. This one's from Proxmoor. What are y'all's top three birds you want to see in the wild? So I'll let you guys think an answer first. Okay.

I'm going Ket-Saw, number one, Cassowary number two, and Great Grey Owl number three. Come to Yellowstone. I'll find you one of those. All right. Mike? Cassaway.

No. I'll go. with, I'll be happy to see any kind of penguin, any species. Oh, that's a good pick. Probably Emperor, just because they're just kind of the biggest and most striking, visually, to me at least. And then I'll go, I mean, Cassowary, ever since West talked about Cassowary is a while ago,

that's been pretty high. And then third pick, oh, let's go Albatross. Big old Albatross. Cool. I was going to say Penguin 2, but now I'm not going to, just since you've already said it. I am going to say, my number one's Cassowary, which we both said, all three of us I mean.

Harpy eagle, number two, which are a South American eagle that mostly eat monkeys and other mammals. And then my number three, I think, is a secretary bird, which is like a non-flying raptor that has really long legs that mostly eat like snakes and small animals, and they're really neat. Secretary bird. Cool. Yeah, it'd be nice to have one. It would. Take your calls. Pretty nice.

Tooth and Claw needs one. From Oana Raka, if you could live in any movie forever, what movie and what character would you choose? Oh gosh. Oana means family. That's what I thought when you read that name. Well, I might have said it wrong anyway. No, it's Oana, I think, anyway. If you could live as any movie character, who would you be?

More just like, I'm going to answer it more just if you could live in any movie setting. Yeah. Okay. What's your answer? I always think of the Shire. The Shire seems really nice to live in. I want to live in Jurassic Park. I want to see dinosaurs.

I think if I could have one, if a genie gave me three wishes, one of them is definitely to see live dinosaurs. Yeah, and everyone really is excited about being there the whole movie. Yeah, you're in an amusement. Things go great for everyone. Always spends as good. Yeah. That ice cream looks good. That's great.

Mike? So this is a jealous. Oh, the Jello, too. My pick is way out of left. In fact, it's so out of left field that I don't even know if I'm about to get the name of this movie, right? Ah. It's that Valerian, the planet of like a thousand, whatever world. Awful movie.

A terrible movie. But that opening sequence where it's kind of like goes through the generations, they incorporate more like alien races onto this big kind of just conglomeration of, I don't know, I think that'd be really cool just to have a thousand different crazy aliens. Space travel. Yeah. You're just looking for the weirdest alien that you can have sex with. Valeria? No, Valeria is like an STD, I think.

What is that? No, Valerian root is the thing you take to go to sleep. Okay. You're thinking of venereal. Venerial disease. I can't remember what that thing's called. Okay. And then from Les Freire's, Best Anime Animal.

I'm going to just say Pikachu. Classic. I love Pikachu. The only anime series of our, watch start to finish is attack on Titan and there's no real animals in it. Is there none? Not. There's horses.

There you are. Sure. The horses from attack on Titan. This is actually really serendipitous because whenever I think about animals in anime, I always think of Beppo, the polar bear from One Piece from Laws crew on the little submarine. Yeah. I love.

He's like a kung fu polar bear that's in a little orange jumpsuit and he's just so funny to me. You know what? You guys made me watch a bunch of One Piece. I'll say those huge goldfish that hang out in the water in one piece, whatever those are. You'd like Beppo West. You just got to watch like 800 more episodes. All right. So to wrap up, we're going to do our conservation corner.

So polar bears on the IUCN list are listed as vulnerable. And the reason they're vulnerable and not endangered or critically endangered is because they haven't lost their habitat yet, but they're quickly losing it. and it's this like huge problem that is almost impossible to solve, which is climate change. As I mentioned before, the way that they catch their food, the food that they've evolved for hundreds of thousands of years to be able to eat is by the ice. They use the sea ice to catch those seals through the breathing holes, through stock hunting. They need the sea ice to do that. And if they don't have the sea ice, they can't hunt seals.

And they don't have a food source on land that gives them that same kind of energy requirement. to survive. So polar bears, like, you'll probably, you'd probably have individual polar bears that would figure out a way to, like, eke it out without the ability to hunt seals. But as a population, as, like, their entire population across the Arctic, it will collapse once they don't have ice anymore. That's right. Yeah, we're already starting to see it, especially in some of the more southern populations

of polar bears. We're starting to see females that aren't having many cubs or no cubs at all. I have a friend who had a research season where they didn't see a sea. single female with cubs. Their body condition is getting a lot worse. And that's just because that fasting period where they're on land is getting pushed weeks and weeks longer. And we're getting really close to this tipping point where we're going to start to see mass die-offs. And there's been papers written about that. One scientist that I worked with pretty closely thinks that by 2050 we might lose two-thirds of the world's polar bears. So, and then by the end of the

century, there would just be, you know, very small populations in the high Canadian Arctic that are that are holding on. So it's a really dire thing. How well are ringed sails and, or ring sales? How well are ringed seals and bearded seals population? Like, how are they doing? From what I understand they're doing pretty well, but what is probably likely to happen too is this, the Arctic frees up more and more and there's less ice. There's probably going to be a lot more orca activity in the Arctic, and they are great at killing seals and so that would probably be a big pressure on their populations as well. Do they get killed more by polar bears or orcas? I'm not sure. Probably more polar bears because they don't exist in the

Southern ring seals and bearded seals are an Arctic species of seals and there's not that many orcas in the Arctic. So I'm guessing polar bears. But they'll be in trouble too when they lose the ice because they depend on the ice for a lot of their food as well. And then a few other things that are happening with polar bears. Because they have less. ice and they're spending less time out on the sea ice. They're spending more time on land, and a lot of these communities up in the Arctic as a result are seeing a lot more conflicts with polar bears because they're on land more and they're by these communities more. And so that leads to two things. It leads to bears being killed because they're getting into trouble. And then it also leads to people who are

allowed to hunt them, for example, indigenous communities, thinking that there's more bears and so they should be able to kill more of them. And that's kind of an unfortunate side effect of this. There are still a lot of places where polar bears can be legally hunted. Luckily, there are places where it's been shut down as well. But I do think for those indigenous communities, it's an important part of their history. It's something we need to preserve them to be able to hunt these bears that they've always hunted for hundreds of thousands of years. But it does need to be really controlled so it doesn't have an effect on their populations. Pollution, a number of other things are affecting them, but the big threat for them is climate change and loss of that sea ice habitat.

All right. Our last category, our claw rating for polar bears, mine's very obvious. Ten claw animal. If there could be like a gilded, golden version of a ten-cloy animal, this would be it for me. They're a top five animal for me, without a doubt, probably top three. Nine. Nine for me. How about that? How about that, Wes? I'll go, I'll go ten claws, and I forget my ranking. I think it was like 12 or Yeah, somewhere around there. I need to go back to mics. Why are you a nine? You've always said that polar bears were like your favorite bear.

You picked them in the March Madness last year as your number one pick. That's true. I'm just being a little more careful about just throwing tens around willy-nilly like you chumps. You're so tired. Polar bears are your favorite bear? Yeah, but they're like not a top ten animal for me. Okay. Surprising.

Your top is tiger, right? And then like crocodilians? Pretty much, yeah. Both for sexual reasons. Yeah, mostly just for the feelings they evoke inside of me. Okay. Orcas. All right.

You know, I can't argue. It's your personal decision. Yeah. But I am a little shocked by it. I like bees more than polar bears. Would you rather see a bee than a polar bear? If you're really backing me into a weird corner here that I wasn't prepared for. But, uh, yeah, I'd rather see a bee than a polar bear.

It doesn't necessarily need to be that. Like, it doesn't need to be what animal you'd most want to see. Yeah. No, I'd for sure prefer to see a polar bear. And polar bears are awesome. They're, if they're not top 20, I don't. I don't know. I'm going crazy if they're not. But I'm just being a little more protective, handing out tens.

I hand out tens like crazy. I know. You're wild. They'd probably move into my top 10 animals if I, like, ever see one in the wild. Yeah. Well, that's it for this week's episode, our second polar bear attack story. Rings West. Good job. Yeah, that's great. Thanks as always, everyone who's joining us.

And again, we're going to have both those subscription services available to you if you are interested in our bonus episodes. We got our Patreon. Great little community on there. And then we're hoping to start something equally as cool on the Apple subscription service. Again, you don't need to subscribe to both. You don't. There's perks.

They'll have the same catalog. Yeah, the same exact episodes are going to be there. So don't feel like we're doubling up or trying to weasel money out of you somehow. We just want to make it for whatever is most convenient for you. That's just going to be there. All right. Cool. Thanks, guys.

We'll see you later. Thanks. See you. Bye. Bye.