Philosophy for Children - Resources

Polar Bear searching for food

Death of a polar bear from the TV series Planet Earth, narrated by David Attenborough

The second disc in the series contains a programme called Ice Worlds.  Select section 4 from the menu, this segment runs from 29m 36s to 39m 24s.

This extract shows a lone polar bear, unable to hunt from his usual grounds because of melting ice.  He swims for miles and eventually tries to kill a walrus on an island.  Exhausted from the swim and unable to feed, 'this bear will not survive’.  The piece concludes with the statement that if the global climate continues to warm more polar bears will die like this. 

Commercially Available

Climate change
Animal rights
Human responsibility to individual animals
Human responsibility to the natural world.

The boxed set of the Planet Earth series is available from the BBC. DVD1883.

KS4+

The obvious areas of enquiry are around climate change, as the polar bear’s death is explicitly linked to the loss of usual hunting grounds due to polar ice melting early.  However, it also raises interesting questions about the ethics of programme makers, for example
Should they have saved the bear?
And conflicts of interest between species,
Do we prefer the polar bear to the walrus?