"Feeding by hand is not species-appropriate but a gross violation of animal protection laws. The zoo must kill the bear." -- German animal rights activist Frank Albrecht, re a Berlin-born baby polar bear rejected by its mother
This has been twisted to the bizarre by the Yellow Press. Noone really, and seriously, has demanded the killing of baby ice bear Knut. No matter what Bild says about this matter (and what several other news services in print and online copy from them.) An objective press covering would, of course, not have produced heart wrenching covers like this: What did happen was more or less this: Ice bear mom rejected ice bear baby. Ice bear baby has been raised by hand by the zoo personel, as have been a lot of animals in that and every other zoo without quite as much press coverage - well,he is cute! Of course there was a media hype. (I think I would have volunteered too for bottle duty, actually.) Zoos live of small media hypes around their newborn, honestly said. A close friend of us was a zoo director for all his professional life and told us, after a few bottles of wine, that zoos around the world live of the cutesy factor from time to time even of they don't know wether there will be room for the grown up animal, or food - but more important room - baby seals are cute, but twenty grown up seals in one bassin don't work. So, many zoos -not only in Germany, where they have a lot of ressources - show off baby seals - and kill the grown ups when setting them free is no option and no other zoo will take them. That is what happens, and that is what this animal rights activist wanted to discuss. Weeks back he published a comment, that accused the zoo "business" of hypocrisy when it comes to raising cute baby animals by hand. He did add that keeping the animal species appropiate, which zoos claim to try, would have meant letting him die. To make even more of a point of this, he demanded the zoo in question should be sued for acting against animal protection laws. Poisonous injections have never been mentioned. Until, that is, weeks later (!) the Bild picked up the statement and made up (which is the correct term here) the story which is now, seemingly, making it around the world. Now, you can discuss a lot about what animal rights activists claim and demand, but this poor guy, and a few like minded people, is experiencing some undeserved media attention right now.
I just realized you might wonder where this came from; sorry, I forgot to translate. It's in the headline of the newspaper cutout I posted. It passed my filter that it isn't really in English.
So the entire story was basically re-built around that comment, taken out of context. Why am I not surprised?
Neither was I. I am only still surprised that so many journalists from less ruthless papers still deem it alright to copy ther delirious collegues - you could as well read your tea leaves for facts instead of doing your own research. I mean, this background info was even online - you just would have had to google the names "Bild" mentioned!
I know, this sort of thing makes me angry as well. The YNET web news site, owned and run by one of the three large respectable newspaper companies here in Israel, used to have articles spun off The Sun. Now, to their credit they mentioned The Sun, but in little tiny letters at the end. Without saying that it is a tabloid. Now they mention it's a tabloid, probably due to complaints received, one of them my own. I sometimes think that news is hardly checked these days. As long as it was by some reporter somewhere then it's Holy Writ, and can be passed on by more respectable news agencies as such. And the public believes that these respectable news agencies actually check what they publish, because they have earned their name and reputation at some point in life. Well, reputation is easily lost. I guess news agencies need to find this out the hard way.
