UK NEWS
PLAYTIME IS OVER FOR KNUT: HE'S TOO BIG NOW
Knut as a baby
By Emma Bamford
HE was so cute as a baby that a million visitors came to see his twice-daily romps with his human “mum”.
But playtime will never be the same again for the celebrity polar bear called Knut.
These pictures show one of his last afternoons with Thomas Doerflein, the zoo keeper who has hand-reared Knut since birth.
The snow-white bear may still be photogenic – but he’s simply too big and too dangerous to be allowed to play alone with Thomas.
When the keeper started rearing Knut after his mother rejected him, he was the size of a guinea-pig.
By the time star photographer Annie Leibowitz put him on the front cover of Vanity Fair in March, he weighed about 20lb and had become the star attraction at Berlin Zoo, with a whole range of merchandising and special tourist trips from as far away as Siberia.
|
He is growing into a big, strong polar bear, which is as it should be
|
|
|
Now seven months old, Knut tips the scales at 110lb (nearly 8st) and is unaware of his own strength. Fully grown, he could reach 50-90st.
Even the chain-mail suit Doerflein had taken to wearing under his overalls offered little protection from Knut’s lethally sharp claws.
Yesterday, under the headline “The Farewell!”, one German newspaper quoted the keeper as saying: “I will always be Knut’s stepdad but I won’t be around him so much now. He is becoming unpredictable.
“He is growing into a big, strong polar bear, which is as it should be.”
The keeper, already covered in scratches and bruises from his playtimes with Knut, revealed that he felt totally “burned out” after hand-rearing the bear, even sleeping at the zoo to bottle-feed him up to six times a day. “I can’t believe I’ve got a couple of days off now,” he said. “But Knut is still a child – he still needs me around.”
Doerflein is said to have hated the celebrity that came with being Knut’s “surrogate mother”. He said he hoped people would stop “bugging me for an autograph”.
At his birth, animal activists felt that Knut should be allowed to die rather than face an unnatural life as a star attraction at the zoo.
