An article by Paul Betney

DISABILITY NOW ARTICLE 2007 

For those of you who missed it Knut is a phenomenon! The baby polar bear born at Berlin Zoo is a brand to be reckoned with. Backed by the kind of press coverage usually reserved for rock stars, children scream his name and stuffed toy bears are flying off the shelves at the souvenir shop. The Zoo is having a bear bonanza! KNUT is the new FCUK?
But it took a bizarre twist to launch this glittering career. For a while simply being the first polar bear to be born and to have survived at the zoo for more than 30 years just wasn’t enough.
Knut only shot to fame when the German tabloid Bild published an article by a group of animal rights activists who actually want the bear killed.
The argument for Knut’s demise – by lethal injection, no less – apparently runs along the lines that his mother rejected him and therefore, by the law of nature, the cute little ball of fluff should have been left to die!
Now at the risk of seeming to play on a cliché, I have to say that I do genuinely get nervous when people, especially Germans, start talking about the laws of nature and survival of the fittest. As someone with a disability I don’t particularly relish the idea of the weak being left to die. Worse still, if the weak should have the sheer audacity to survive I relish even less the idea of putting the blighters down with lethal injections! Life’s hard enough for the weak!
To this way of thinking, putting Knut in an incubator and bottle feeding him was somehow cheating nature of a light lunch. Not only that, but now that humans have rescued him, they say, he is hopelessly tainted and will always find it hard to be with his own kind.
Possibly they are concerned he might become so humanized that one day he’ll head for the Arctic in a smoking jacket, sipping whiskey, starting wars and claiming ownership of oil and mineral reserves. Now that fear I could understand and, to speak bluntly, if that were the case I’d be first in line to inject the little bugger.
But if we cannot help animals, does that mean they cannot help us? Does this herald the end of guide dogs lest blind people start finding it hard to be with their “own sort” and start taking on dog like tendencies, rutting in the park, smelling each others bums and urinating on gate posts? Where does it end?
Still, there is hope that sanity will prevail. Quoted in the Guardian after visiting the zoo 12 year old Adrianna Zielinska said, “I did think when he was rejected by his mother that he should have been left to die for his own sake, but he’s clearly a real fighter, so I’m glad he was given a chance.” Well I’m sure she isn’t as glad as Knut, but it’s good to see that even hard hearted children can be swayed. Our future is in safe hands!