Thursday 17 April 2008

Polar Bears, Germany's new national mascots

For quite some time now Germans are stark raving mad about polar bears. Yes, polar bears. Those artic predators. Still most people would consider them to be very cute at a young age. It all started with a polar bear baby at the Berlin zoo which was seperated from its parents after his birth. There was one animal welfare activist who said in a newspaper article that the poor animal would be better off if it was killed which caused a huge uproar by the nation's biggest tabloid, the Bild-Zeitung. So the media caught on to the story and suddenly the small polar bear was a front page celebrity. Named Knut it soon got the masses streaming into the Berlin zoo to take a look at the little guy. Thsi went on for quite a few weeks and I really was glad when it finally all died down and the media attention shifted towards other things.
But then the Nuremburg zoo pulls out Flocke, the next polar bear baby and the whole thing repeats itself. Not with the scandal about the bear being better off when it is killed, but still there are tons of people roaming the cages in Nuremburg only to get a small glimpse of that white fur thing running around. And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse there's another polar bear baby, this time at the Stuttgart zoo. Frontpages, etc, you know the story. There's even documentaries on news television stations and I believe there was even a documentary which was shown at cinemas.

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