HANGRY EYES
Sound familiar? Your husband or work colleague perhaps? I feel for you, I really do. Imagine, then, a town where hangry spreads like a pandemic among Toyota Yaris-sized apex predators who can both swim and run faster than you can.
Welcome to autumn in Churchill, Canada’s accidental polar bear capital, 1000 distant kilometres north of Manitoba’s capital, Winnipeg, as the lesser snow goose flies. Polar Bear Capital – sounds like a magical Disney kingdom, right? Well, there are a few things you need to know about polar bears…
While the animal radiates a toilet-paper-commercial-Labrador’s cuteness, it also happens to be world’s largest land predator with a post-fast appetite roughly equivalent to a hungover rugby team. For the bear, this is simply a survival mechanism against heartless winters (minus 40 and beyond). But for the remainder of the 58th parallel north’s food chain, doe-eyed tourists and even hardened locals, this degree of hangry can be Texas-Chainsaw-Massacre confronting.
Local Stanley Spence has treaty rights to ‘harvest’ the meat and skins of animals that his ancestors have hunted for aeons on the shores of Churchill’s immense backyard, Hudson Bay. These rights no longer extend to
