Life in the Arctic is brutal. Food isn’t always readily available, so the fight for food can turn ugly pretty quick.
An encounter between a male polar bear and a mother with her cub turns ugly pretty quick. After taking off with her cub after they got too close to the male, it doesn’t take long for him to catch up. Despite the best efforts of the mother to fight off the pursuing bear, he basically just blows right past her as he takes down the cub, kills it and starts to eat it.
Although it’s part of nature, it doesn’t make the scene of this polar bear killing and eating a cub any easier to watch. The encounter was caught by a crew during a Lindblad Expeditions trip on the National Geographic Explorer.
While polar bears prefer to eat seals, they aren’t always around. When there’s nothing else to eat, it’s probably not a rare occurrence for polar bears to resort to cannibalism in order to survive another day. However, managing to capture it on camera is a rare event.
