In this absurd yet beautiful video, we can witness polar bears playing alongside a pack of huskies under human supervision.
What caught me by surprise were
1) from my vast experience of watching Animal Planet (yes, I’m a TV junkie), I always had this impression that polar bears are solitary animals. They usually travel alone, and would pair up to mate only during mating season. Even then, the males have to seek very hard - with their keen sense of smell - for females as they live very far apart from each other. Just for them to congregate is unimaginable. And for the man in the video to comment that polar bears are social animals is extremely bemusing to me.
2) then there were hair-rising moments when the bears bite the dogs on their necks. *no dogs were hurt in this video.*
The heads of the dogs look dangerously close to being bitten off by the bears. The act of picking up smaller animals by their necks resembles the act of parent animals picking up their cubs - for example big cats like lions. Neck biting is also a form of play for the cats.
I wonder whether polar bears also pick up their cubs in this fashion and play with each other by biting each other on their necks. If polar bears do play among each other by biting each other on their necks, do they treat the huskies as their own kind?
3) the dogs seem to shed all forms of guard towards the bears. Are they so confident that their owner would be able to protect them? Could it be that they find safety in numbers? Or could it be that they had lost all their hunting instinct and danger awareness due to domestication? Or could it be something else?
To answer my doubts and validate my impression of both polar bears and dogs, I did some research and verification.
Polar bears are indeed solitary animals and would pair up usually only to mate. However, some do gather at places such as Churchill in Manitoba as part of their annual migration. As many as a thousand polar bears would wait there for Hudson Bay to refreeze before moving out for their seal hunting season. It has become such a phenomenon that Churchill attracted more than ten thousand tourists each year and was documented by PBS in its program
Polar Bear Invasion. Churchill has also become one of the best places to study polar bear and is likely to be the place where the featured video is shot.
To answer why polar bears and huskies are not showing aggression to each other, I propose 2 reasons for their play behavior. The primary reason will be that they are able to read each other’s body language due to their frequent interaction. Ability to read each other’s body language is not restricted intra-specifically and consensus to play was reached when both animals do not show signs of aggression.
In a study done on dogs and cats living together under one roof, it is shown that the earlier both species are exposed to each other, the better mutual understanding can be attained. They will be able to comprehend each other’s body language which culminates in friendliness between these two traditional nemesis. It can be inferred that animals belonging to different species can read each other’s body language.
A keen-eyed observer, Stuart Brown,
noticed in the photographs of renowned german photographer
Norbert Rosing that the husky was not showing its fangs and the polar bear was not raising its ears in their face-off. Albeit being traditional nemesis, the absence of aggression leads to the unfolding of peaceful play between the 2 animals. This further substantiated my proposal they inter-specific consensus can be achieved. The set of photographs can be found
here.
The secondary reason will be classical conditioning. The huskies owner mentioned using cracker shell to scare the bears away in the event of bear attack. Cracker shells shot produces a loud sound similar to a gunshot, and are used strategically by other
national parks to scare away other species of bears. The bears know the cost - their potential death - weighs more than the benefit of savoring fat-less dog steaks from maybe witnessing their friends being killed by guns.
Reference
Complete Polar Bear Fact (http://www.geocities.com/mikepolarbear/together.html). Taken on 19 Mar 08.
Feuerstein, N. & Terkel, J. (2007).
Interrelationships of dogs (Canis familiaris) and cats (Felis catus L.) living under the same roof. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 20 December 2007.