Tiergarten Nürnberg Polar Bear cubs left to die.

Let's update the whole situation:
1. "Vilma" seems to have eaten her cubs
2. " Vera" carries one cub around and they now think about bottlefeeding it.(the cub, not the mother;) )

The German animal rights activists try to sue everyone and everything in the zoo (why not take the humanisation one step further and sue the male bear for not paying alimonies-in the form of fish, maybe-to his females...? I'm also surprised that the feminist wing of the "Greens" party has not yet vituperated him for being "typically male & macho" and a bad father... jk)and the German media now has another "highly important" topic to talk about this week; huge emotional headlines and first page "reports" by the German yellow press. I'm just wondering what's going to be next week's "tragedy"? I'm putting my money on Britney Spears & Paris Hilton...
 
Sun Wukong, quite a few of the British "red-tops" (tabloids) have taken up this story as well.

It's on the S*n's homepage next to a young girl dieing in a gas explosion!! (oh, as a Liverpool FC supporter I refuse to type out that dishrag's name out of respect for Hillsborough - just replace * with 'u')
 
I suspect this could be worse than Knut, since this may not have a "happy ending". Hopefully, if the last cub dies that is, this will not last long, since people forget quickly, and the tabloids and newspapers have no long-running interest in something that's dead and gone.
 
I stand corrected :p

Polar bear cubs just don't have the same appeal when they are dead.
 
According to Australian media, one of the cubs has been pulled from the mother after she apparently ate the other two and showed unusual behaviour, picking up and dropping the other while the animal was on display, this has been caught on film. I only caught the end of the report though so don't hold me to it.
 
sorry jarkari, i read that a different cub was pulled, from another zoo. It is all to conflicting.
 
I can't find what part you said before that is relevant to the cub being pulled. please quote it. Tens News was saying it was one of the cubs at this zoo
 
Sun Wukong said:
Let's update the whole situation:
1. "Vilma" seems to have eaten her cubs
2. " Vera" carries one cub around and they now think about bottlefeeding it.

...
Click to expand...
Sic?

The zoo took the single (no second, third or any other made-up number)cub away from "Vera" yesterday night. It's now in the zoo vet hospital.
 
Does anyone not see the real problem here? The zoo has let this mother out & on show too early! From the footage I have seen other than the dropping the cub, the polar bear seems to be an attentive mother and is clearly seen cleaning the cub!

I would raise the question, why was the mother and cub put on display? When in the wild they would not appear from the den for a few months!
 
They were not put on display! The mother had acess to the outdoor enclosure because she wanted to go out and to avoid that she became nervous because of being locked in, the door to the outdoor enclosure was open all the time since she had the cub. She started to go out and leave the cub alone for some time very early, but it was her decision. Yesterday she became very nervous for unkown reasons, she took the cub outside, carried it around, dropped it a couple of times and finally abandoned it in the outdoor enclosure. This was the moment when the keepers stepped in and rescued the cub.
 
Two cubs are already dead...

It staggers me the zoo has changed its stand point now and stepped in, all it is doing is opening itself up to critism from both sides... At least before you could respect them for "letting nature take its course"... (which I think is a bit of hogwash, nature would be able to take its course if humans could still leave them completely in the wild, which due to habitat destruction we can't)...

Now they just look confused and liable...
 
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I think the only mistake they made was talking in public about the theoretic situation that one of the mothers wouldn`t nurse their cubs. At that time, everything was ok and both mothers were caring for their babys, one better and the other one not that good, but both ok. Then later the situation changed dramatically (2 cubs dead and the other one abandoned in the outdoor enclosure). It`s so much easier to say that you would not interfere and let the cubs die instead of hand-rearing them when everything is ok and the emergency case just theory. Letting a cub dying in the front of the public in the outdoor enclosure is something different and I agree that they rescued it. Handreared animals will usually develop normally when put back with animals of their own kind at an early age. I am concerend because Knut is still alone in Berlin with no plans to integrate him back with other bears until next summer or autum (he will be alomst 2 then!), sending him to another zoo now and bringing him together with other young polar bears would be much better in my opinion and giving him the possibility to learn appropriate social behavoir. I am confident though that Nurembegr will avoid the mistake Berlin is making right now with Knut.

P.S.: It`s a girl.
 
Perhaps a future partner for Knut?

Why are these zoos letting their Polar Bears breed if they don't really want them to produce cubs and are finding these problems with stressed mothers either abandoning or neglecting their cubs. Wouldn't it be better to have them on contraceptive implants?
 
But Nuremberg and Berlin WANT polar bear cubs? These cubs are not surplus but wanted (and needed to keep up the european population...). The 2 females in Nuremberg were both first-time mothers and it`s no surprise that things went wrong. The positive thing is that both cared for their cubs 4-5 weeks and got much-needed experience. Hopefully next year they`ll have more sucess and can both raise their cubs sucessfully and without human help.

Regarding Berlin, things are a little different, because their females breed since years and never raise the cubs. I don`t know the exact number of deceased cubs, but I think there have been at least 10 dying with only Knut surviving. I`ve been told the facility in Berlin is not suitable for polar bear females, they don`t have enough peace and get too stressed by the noise of the other animals and the keepers. To make things worse, Knut`s mother is an ex circus bear and has behavoir problems because of her past. So it is more then likely that all polar bears born in Berlin in the next years will end up being hand raised or dead (or dead after failed handrearing). I would put them on the pill but the management of the Berlin Zoo seems to have different plans.
 
Yassa said:
But Nuremberg and Berlin WANT polar bear cubs? These cubs are not surplus but wanted (and needed to keep up the european population...).
Click to expand...

It seems to be a different situation in Europe than in the Uk. You probably know in Uk Polar Bears have been all but phased out nowadays(only two left in the whole country) It seems in Europe a lot of zoos still want to keep this species and maintain it as a 'zoo population.'

Of course, even in Uk, Polar bears could reappear in zoos if they are seen to be endangered by climatic change, though I think they would only be exhibited again in Britain if enclosures were very spacious and regarded as suitable
 
Oh yes a lot of "mainland Europe" zoos want to keep polar bears and are building new enclosures for them. Currently at least 2 zoos are busy building new polar bear facilities: Hannover and Rotterdam, Rotterdam being ready soon. Amsterdam and maybe Emmen are planning a new enclosure although this can take some years. In the last years, Gelsenkirchen, Karlsruhe (ok that was in 2000 and not recently) and Bremerhafen finished new enclosures and want to breed too. Rhenen is currently improving/renovating one of the existing enclosures to have enough space for their 2 breeding females and the male (one female gace birth to a cub a few weeks ago). It seems we are having a baby boom with polar bears in Europe at the moment - one cub in Nuremberg, one cub in Rhenen, 2 cubs in Vienna, 2 cubs in Brno/Chech Republic...

There are still many very unsuitable, really bad polar bear enclosures left, unfortunatley (some really bad examples Rostock, Wuppertal, Amsterdam... Munich isn`t great either)
 
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