Knut’s Death Blamed on Berlin Zoo

Animal-rights groups said the polar bear should have been kept in a larger enclosure.

He was the world’s most famous polar bear, netting the Berlin Zoo €5 million in visitors’ cash and even appearing on the cover of Vanity Fair. But Saturday the lovable ursine collapsed in front of 600 horrified onlookers and was later declared dead. A post-mortem has yet to be performed, but already animal-rights groups are blaming the zoo for the four-year-old bear’s death, saying that staff should have treated him more carefully because he was hand-raised by humans after his mother rejected him, meaning he was predestined to have elevated stress levels. While polar bears are solitary animals, the zoo hoped that Knut would mate and so kept him with several female bears in an enclosure critics say was too small.