Knut gets love

Our housekeeper Mona has a sense of humor, and occasionally leaves the bed decorated with some of the stuffed animals we have in the bedroom. Yesterday’s was especially cute, featuring the cuddly embrace of two bears that have been given to us – a Steiff Knut from my friend Andrea and a hand-made fluffy brown teddy that Mark’s sister Vickie made and gave to us. Everyone knows we like bears!


Bear love



Andrea, who lives in Germany, knew that we were Knut fans and sent us this beautiful little Knut. Like the rest of the world we were enraptured by the poor rejected polar bear that the Berlin Zoo hand-fed and nursed into adulthood. Who couldn’t love a baby polar bear? The trouble was, Knut grew into a brownish scraggly and not-so-pretty adolescent and young adult, who seemed isolated and depressed. People still came, but that lovely bloom of fresh white youth and huggable-ness was long gone.

But then, to the shock and sadness of the whole world, Knut died last month of some sort of strange changes in his brain, and convulsions which caused him to fall into his pool and drown. He was only four years old, which is very young for a polar bear. Thinking back, his mother rejected him when he was so young that he would have died without human intervention. Because we anthropomorphize, we fed him (though many wildlife experts thought this was wrong and said so). But what if his mamma was right? What if she perceived that he had a problem that would not let him live long, and she chose the solution that nature would have provided. . .

We will never know – but it’s something to think about. Knut had some good years of life, he was by the account of his keeper a happy if shy bear, and was learning how to be social with other bears when the tragedy occurred. By human standards, we did the right thing for Knut. And I suppose that Knut gave the humanity a renewed focus on the polar bear kind, which the bears badly need in this complex world today.

In a gesture not usually provided to human kind (except perhaps Evita Peron), the Berlin Zoo decided to stuff Knut’s body and place him in the Berlin Museum of Natural History – so visitors can still see at least the outsidy parts of Knut for generations to come.