Innovative Winnipeg zoo experiment shares the plight of polar bears

One-year-olds are not supposed to have breath that would peel paint.

Nor, on the other hand, are they supposed to stand eyeball to eyeball with you, close enough that you can hear the nostrils opening and closing, ready to tear you limb from limb and gulp happily eat you.

But meet Blizzard just dont try to shake hands with him through the thick chain-link fence that is all that stands between you and the front page of this newspaper. Blizzard and his sister, Star, are one-year-old orphaned polar bears who are the latest additions to an ambitious experiment called Journey to Churchill at Winnipegs Assiniboine Park Zoo.

Blizzards ready to hold his own, says Brian Joseph, the zoos new director. Hes not at all deterred by the presence of a stranger.

The stranger, on the other hand, is deterred, unnerved and twice frozen: once by the -15C temperature, a second time by the dark laser stare of a bear.

There is nothing these bears are afraid of, Dr. Joseph continues. They have no innate fear of humans because humans are merely another prey to them. There is no animal on Earth other than another polar bear or a human with a rifle that is a threat to them.

These bears may be confident and fear nothing, but a great many people are now fearing for them and, sadly, are not so confident.

The bears know nothing, Dr. Joseph says, about climate change.

Five years ago, the Assiniboine Park Conservancy came up with an ambitious $200-million plan to rejuvenate the park, the old zoo and create something new that would be unique to the world, not just Winnipeg.

There are lots of zoos in the world, conservancy president Margaret Redmond says, and they tend to have animals from different parts of the world. The polar bear, however, is an iconic species for Manitobans.

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Innovative Winnipeg zoo experiment shares the plight of polar bears