This video was made possible by Dashlane.
Stay safe on the internet for free by signing up for Dashlane at dashlane.com/hai.
It's late October, which means trick-or-treaters will soon be going door-to-door extorting
their favorite Halloween snacks from defenseless homeowners.
Some like chocolate, others go for lollipops, and a few prefer human flesh.
We are, of course, talking about Polar Bears.
"But wait," you ask "I only see polar bears during Christmas Coke ads."
But, if you’re one of the 2,657 people who live in Arviat, Nunavut, Canada you'll remember
that one time when polar bears ruined Halloween and put an abrupt end to trick-or-treating.
Now, for some reason many falsely believe that polar bears don't live near any areas
populated by people.
As their name suggests, polar bears live here, near the pole, and not a lot of people live
around here but if cyanide class taught me anything it’s that not a lot isn’t none
and there are some places around here like Arviat where polar bears and humans coexist.
So, polar bears don't tend to have set territories because their living areas are tied to their
sea-dwelling food source.
They wander all around the far north in search of food, namely, fat seals.
Some polar bears can live more than 600 miles away from their original birth-sites which
is even more impressive when you consider that most polar bears walk long-distance at
no more than three miles per hour.
Polar bears live in regions where sea ice collects and solidifies to the point of creating
platforms that they can use to hunt on, and because they use twice as much energy to move
than your average picnic basket stealing or honey eating bear, they prefer to do their
fishing as still as possible on the ice shelves.
As you can imagine, this is becoming a problem due to the ever-warming Arctic pushing polar
bears to more populated areas.
Currently, there are an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears left in the world with
60% of them living in Canada, eh.
Since Polar bears are some of the only animals that are predators to humans they have been
regarded as human-hunting fuzzy terrors but to be honest, polar bear attacks on humans
are pretty rare with 73 recorded in an 144-year-period, and of those recorded an even smaller amount
of 20 attacks have been lethal.
Two-thirds of those attacks, however, had something in common.
The pronounced points of parity provoking the predominately peaceful polar pups?
They were hangry.
The attackers were mostly starving young male polar bears, and these attacks commonly happened
in-between feeding seasons before and after the ice shelves solidified.
With their resources and habitats shrinking, these polar bear attacks are becoming more
common with 20% of all recorded in 144 years being between 2010 and 2014.
This is why it's not too surprising that, one year before trick-or-treating had to be
canceled in Arviat, there was a polar bear attack 160 miles away in Churchill, Manitoba,
on Halloween night.
That particular attack saw an entire neighborhood throwing shoes and shooting at an irate bear
who was attacking a local elderly man.
The bear wasn’t deterred and didn't stop his assault even after it was shot.
In the end, it took one of the neighbors getting in his truck and chasing the bear to get it
to flee.
Arviat, which is near Hudson Bay in Canada, is pretty secluded from the outside world
and is generally only accessible by ATVs or by helicopter.
Lately, the town has seen a real boom in the polar bear tourist industry as the town now
sees as many as 1,200 polar bears a year during the polar bears' migration north during the
late-fall period.
Coincidentally, there are also around 1,200 children in the town.
The people of Arviat see six-to-eight bears
a day during migration periods.
The World Wildlife Fund therefore employed a bear monitor specifically to watch the bears
and make sure they pass through.
This corralling of the polar bears of Arviat has the bears down in the dumps, literally.
The bears have been known to take over the garbage dump, and thanks to the ice platforms
melting, the migration path now has them going directly through the towns where the locals
store and dispose of marine carcasses and remains after hunting.
Naturally, when the town realized how dire the situation had become, the only logical
step was to call off trick-or-treating.
It’s dangerous enough to have the kids go door-to-door when the town only has a few
hours of sunlight, but when you sprinkle polar bears into the mix it almost makes you miss
the days of razor blades in apples.
So, trick-or-treating on Halloween was canceled and other indoor activities were planned for
the kids over the next two years.
In 2016, the town allowed trick-or-treating to resume, but only after it surrounded the
populated areas with armed guards and had firefighters turn one their sirens to deter
bears.
Of course the scariest thing that could happen this Halloween is not being eaten by a human-hungry
polar bear, it would be having someone hack your YouTube account, look at your watch history,
and see every messed up and freaky video you watch.
When creating a password you want to have a complex one that you don’t use on other
sites but this, of course, is tough because that’s so many passwords to remember…
unless you have Dashlane.
Dashlane generates super secure passwords for you, stores them in one super secure place,
and autofills them on your devices when you go to log in so you stay safe on the internet.
The best thing is, that’s free at https://dashlane.com/hai but, if you want to get all their premium
features like a VPN, syncing across devices, and dark web monitoring you can use the code
“HAI” to get 10% off upgrading to premium.