袁咏仪任达华演过电影:Was the world's favourite polar bear, Knut, killed by fame?

Was the world's favourite polar bear, Knut, killed by fame?

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The world’s most famous polar bear is dead. Knut — who won worldwide affection after he was abandoned by his mother but was then hand-reared by zookeepers — collapsed in his enclosure in front of a crowd of 600 visitors.


Scores of screaming children were among those who watched in horror as Knut suffered convulsions before falling into a pool in Berlin Zoo on Saturday afternoon.


Yesterday, crowds gathered beside his empty compound, laying down red roses and white stuffed polar bears, lighting candles and putting up pictures of Knut with personal messages for him.


Initial theories were that the four-year-old polar bear suffered a heart attack or stroke. But animal rights groups have condemned the way he had been reared in the zoo, blaming the stresses of his ‘unreal’ celebrity-style life for his early death.


Polar bears normally live for 15 to 20 years in the wild and often longer in captivity. But animal rights campaigners fear Knut had become psychologically unbalanced, dependent on crowds — a highly unnatural state for a polar bear — and unable to mix with other bears.

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His rise to fame started after he was rejected at birth by his mother. He would have died had the zoo not taken the decision to rear him by human hand.


Keeper Thomas Doerflein moved in with him at the zoo, feeding him at night and changing nappies on him.


Soon, visitors from far and wide came to watch twice-daily shows as the keeper played with this enchanting tiny ball of white fluff. Soon, he featured on the front cover of Vanity Fair — alongside actor Leonardo DiCaprio — and made an estimated £6 million for the zoo through the marketing of pictures, key chains, sweets and stuffed Knuts.


But the special bond with his keeper was broken in September 2008 when Doerflein died from a heart attack. It was widely speculated he died from a broken heart after being banned from entering Knut’s enclosure because the zoo authorities were concerned the bear had grown and was too dangerous.


However, it seemed Knut in turn had become depressed — seemingly distracted and looking lost if there were no crowds around. At this point, animal psychologists warned he was in danger of becoming a ‘psycho bear’.


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A suggested solution was to put him in with three females — Tosca, Katyusha and Nancy — in an attempt to normalise his life. But the trio ganged up on Knut, biting and chasing him away.


Knut was therefore alone in his enclosure when he died. He was resting on his favourite rock when his left leg began to shake uncontrollably. He then started pacing round and round his enclosure, before falling into the water and dying.


'He was not sick. We don’t know why he died,’ said his keeper, Heiner Kloes.


Knut’s premature death plunged Berlin into gloom. ‘His death is awful,’ said the city’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit. ‘He was the star of Berlin Zoo.’


'I’ve been crying nonstop since I heard about his death,’ said Ingrid Rommel, a 65-year-old widow from Berlin, who said she had been visiting Knut weekly since his birth on December 6, 2006. She credited him with helping her get over the death of her husband.

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Heidemarie Vogel, 58, remembered that Knut had sometimes raised his paw when she called over to him.


'It was as if he was waving to me — so nice,’ she said tearfully.


According to Doug Richardson, animal collection manager at Highland Wildlife Park, which looks after two of the three captive polar bears in the UK: ‘His death could have been caused by any number of things. It could have been as simple as choking on a small bone or just an infection.


'Polar bears have a very poorly developed immune system. In the wild, they have only a 40 to 50 per cent survival rate. Mother Nature is not Disneyfied — it’s cruel.’  


But the little bear’s life story did have a touch of Hollywood. After Knut (the Scandinavian version of Canute) and his twin brother were rejected by their mother, Tosca, a 20-year-old former circus bear from East Germany, they were rescued from their enclosure by zookeepers, using a fishing net.


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Then his twin died of an infection four days later and it seemed Knut, too, the size of a guinea pig, was doomed to death. But he quickly captured the affection of the world by surviving 44 days in an incubator.


The public’s fascination with him strengthened when his keeper, Doerflein, struck up an unlikely paternal relationship with Knut. Every day, he hand-reared the cub, feeding, bathing and playing with him; at night, he slept on a mattress next to him.


Under Doerflein’s care, Knut grew — feeding first on baby formula mixed with cod liver oil, then moving on to milk porridge mixed with cat food and vitamins.



Knut had increased the zoo’s attendance by 30 per cent — making it more successful than it had ever been in its 163-year history. For some, though, the combination of fame and human rearing was proving too much. Even before Knut turned one, an animal rights activist was quoted as saying Knut should die rather than become a domestic pet.


If Knut continued to be raised by humans, he warned, the polar bear would be psychologically damaged when that human care was progressively removed.


This threat to the life of the lovable little bear sent Knutmania into overdrive. Children stood outside the zoo, waving placards that read ‘We Love Knut’ and ‘Knut Must Live’.


At this point, Doerflein suddenly died, aged 44. For the third time in his young life, Knut had lost his closest companion.


The bear’s subsequent listlessness was diagnosed by zoological experts as the result of damage caused by too much human contact — he had become incapable of dealing with other polar bears in the natural way he would have if his mother had reared him.


In 2008, he killed ten live carp fish put into his moat to eat algae, biting their heads off and smothering himself in their blood.


Then, in 2009, Knut was caught up in an acrimonious battle between Berlin Zoo and Neumuenster Zoo in Schleswig-Holstein, north Germany. Neumuenster had loaned Knut’s father, Lars, to Berlin, to mate with his mother Tosca.


The Neumuenster authorities maintained that they only did so on condition that the first-born cub would be their property. Berlin Zoo subsequently had to agree to pay £375,000 to keep Knut in his Berlin compound — the only source of continuity in his rocky existence.


Each year, on his birthday — December 5 — adoring crowds sang Happy Birthday to him in English. His most obsessive fans — Knut Nuts — even took to wearing polar bear headgear. On his third birthday, he was given a loaf of bread, baked into a vast number three shape, and a birthday cake with three candles, fashioned out of frozen fish.


But there was the negative side of fame. He even received a death threat. ‘Knut ist tot! Donnerstag Mittag’ (‘Knut is dead! Thursday at noon’) read the anonymous fax. The worried Berlin police force increased their guard on Knut.


There was criticism he was getting overweight. He had a weakness for croissants and by the age of two he weighed a hefty 130 kilos.


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A prurient interest in his sex life developed, too. When a female bear, Flocke, was born in Nuremberg Zoo in December 2007, she was immediately dubbed Mrs Knut — a potential mate for the superstar of the bear world.


Another bear in Berlin, Giovanna, was also considered a future mate, until it turned out that they shared a grandfather — and so exposed Knut to concerns about possible inbreeding. In the end, he died before he ever mated (polar bears not being mature enough to do so until they’re five or six).


It’s too early to say what killed him — a post mortem is being held today. But long before he collapsed on Saturday, worried observers were complaining that Knut had been destroyed by fame.


Doug Richardson rejects this claim, insisting it is impossible for polar bears to be affected by psychological issues in the way we might like to imagine.


Instead, he suggests that Knut’s health problems could have been laid down in infancy when as a cub he was given bottled milk. ‘It’s just not as good as their mother’s.’


He also suggests another reason. ‘Perhaps his mother may have abandoned him as a baby for a reason — having identified some kind of genetic problem in advance.’


He is convinced that Berlin Zoo did nothing wrong in the way keepers raised Knut. ‘Berlin Zoo has a huge amount of experience with polar bears. It did the best it could . . . the bears are just prone to the slightest disturbance.’


But one of Knut’s keepers, Markus Röbke, had long been warning that Knut should have been removed from the zoo to be weaned off his so-called addiction to public adulation and recover emotionally from the death of his keeper.


Röbke even says he often saw Knut cry when the public left for the day. ‘Knut needs an audience,’ Röbke had pleaded. ‘That has to change.’


Tragically, it never did — and Knut’s intensely public life has led to a far too public death.


Such was visitors’ love for him that one woman mourning Knut there yesterday said: ‘My only consolation is that now he is finally united with his keeper in heaven.’


Daily Mail

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