• butter
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    26
    ·
    1 month ago

    Polar bears don’t find food as readily as Grizzly bears. If a Grizzly hesitates on a salmon, it’ll find another salmon.

    If a Polar hesitates on a penguin, it could starve.

    • Hotspur@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      1 month ago

      Gotcha so the idea is they’re just gonna give it a shot and try to eat you, regardless, because the stakes, they are high?

      To be fair, in a moral sense, they should absolutely try and eat every human they can get their claws on; we have done a bang up job on making their habitat and food sources disappear.

      • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 month ago

        because the stakes, they are high?

        I also heard it’s because a typical polar bear has never encountered anything that moves that isn’t food.

        So they don’t have any mental category for “moving things on the ice I should flee from” or even “moving things on the ice that isn’t totally delicious”.

      • DarkSirrush@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 month ago

        Their habitat has also shrunk so much, and their population dwindled so much, that they have gotten fairly inbred and that is causing more aggression and insanity.

        There is also a female polar that keeps breeding with grizzlies, and those offspring are consistently more aggressive and dangerous.