Polar Bears Run Amok In Churchill, Manitoba
by Pauli Poisuo
Here's a question: What would you do if you woke up one day and found out that you're now living in the middle of a popular polar bear hangout?
That’s not a hypothetical question, by the way. There’s a correct answer, and weirdly, it’s not “grab your bug-out bag and escape as fast as humanly possible, while uttering a constant stream of continuous panicked ululating.”
If you ask Churchill, Canada, the answer to handling an unwanted neighbour that also happens to be a 1,300-pound carnivore is simple: You just keep living your goddamn life like a normal person, and when the bears get annoying, you deal with them like they're bandits from the Old West.
Which, yes ... involves throwing them in jail. For such is the Churchill way.
Churchill is an incredibly remote town in an area of Manitoba that’s been populated for around 4,000 years. The actual town itself is a bit newer, but the current residents still aren’t about to move for the minor inconvenience of a few hundred giant predators roaming the area on a regular basis. As it happens, the place is smack dab on the path polar bears use to migrate between ice and land as seasons change, so the townspeople have a steady flow of "unstoppable force" to test their "immovable object" philosophy against.
The town’s absurd polar bear concentration is actually so good for tourism that Churchill happily advertises itself as the “Polar Bear Capital of the World.” But for the average residents who enjoy simple things like not having their faces eaten, it’s not an optimal situation … especially because they don't want to kill the deeply endangered beasts. As such, certain arrangements must be made, especially for the weeks when polar bears are so numerous that they’re wandering the streets and peeking inside people’s homes.
And cars and such.
Fortunately, living in extreme conditions breeds extreme creativity, and over time, Churchill has become pretty adept at dealing with the animals. There’s a very good hotline, and a “holy crap there are polar bears here” app that informs people of the areas where, holy crap, there really are polar bears here. There’s an ingenious, seal-scented perimeter contraption, specifically designed to divert the animals from the town. The residents have become very, very, good at approaching every single street corner with caution, lest they walk into a horror movie. And on the off chance that they forget to do so, they can rely on a town-wide agreement that assures every door everywhere is left unlocked, just in case someone needs a last-ditch escape from a hungry beast.
However, when all of this fails, the animals that cause too much trouble are quick to find that Churchill is essentially a town-sized “Home Alone” scenario for polar bears.
They don’t shoot the worst troublemaker bears these days; the people are happy to scare the beasts out of the area with blanks, paintball guns, and rubber bullets. If a particular bear gets on their nerves too much, they simply lure it into a giant, specially-constructed polar bear trap. Then, they shut it in an even more giant, even more specially-made polar bear jail for 30 days. After the bear has learned learned its lesson (probably), they relocate it after giving it a radio tag, an identifying lip tattoo, and, presumably, a hell of an existential crisis. It’s not just two or three polar bears that have gone through the experience, either. As of 2016, the Polar Bear Holding Facility had hosted over 2,000 inmates.
Most of the time, all of this works surprisingly well. On the off chance that it doesn't, some of Churchill's more senior residents have been known to flat-out attack antagonizing polar bears with shovels. Seriously.
I mean, it is Mother Nature's world, after all. We're just living in it.
