"It's Inuit food,” says Canadian Inuit Jayko Alooloo in an interview with Canada's CTV, “like cows for you southern people.''

Alooloo also regards the newly-designated status of polar bears as “endangered” as a complete crock.

“They're actually increasing every year.” he says. But what does he know? He only lives amongst them? Whereas, from his Washington D.C. Office, U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne relied on computer weather model to predict that in 50 years, due to Global Warming's effect on arctic ice fields, polar bears will decrease in numbers. My own weatherman's computer model's rarely get it right for the next four days. Kempthorne's nails it for the next fifty years!

Recreational hunters (again, overwhelmingly from the U.S) pumped $3 million a year into Eskimo communities for polar bear hunts. These Inuit communities get a quota of bear tags (licenses) from the Canadian government to use as they see fit. They can hunt the bears themselves for the meat, and for the roughly $1000 per hide if they sell it. Or they can sell the tag to a recreational hunter for $30,000 –serve as his guide, (i.e. experience most of their culture's traditional and integral parts of the hunt) and still keep the meat. Only a Federal bureaucrat would miss the implications here.

In fact, these hunts being such an integral part of their culture, a few Inuits elect to retain the tags for themselves to do the killing. The new ruling means that now they'll probably keep all. A recreational hunt lasts a few days and—like all hunting--does not always climax with kill. But the tag is considered used once it's sold to a recreational hunter, kill or no kill. On the other hand, Inuit hunters always kill a bear because they have months to fill that tag. So now that U.S. Recreational hunters are barred by U.S. Federal law from bringing home their conversation-piece rug, the Inuits have no choice but to keep their tags, assuring that more Polar Bears bears will be killed.