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Polar bears are not just the largest bear species on earth they also hold the distinction of being the only species of bear that has been documented actively stalking and hunting human beings as prey. Given that they inhabit the most extreme cold regions on earth, meals are hard to come by so it isn’t surprising they would stalk anything that could constitute a meal but with that said, this video below is simply mystifying.
This footage of a man in the Russian arctic has gone viral since it was posted recently on Instagram and it has since made its way to other social networks. In the video, a man can be seen standing face-to-face with a wild polar bear that wandered into the town in the Russian arctic. And instead of fleeing for safety, the Russian man stands there taking a video as the bear walks toward him.
It’s almost as if the massive polar bear seems perplexed by the man’s lack of fear. The man slowly backs up while filming on his iPhone and as far as we can tell from the video he was not carrying a rifle. It is commonplace in areas where polar bears are found, like Svalbard or Nunavut, for people to carry rifles in case they are blindsided by a polar bear that had been stalking them but this man appears to be unarmed. Here’s the viral video which can also be seen on Threads if Instagram isn’t working:
Since the caption is in Russian I’ve translated it. The person who posted that video, @nave933 on Instagram, wrote:
“In my childhood and youth, I often watched this picture from the window of my apartment on Chukotka. In the winter, polar bears came to our village in search of food. And the little bears could be seen with the bear the day they crossed the frozen Providence Bay! And now the bears are also coming) The video was sent by my Chukot friends) This is a real shooting of today. We go with you from work in cars and to the subway, and someone at the edge of the earth meets such neighbors in the evening! The guy sure is pretty desperate. So close to the bear and still shooting. I certainly haven’t done this!”
The only explanation here is ‘Russia.’ Russian men are the Asian equivalent of ‘Florida Men’ and find themselves in the most precarious of situations like this, face-to-face with the largest bear species on the planet.
The same person who shared that video above also recently shared this one of a polar bear entering a town and getting ran off by dogs. He wrote that everyone, the bear and the dogs, all made it out of the dangerous situation safely:
As I’m sitting here in SW Florida where it was 80+ yesterday and the forecast shows temperatures over 80 for the next 10 days here… in February… it is truly hard for me to fathom that somewhere on this earth right now people are coming face-to-face with polar bears in the dead of Winter. It’s practically Summer where I live already, or at least it feels that way… I’m thanking my lucky stars and stripes I wasn’t born in some Arctic village in Russia right now.