Le Nunavut défend férocement la chasse à l'ours polaire

[Animal 0]

Nunavut defends bear hunt in fierce dispute over an icon of the fight against
climate change

Martin MittelstaedtFrom Saturday's Globe and Mail Published on
Friday, Mar. 05, 2010 8:45PM ESTLast updated on Saturday, Mar. 06, 2010 3:32AM


ESTA cross-border battle is looming over polar bears, the Arctic giants that
provoke passionate reactions in both Canada and the United States.The U.S. wants
to ban the trade in polar-bear body parts, a proposal that will be considered at
a meeting beginning next week of the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species. Canada, the only country allowing the sale of bear skins and
trophy hunting of the animals, is trying to defeat the proposal.The looming
dispute over the species that environmentalists have made a sentinel of climate
change is already taking on a no-holds-barred intensity.Animal rights activists
in the U.S. just issued a study claiming that stalking the big carnivores for
trophies is a marginal economic activity benefiting only a handful of people,
and asserting that widespread hunting of the animals is only a recently adopted
part of Inuit culture. Inuit who organize trophy hunting, it suggests, are
violating their culture's tradition of respect for animals.Nunavut's government,
meanwhile, is trying to head off criticism that it is showing lax oversight of
its bears. It announced a big cut in the number of the animals it will allow to
be killed each year in the Baffin Bay area, where biologists have been alarmed
by years of overhunting by residents of the territory and nearby
Greenland.Saying it is reacting to “the urgency of the conservation concern,”
Nunavut will reduce the numbers killed annually from 105 to 65 over the next
four years. The current population in the area is estimated at about 1,500.
Large numbers of the animals have been killed in recent years under a mistaken
assessment that there were at least 2,000. The announcement wasn't timed to
affect the U.S. trade-ban proposal, said Stephen Pinksen, director of policy at
Nunavut's Department of Environment.The study critical of trophy hunting – from
the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the Humane Society International –
said the practice nets Nunavut Inuit communities only about $1.5-million, or
less than 0.1 per cent of the economy. The U.S.-based groups also said only a
few dozen people, “at most,” benefit from the hunt.Trophy hunting was developed
in the 1980s by local governments to promote tourist revenue, and the bears were
not widely taken by Inuit before the arrival of Europeans, it said. “It's not
part of their culture. This is something that was developed within their
culture,” said Rebecca Aldworth, director of Humane Society International
Canada.The flurry of action comes just as the international community is to
consider the proposal to ban sales of polar-bear parts under the UN's convention
on endangered species. If adopted, the U.S. recommendation would allow other
countries to block the import of bearskins and trophies from Canada. The U.S.
wants more protection for the species, based on estimates by its government
biologists that populations could crash by two-thirds by 2050 because of
declining sea ice.There are about 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears in the world,
most of them in Canada but also in Alaska, Russia, Greenland and Norway. Canada
disputes that the bears need more protection: Environment Canada said in an
e-mail that “Canada's polar bears are not threatened by trade.”Mr. Pinksen said
if the ban reduces trophy hunting, there will be no impact on bear numbers
because the overall harvest won't change. Currently, Inuit can choose to use
their quota to accommodate trophy hunters, or hunt the bears themselves. He said
if fewer are killed by trophy hunters, Inuit will offset the reduction by
increasing their share.