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Polar bear cub melts hearts worldwideA very young, white fur ball has become a fast YouTube star. Siku the polar bear cub opened his eyes for the first time over the Christmas weekend, a big milestone for the month-old cub that was born Nov. 22. Born into captivity at the Scandanavian Wildlife Park in Denmark, his mother never produced milk and was therefor unable to keep the infant bear alive. So now keepers at the park are playing mom. Through round-the-clock care and routine bottle feedings, the cub is thriving and weighs nearly 7 pounds. His name "siku" means "sea ice" in Greenlandic, an Iniut language. The wildlife park is chronicling the bear's progress in pictures and videos. Viewers can watch the bear enjoy a stimulating body massage or back scratch, stick out his tongue, suckle (or rather, gulp) a bottle, squeak, snore and grunt, roll over, and nap in a variety of splayed out positions. Siku comes into the world at a pivotal time for the polar bear, a threatened species whose protections mandated by law, including habitat preservation, are grinding against the exploration plans of resource-driven industries seeking to find and extract oil and gas from the very same Arctic terrain in which the bear roams. The state of Alaska and industry groups sued the Interior Department in March over the designation of 187,000 square miles in Alaska's Arctic, including terrain offshore, as critical habitat for the bears. The iconic animal has recently become the focus of a marketing and philanthropic campaign by soda giant Coca-Cola, which now sells a special can in white instead of the trademark red to help raise money to help save the Arctic and the bears' home. With the profile of polar bears and their plight at what could be an all-time high, the Scandanavian Wildlife Park is wasting no time capitalizing on Siku's super-cute arrival. In addition to his own page on the center's website, he also has his own Facebook page, where he appears to be on track to becoming the latest in a line of ambassadors for the species. |
