Why Kill a Baby Polar Bear?

BERLIN, March 20, 2007 — -- An adorable polar bear cub who has won the hearts of Berliners has just about escaped the death sentence that animal rights activists had imposed on him

Knut is the first baby polar bear to survive in the Berlin zoo in 30 years. His mother, Tosca, a grumpy 20-year-old former circus bear, abandoned him and his brother to die on a rock in the bear pit after they were born on Dec. 5, 2006.

Keepers scooped the cubs out of the compound with fishing net and placed both bear babies in an incubator.

Only Knut survived, and he was brought up as a pampered baby, fed with human milk and cod-liver oil every half hour. Now that he's almost 4 months old, he is fed chicken puree, sleeps with a teddy bear, plays with a football and his keeper strums Elvis Presley songs to improve his mood.

That treatment, however, has brought complaints from animal rights campaigners. They claimed it is inappropriate to raise a polar bear baby by a human hand. One group even considered it a blatant violation of animal welfare laws and threatened to take the zoo to court.

Wolfram Graf-Rudolf, director of the zoo in Aachen, Germany, told ABC News, "I've experienced bottle-feeding three baby bears myself years ago, and I remember how tough it was for the little ones, when they grew up and had to be separated from their keepers. For as long as they are cute little things, everything is easy. But there were huge problems once they grew up.

"The animal will now be fixated on his keeper and not be a 'real' bear; he could not survive in the wild. One should have the courage to put him to sleep much earlier, but now it is too late, the mistake has been made and the zoo now has to raise the bear."

Some animal rights activists even called for the zoo to kill the baby bear with T61, a poison that kills in two seconds.

Those claims have provoked a public outcry and little Knut has become a media celebrity. A headline in the German tabloid Bild Zeitung asked "Must sweet Knut be killed?" The next day, some Berlin children were out on the streets angrily protesting with hand-drawn posters reading "Knut must live" and "Knut is cute."

Six-year-old Celina was quoted by Bild Zeitung, saying, "How can adults be so mean? I would be terribly sad if Knut must die!" and Tobias, 5, told the newspaper, "Knut is such a lovely baby bear. They must let him live! I thought the zoo is protecting animals, not killing them."