Iceland has defended shooting dead a polar bear that appears to have travelled 300km from Greenland (video, not suitable for Knut fans).

The 250 kg beast was originally going to be tranquillised, but weather conditions put a stop to that.

“There was a lot of fog in the area and the bear was moving into the fog. We couldn’t risk losing him and there was no time to wait for anaesthetics, so we had to shoot him. It was for the safety of the public,” Police Superintendent Stefan Vagn Stefansson told Icelandic radio (Reuters).

Although some reports are saying the bear swam from Greenland, it seems more likely it was carried on drifting ice. “When polar bears have come to Iceland they have usually travelled most of the way on icebergs that continuously drift south along Greenland’s east coast,” notes Vísindavefurinn, a science website run by the University of Iceland, in a 2005 article ‘Could a polar bear swim from Greenland to Iceland?’.

Just last year the Daily Telegraph was warning that Icelanders were worried that thick pack ice might bring more bears.

The paper noted:

There have been numerous accounts of bears making land on the shores of Iceland in the past. But it is the bears who tend to come off worse in encounters with the Icelanders, who take a distinctly unsentimental approach to wildlife.

In a 2003 article from Icelandic Geographic, Thor Jakobsson, head of the Sea Ice Research Unit of the Icelandic Meteorological Office said,

Icelandic annals contain fairly frequent reports of polar bears which had been transported to Iceland by polar ice. As might be expected, they were more frequent visitors in past centuries when the ice was more extensive. All the same, they were a rare enough sight to cause a flurry of excitement when word spread of a polar bear in the vicinity. People closed themselves securely in their dwellings while the most daring men joined up to take on the uninvited guest.

There are stories, for example, of the shooting of a polar bear in 1792 in the West Fjords and another in North Iceland. In 1802 two bears came ashore in the Strandir district of the West Fjords. After spending several days visiting fish-storage shacks, one of the bears was killed. Nothing more was heard of the other. In 1874, a number of polar bears came to Iceland; three were killed in the Hornstrandir region of the West Fjords while three came ashore in Mjóifjörður in the East Fjords. Bears have not been known in Iceland since the year 1988, although in 1993 fishermen noticed a polar bear swimming several miles offshore.

Although a lot of people are angry about the shooting, what would you do if a 250kg killing machine turned up in your backyard?

Image: A bear unrelated to the Iceland beast considers his holiday options / Susanne Miller – USFWS