I like to think of myself as progressive; forward-looking. Especially among Americans. As a country, we devote our selves to the Christian god and capitalism, and this tends to keep us well behind Europe in terms of human and environmental rights. A controversy in Germany, over a zoo-bred polar bear abandoned by his mother, has made me first question my own progressiveness, and second, that of Europe. The polar bear, now named Knut, and a twin brother were born in December and abandoned to the cold by their mother. When the brother died, zookeepers intervened, and began hand-rearing Knut. He's now a healthy three-month-old, and ready to make his public debut. According to the BBC, some animal-rights activists are complaining that Knut was not allowed to die/euthanized that the time his mother rejected him, and suggesting that it would be in his best interest to euthanize him now. This shocked me. We know that whenever possible, hand-rearing should be avoided, but the idea that death is better than hand-rearing seems outrageous. Is that really the progressive idea? Note that the principal complaintant in the article is a keeper at another zoo. So his problem doesn't seem to be the idea of keeping animals and breeding kept animals. But nature should have its course, as it were, with the little abandoned bear. Am I the only one to see a logical inconsistency here? Or am I simply trying to work my irrational thoughts into a framework of reason so that I don't have to admit to harboring vestiges of my paternalistic culture? I don't know. But I'm glad they didn't let the bear die.