Polar bear-cub Knut’s 1,000,000th visitor
Jul 6th, 2007 by Paul Moor
Unless you’ve spent the past several months under water, you’ll almost certainly long since know about Berlin’s latest superstar and present unrivalled all-out celebrity darling: a snow-white polar bear-cub named Knut, rejected at birth by his circus-traumatized mother Tosca and raised by a model bipedal foster-mother named Thomas Dörflein, a member of the staff of western Berlin’s Zoölogical Garden. (As with so many duplications resulting from Germany’s 1990 reunification, Berlin today sports two full-fledged zoos, with the Zoopark, also excellent, over in erstwhile East Berlin.)
On Thursday a young Dutch couple from Amsterdam, Vincent and Ilja Arends, chanced to hold the places in line that made one of them the 1,000,000th visitor to Knut since the zoo last March, a suitable waiting-time after his birth in December, began proudly presenting him to thousands of admirers for strictly limited public appearances. Since then, really serious bear-freaks have even made special trips from all over the world to gaze at and coo over him – to the ever merrier ring of the zoo’s cash registers thanks to the insatiable demand for Knut dolls (in three sizes) in addition to actually seeing him.
As a prize the young Dutch couple got a gift basket from the zoo, containing one of those soft toy versions of Knut plus other goodies. The fluffball celebrity now weighs 42 kilos (92.4 pounds), and his public career approaches its end, for maturity will make him substantially less cuddly than he now looks: a single swipe of a grown polar bear’s paw can kill a seal, for instance – or, for that matter, even a genuinely beloved bipedal foster-mother….
Thomas Dörflein himself approaches their inevitable separation with considerable apprehension, for it will unavoidably bring a profound readjustment for both him and his charge: Knut’s abandonment by his Canadian-born mother (Tosca already had a professional career behind her as a star attraction of the erstwhile [east] German Democratic Republic’s state circus, which had evidently done her no psychological good) abruptly catapulted Dörflein out of a conventional life with his own family onto makeshift cots in Knut’s succession of quarters at the Zoo, where at first he had bottle duty every two hours – around the clock – for the squalling furball he’d moved in with.
From the website of the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel I’ve lifted some delicious visual aids you can revel in by clicking here .
