A Canadian man is recuperating in a hospital after thwarting a polar bear attack on his wife, according to the Nishnawbe Aski Police Service.
The couple, who live in Fort Severn First Nation in northern Ontario, had gone outside at 5 am on December 3 to look for their missing dogs. The polar bear attacked the woman in their driveway. The woman fell to the ground as the man “leaped onto the animal to prevent its attack,” the service’s press release says.
The bear then turned its attention to the man, who received “serious but non-life-threatening injuries to his arm and legs.”
A neighbor heard the commotion, seized his gun, and fired several times at the animal, which retreated. Police responded to the sound of the gunshots. The bear was found in some nearby woods, where it had died from its wounds. The man is expected to recover.
An estimated 17,000 polar bears live in Canada. Between 2006 and 2023, nine people in Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia, and the United States were killed by polar bears. Twenty-two were injured.
The last fatal Canadian polar bear attack occurred this past August when two polar bears mauled a worker for the company that services the North Warning System in Nunavut. The attack took place at a radar station on Brevoort Island, off the coast of Baffin Island.
