RJ Hamster
EXPOSED: ‘Polar Bear Protection’ Charity Backs Killing Them
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EXPOSED: ‘Polar Bear Protection’ Charity Backs Killing Them
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GUEST POSTREAD IN APP
Polar Bears are well known and much beloved creatures. I bet not many of Protect the Wild’s readers have seen one in real life, but we have watched the wildlife documentaries, seen photos. Many children are familiar with what a polar bear cub looks like.
What else do we know about them? Well, they’re threatened with extinction, right? We’ve all seen the glossy adverts by conservation NGOs in magazines and on TV about the bears’ shrinking polar habitat. In fact, there are only an estimated 26,000 polar bears left in the wild and scientists predict two thirds of them may disappear by the middle of this century.
What’s another kitchen table fact about polar bears? Well, everyone knows that their existence is threatened by climate change. They need expanses of ice to survive and hunt, and that ice is melting at an accelerating rate.
In the UK, animal lovers send millions of pounds every year to NGOs like Polar Bears International and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Both charities offer ‘Adopt a Polar Bear’ schemes to their supporters.
Relatively few are aware that ‘trophy’ hunters kill a significant number of bears every year. We’re not talking about subsistence hunting by First Nations communities here either. This is trophy hunting, arranged for the benefit of rich bloodsport enthusiasts, with an average hunting trip setting you back in excess of US$40k. Furthermore, the international trade in polar bear body parts is still legal. Canada is the only country that supplies this market with polar bears shot from its own population, with China and Norway being the biggest importers. The largest and most ‘magnificent’ polar bear furs (or full mounted taxidermies) can fetch upwards of US$60,000. Whilst the number of polar bears entering the international market fluctuates annually, in the past 15 years the skins of over 2,000 polar bears have entered commercial trade.
Polar bear skins on sale in Svalbard, Norwegian Arctic..
Here’s the most shocking thing. The same NGOs that have been bombarding us with advertising asking us to ‘save the polar bears’ are actually vocal advocates for hunting and ‘trophy hunting’ and are enabling the continuation of the international trade in fur.
PBI, WWF, WTAF?
Director Abraham Joffe recently released an investigative documentary shining a much needed light on ‘trophy’ hunting of polar bears and the trade in their fur. The film – entitled Trade Secret – calls out WWF for repeatedly opposing restrictions on international commercial trade in polar bears, including at the meetings of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES. In the film, we see how slippery WWF’s public relations narrative is on polar bears. A casual visitor to their website would think that the organisation is opposed to the ‘trophy’ hunting or trade of polar bear skins, when the opposite is true. Check out the film here.
But other international conservation organisations need calling out too. That’s why Protect the Wild is releasing this expose of Polar Bears International (PBI), a Canada based NGO which elicits donations and bequests from UK donors.
PBI – originally called Polar Bears Alive – collects millions of dollars a year on behalf of polar bears, including from UK donors. The organisation was set up in 1992 to oppose polar bear hunting and invasive scientific research into the species. However – since the death of PBI founder Dan Guravich the NGO has been in a period of change. In 2001 businessman Robert Buchanan joined the organisation. Since then, the organisation has strayed a long way from its original aims and objectives. So much so that PBI – an organisation originally set up to oppose hunting – now refuses to speak out on ‘trophy’ hunting – and has opposed the end of the international trade in polar bear skins and body parts.
Protect the Wild has launched an online petition calling on Protect the Wild to change its position. To sign it CLICK HERE.
Hang on, aren’t polar bears protected already?
In 1973, the multilateral ‘Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears’ was signed in Oslo on behalf of Canada, Denmark, Norway, the United States, and the Soviet Union – the five nations with polar bear populations. The Treaty was a response to an existential threat posed to the species by hunting. It outlaws the hunting of polar bears, except in some circumstances. One of those exceptions is traditional indigenous hunting.
However, in some regions indigenous people make money from selling ‘tags’ (or permits) to kill bears to ‘trophy’ hunting companies. Foreign hunters pay a small fortune to accompany local people and shoot polar bears themselves. On top of that, the Canadian government provides financial incentives – via a subsidy program – to support the continued supply of polar bear skins to the international market. Shockingly, many of these skins are never actually sold at all – with hunters paid by government subsidy in their home communities, only for many of the skins to rot in auction house storage.
Conservation NGOs working to prevent protection
The CITES conference in Panama.
Appendices I, II and III to the CITES convention are lists of “species afforded different levels or types of protection from over-exploitation”. Animals listed on Appendix I are agreed to be endangered and the international trade in their body parts is prohibited.
Mind bogglingly, polar bears – a species that it’s common knowledge are facing a threat of extinction – are not listed on Appendix II. Why? Partly because powerful organisations have lobbied against it. Shockingly, these include big ‘conservation’ organsisations like WWF and PBI. Several other conservation organisations have stood up against the hunting of polar bears, including International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Species Survival Network (SSN), which is a coalition of over 80 conservation groups.
PBI, like WWF, has opposed the upgrading of polar bears from CITES Appendix II to Appendix I, helping ensure that ‘sports hunting’ and the commercial trade in their furs and body parts can continue – even as their numbers dwindle.
At the CITES meetings of the 15th and 16th Conference of the Parties (COP) in 2010 and 2013, wildlife defenders made the case for the inclusion of polar bears in Appendix I. WWFand PBI opposed both attempts.
For example, in 2012, PBI’s Chief Scientist Steven Armstrup blatantly opposed stronger protections, declaring:
“at this time there seems no reason to uplist polar bears under CITES, and lots of reasons not to.”
Almost a decade later, PBI’s stance remained unaltered. In 2021 the organisation’s website stated that:
“For the present, some populations may still be safely hunted. In some parts of Canada, local people can choose to ‘sell’ some tags [ie permits to hunt] to sport hunters.”
Polar bear skins on sale at a Canadian auction house.
Armstrup, who is still Emeritus Chief Scientist for PBI, publicly defended hunting to National Geographic in 2020:
“Polar bears, like other wildlife, are renewable resources if they have stable habitat and are managed in a sustainable way. I think we can’t lose sight of that, and we can’t lose sight of the fact that many cultures have a history going back thousands of years of hunting these animals. So we need to tread very carefully if we’re going to adopt a large umbrella piece of legislation like CITES uplisting that can affect the lives of lots of people.”
Armstrup continued:
“Now, I’m not going to say that at some point in the future we won’t want to just pull out all the stops we can: banning international trade, closing off [polar bear] hunting seasons. All of those things may eventually be on the table. But for the foreseeable future, there are a number of populations that we can probably harvest safely.”
Protect the Wild asked PBI whether they would support a future uplisting of polar bears from Appendix II to Appendix I at CITES. They responded by doubling down on their past policy. PBI wrote:
“As a science-based organisation, we know that climate change remains the overarching threat to polar bears across their range by a wide margin. We acknowledge that recent analyses are raising questions about the impact of hunting on specific subpopulations, which warrants deeper research and a broader dialogue with all the key stakeholders – including government bodies, Indigenous communities, and wildlife managers – as Northern communities continue to coexist with polar bears in a rapidly changing Arctic.
At present, according to the established criteria and available data, polar bears as a species do not meet the thresholds required for an uplisting from Appendix II to Appendix I.”
The opposition of PBI and other NGOs to further protection for the species has real world consequences. Since PBI last opposed the proposal to end the international polar bear skin trade at CITES in 2013, the skins of at least 1,760 polar bears have entered the international market.
PBI has strayed from its original path
Protect the Wild caught up with Dr. Nikita Ovsyanikov – a world renowned polar bear expert, conservationist and specialist in animal behavior – to speak about PBI. Nikita got to know PBI founder Dan Guravich when he was setting up the organisation. Ovsyanikov believes that PBI has strayed far from Guravich’s vision of an organisation dedicated to the protection of polar bears by opposing hunting and invasive scientific research. In fact, he says that PBI has “stolen” Guravich’s organisation.
Guravich, who originally trained as a genetic scientist but later worked as a wildlife photographer, met Ovsyanikov in 1992 on a trip to photograph female polar bears emerging from their maternal cave on Russia’s Wrangel island. The pair had ample time to talk during their trip, and became firm friends.
Protect the Wild also spoke to Dennis Compayre, a veteran wildlife guide and wildlife filmmaker who worked with Guravich in the ‘90s. He told us:
“He was a real champion of the polar bears. He looked after their wellbeing. We used to go to Cape Churchill [in Canada], which is 50 kilometers east of Churchill, where the big bears hang out. And we’d stay two or three weeks there. If Dan saw a bear that was underweight or looked like it was ailing, he would put antibiotics and pieces of hamburger and throw it to the animal to try to help it out.”
Ovsyanikov told us about the formation of Polar Bears Alive (which became PBI):
“Dan’s idea of creating a special NGO for polar bear protection was with the two prime objectives – to protect polar bears from being killed by hunters through substituting trophy hunting (as well as any hunting) with ecotourism based on polar bear viewing and photography, and to oppose invasive scientific exploitation of polar bears.”
So what changed?
PBI has changed dramatically since Guravich’s death in 1997. Ovsyanikov told Protect the Wild that the changes in the organisation sped up when Armstrup and Geoff York joined the organisation. York had previously worked with WWF, serving as Senior Program Officer for Arctic Species at WWF’s Global Arctic Programme. As part of his role, York had opposed the US government’s attempts to secure greater protections for Polar Bears at CITES. York now works as Senior Director of Research and Policy at PBI.
WWF’s support for ‘trophy’ hunting is well known. The organisation’s co-founder, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, was a prolific hunter himself and the NGO still accepts donations from the ‘trophy’ hunting industry. In fact, critics have argued that the WWF was set up to ensure the survival of species in order to ensure that ‘trophy’ hunting can continue.
In Ovsyanikov’s view, WWF’s pro-hunting ideology was exported to PBI when York joined the organisation. He said:
“When Jeff York joined PBI he brought WWF ideology into PBI. WWF ideology is to actively support trophy hunting”
Hunting endangering the existence of the polar bear
We asked Ovsyanikov what he thought about the continued hunting of polar bears, he said:
“You know it, it seems it so obvious that any hunting on an endangered species is extermination, because hunting is always much exceeding natural mortality in any animal population. And it’s also not selective, or if it is selective – like in case of trophy hunting – it’s selective in the opposite way that natural selection works, and that is the main danger.”
Another reason for the changes in PBI, according to both Compayre and Ovsyanikov, was a switch from a focus on polar bears, to one on climate change. According to Compayre:
“When Guravich passed [away] PBI switched over from just looking after the wellbeing of the polar bear to a more grandiose idea of saving the world by fighting climate change.”
Compayre said that PBI leveraged the narrative about global warming to get people to “open the purse strings”, but in doing so they decentred the polar bear.
PBI’s disengenuous statements
Polar Bears International’s homepage, soliciting donations with pretty pictures of polar bears.
PBI’s page on ‘Why is Polar Bear Hunting Allowed?’ has been updated recently to remove overt support for trophy hunting. But a glance at the web archive shows their previous explainer. The organisation’s previous statement gave the impression that most polar bear hunting is done in a sustainable by indigenous peoples. PBI stated:
“Over most of the polar bear’s range, polar bears are now mainly harvested by Indigenous peoples, with takes regulated by management systems designed to keep the take within the bounds that populations can support. In countries where harvest is allowed, each community gets a set number of tags that allow hunters residing there to harvest the number of bears the population can sustain. In some parts of Canada, local people can choose to “sell” some tags to sport hunters. That is, they guide a non-resident hunter out on the ice to hunt bears and they allow that non-resident to shoot the bear they might have shot. Typically, this “sport” hunting results in the take of fewer bears because the sport hunters are normally not as successful as the local hunters. The resulting cash economy is also significant for some northern communities with otherwise very limited opportunities for employment.”
One glance at the websites of companies organising polar bear hunts shows the lie in the notion that allowing ‘sport hunting’ means that less polar bears will be killed. The Hunting Consortium, a company that arranges expeditions and permits to kill polar bears, boasts:
“Hunters working with The Hunting Consortium can expect a high success rate, with 100% of past hunts resulting in successful.”
An advertising image from The Hunting Consortium’s website – a company that arranges trophy hunting exhibitions to kill polar bears.
German hunting company Blaser also advertises a 100% success rate for trophy hunting customers on its polar bear hunting trips in Nunavut in Canada.
Compayre – who lives in Churchill in the Hudson Bay – explained to Protect the Wild that the money from selling ‘tags’ remains with a few wealthy hunters. Compayre argued that ‘trophy’ hunting had no significant positive effect on communities. He said:
“The community doesn’t benefit from any of the trophy hunting. There’s only one or two people in any community that take international hunters out to kill a bear, and they certainly don’t distribute the fee they get to anybody in the community. In fact he puts it in his pocket and buys a new snow machine. So this whole idea that if you take away trophy hunting, you’re taking away the subsistence of the community is bullshit.”
The US based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has made a strong caseagainst the rhetoric put forward by WWF and PBI, arguing that polar bears are negatively affected by the fur trade and are under a serious threat of extinction. NRDC also highlighted that the increases in polar bear hunting coincided with a rising demand and prices for skins, suggesting that commercial market forces were influencing hunting levels.
Killing the ‘big breeders’
Trophy hunters are known to desire and target the largest and ‘most magnificent’ individual polar bears as their “trophy” kill. Many conservationists and some scientists have warned that the selective removal of the largest, fittest individuals may be undermining the species genetically. This ‘unnatural selection’ leaves behind weaker and less robust individuals at a time when the species faces the worsening threat of the climate crisis.
This is backed up by the advertising spiel that The Hunting Consortium uses to sell polar bear hunting trips. The Consortium clearly sees the size and ‘impressiveness’ of the bears as a selling point. According to their website:
“The polar bear hunt in Canada is an opportunity to pursue some of the largest and most impressive trophies in the world. The average size of a trophy polar bear is typically between 9 and 10 feet (2.7 to 3 meters) from nose to tail, with older males reaching weights of 1,200 pounds (540 kg) or more.”
Compayre described the effect of the targeting of the strongest bears on the polar bear population. He said:
“The fact is that these hunters want the biggest bear they can find. You know, the ‘big trophy bears’. So what they’re doing is going out and killing all the big breeders, the bears that keep sustaining the population. There’s not very many big populations of Western Hudson Bay polar bears around Churchill. It’s roughly about 1000 and if you do the math, you take away the males and the sub-adults and they’ll only have about 40 or 50 big breeders left within that whole population.
Compayre continued:
“I don’t agree with it, and I would do anything I could to stop it. But it takes a lot of lobbying to get things changed.”
Still not willing to speak out on trophy hunting and the skin trade
PBI may now have removed its overt support for ‘trophy’ hunting from its website, but its stance is far from clear. If the NGO wants to truly live up to its legacy and defend polar bears it should make a clear statement against ‘trophy’ hunting and oppose the skin trade by supporting the uplisting of the species at CITES.
One reason for PBI’s muted stance may well be that the NGO needs access to Inuit communities in Canada in order to continue its scientific research and polar bear tours. Compayre explained that this may be the reason they don’t want to speak out too loudly against hunting. He told us:
“To exist anywhere along the Hudson Bay coast – [PBI] have their offices in Churchill- If PBI dared ‘say that we’re against the harvesting of polar bears’, they would have been ostracised, and the door slammed on them, wherever they went along the coast.”
Protect the Wild asked PBI to clarify their stance on trophy hunting. Their reply sought to minimise its impact and neglected to take a clear stance against it. PBI’s media department wrote:
“While research thus far has shown trophy hunting to be statistically insignificant compared to the threats such as climate change, we are prioritising fundraising for a new analysis of the potential conservation and societal impacts of trophy hunting in Canada.”
This response displays a shocking level of ignorance of the effects of ‘trophy’ hunting. Polar bear experts have stated repeatedly that killing the biggest and strongest bears – which ‘trophy’ hunters prize the most – could damage the chances of survival for the species. PBI need to take a public stand against ‘trophy’ hunting now, not spend donors’ money on a costly analysis which will only prove the obvious reality.
We asked if PBI opposed the hunting of polar bears and the trade in their skins. They replied that they opposed “illegal“ hunting and trade. However they weren’t prepared to state their opposition to the legal trade. Moreover, they are still not prepared to support the further protections for polar bears that would come with a CITES uplisting.
PBI’s ties to animal cruelty
PBI has long-standing ties to Canada Goose, a company which has been criticised by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) for using the fur of snared coyotes in its luxury apparel. Canada Goose’s billionaire CEO Dani Reiss served as chairman of PBI USA for more than a decade. The same organisation that claims to be dedicated to polar bear conservation has had a man on its board whose company long profited from killing wildlife.
Reiss is still an Emeritus Director of Polar Bears International. Canada Goose is also listed as a “Diamond” corporate sponsor of PBI, and the company states that it has donated more than $8 million to the organisation. Canada Goose has also sold a range of polar bear conservation-themed apparel. (It should be noted that Canada Goose, after years of pressure, announced it would end the use of real fur in its products by the end of 2022).
Polar bear on snow covered ground.
Invasive science
One of Guravitch’s motivations for setting up Polar Bears Alive was to oppose invasive research on polar bears. He saw the suffering caused to the bears by being constantly pursued, darted with sedatives and fitted with monitoring devices – and wanted to end it.
Polar bear scientist Ovsyanikov agrees that this research has little to do with the welfare of the bears. He previously participated in polar bear research trips and recalls how his team extracted teeth from the bears without even local anaesthetic. When he asked why this was, he was told they were following “what was agreed in veterinarian protocols” and it would not kill the bear. Ovsyanikov said that the procedures caused distressing convulsions in the bears.
This constant research carries the clear risk of weakening polar bears, who are already facing multiple challenges to their survival. Ovsyanikov argued that the scientists were causing a “strong negative impact on endangered” animals and were contributing to driving them to extinction.
He explained that – since Guravich’s death – PBI was engaging in the very practices the NGO originally sought to oppose. In a recent article in the Svalbard Post, Ovsyanikov spoke out in support of a new non-invasive form of research studying polar bear populations.
Keeping the population at a ‘minimum level’
The support that has been given by so-called ‘conservation’ organisations to the polar bear skin trade and trophy hunting is done on the basis that hunting can be done “safely” without endangering the survival of the species. Ovsyanikov explained how this strategy does not allow a buffer that would give the species a good chance of survival in the case of emergencies. According to Ovsyanikov:
“The current official strategy of so-called conservation is not really conservation, it is only management of the level of killing, It’s not conservation at all. It’s nothing to do with conservation. But the concept of this management is based on keeping the polar bear population at the minimum survival level…”
Ovsyanikov continued:
“The concept of the calculation is that ‘we scientists’ can allow the killing of as many polar bears as would allow them to maintain population at the minimum level for survival. That is what it means. So, in other words, in terms of population biology, this strategy does not give the polar bears population a chance to form what is called a ‘reserve number’ or ‘buffer number’. It is particularly important at the time being – when very fast, environmental changes are progressing – to give the animal the ‘reserve’ opportunity to survive any sudden unexpected or unpredicted impacts… Because if the population is kept at the minimum survival level, it means that any sudden or maybe not foreseen, not predicted, impact may cut them down very quickly. To me, that is is just the basics of population ecology.”
A duplicitous stance
On February 27 2026, World Polar Bear Day, critics commented on PBI’s post – asking them how they could justify their stance. These comments swiftly disappeared. It seems that PBI may still be keen to hide their real views from their supporters.
Protect the Wild’s Rob Pownall said of PBI’s stance:
“PBI’s position is deeply misleading. This isn’t about protecting Indigenous traditions, it’s about protecting a global commercial trade that generates significant profits, much of which do not go to First Nations communities. Framing this as ‘sustainable’ or ‘traditional’ ignores the reality: polar bears are being killed for sport and commercial gain, not subsistence. At a time when the species faces increasing pressure from climate change, opposing stronger protections under CITES is both irresponsible and indefensible.”
Polar bear in Svalbard via Arturo de Frias Marques/Wikimedia. Polar bear on snow covered ground via Hans Jurgen Mager on Unsplash. The Hunting Consortium advertising images published under ‘fair use’ regulations.
A guest post byTom Anderson
Journalist for Protect the Wild
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