A polar bear walked into a bar……..no, wait! Wrong beginning to this story but just as asinine. According to Animal Planet, polar bears are safer for humans to be around than dogs.

I was sitting in my favorite chair last night waiting impatiently for the Fiesta Bowl to start. (In need to move out West so that I don’t have to stay up so late watching live sports broadcasts.) So, I’m flipping through channels and I come across Animal Planet and they’re talking about polar bears. I pause.

On the TV screen is the film of a polar bear standing on its hind legs with front legs and paws on one of those tundra buses, that schlep tourists out into the “wilds” to see bears, looking in. The narrator says something not exactly in these words. “The polar bear is just as curious about the people in the bus as the people are about the bear.”

Great! But then he goes on to say that as a matter of fact polar bears are safer to be around than your neighbor’s dog. Then begins the ridiculous citing of statistics. Something like, “As a matter of fact there have been only 9 deaths associated with polar bears in Northern Russia where polar bears are plentiful.” This is followed by some obscene number of deaths associated with dog attacks worldwide.

So let’s see. I think I read recently that worldwide there are something in the order of between 20,000 and 30,000 polar bears. Help me out here if you can. How many of those polar bears live near civilization? By civilization I mean around more than a handful of people and we don’t count tourists.

Not even considering the fact that polar bears and humans never see each other – when’s the last time you encountered a real live polar bear outside of the zoo? – Consider this and again help me out here.

There are somewhere between 6.5 billion and 7 billion humans on the earth. According to Wikipedia, there are 400 million dogs in the world. Assuming that 400 million dogs, of which I think 300 million of them live in Florida alone, is referring to pet dogs, I think the odds are quite a bit higher that I’m going to encounter several hundred thousand dogs long before I run into a polar bear.

Do people not understand the absurdity when animal lovers spew these sorts of distorted, finely spun “facts”? Don’t get me wrong, I think them cute little buggers make nice Coca-Cola commercials. Which reminds me. I don’t recalling seeing any during the Christmas holiday period.

Polar bears are a fascinating animal. The little ones are cuter than the dickens but you would be making a big mistake if you decided to approach a polar bear in the wild because you were told you are safer around a polar bear than your neighbors dog.

Tom Remington

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