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| CANADA'S SOURCE FOR HUMOUR, PARODY, AND SATIRE
CANADA -- Polar Hunting Day is almost upon us. The annual late-summer holiday that honours Canadian traditions and offers everyone a break from the toils of summer is celebrated by most of the country's four million citizens. Canadians from Red Deer to Moose Jaw, from Head-Smashed-In to St. Johns, and from Nunavut to Allovut all participate in a fun-filled week of polar bear slaughtering.
While the national holiday is mostly a symbolic tradition now, at one time polar bear hunting was a necessary means of protecting livestock. Polar bears once ruled the Canadian plains, stealing cattle, prairie chickens, and crippled youths. For centuries their numbers were so vast their movements across the prairies could be seen as a blanket of white, a snowy sea stretching for hundreds of kilometres--as far as the eye could see. Then, It was important to thin their herds purely to protect livestock, and to preserve the crops from bear stampedes. Native Indians from Sooke to Sardis, along with their paler brethren, organized special hunts and glorious festivities around the annual event. Nowadays, Polar Hunting Day (which the first nations people call "Day of the Polar Hunt") is mostly a ceremonial practice. There are few polar bears in major cities now. Toronto and Vancouver are practically "polar-free" and only the occasional white bear is seen sniffing through garbage bins or wrestling with local fur trappers. For the holiday, most city children are content to stab or hack at cardboard effigies stuffed with sweets using dad's 10" carving knife or lumberman's axe. In the countryside many families limit themselves to two or three dozen bears. Only twenty years ago, big bear derbys would bring in thousands of carcasses which would be left to rot on the sides of the road, after the gallbladders had been removed to sell to Chinese herbalists and their skins sold to underground sweatshops to make polar fleece. The recent mysterious decline in polar bear population is partly to blame, but also, as more people become vegetarian, the popularity of polar bear jerky and pemmican has declined. Still, for one week of the year, even ardent vegan Canadians will relive the ancient polar bear hunt, and keep the traditions of their ancestors alive. A
hundred years ago, Canadians made their own spears using chert and flint,
or carved them from a stout cedar branch. But now, most flock to big-box
retailers to buy fancy new spears made of graphite or composite materials.
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