THE CHRISTMAS BEAR$$

In these early days of December, you go to any store, even the dollar store, and there you find them. Fluffy, white, cute little polar bears for sale. Yet I haven't meet a single bear here in the Arctic that got by mail a cheque as royalty payment for the use of our image. If polar bears were a trademark, someone would be making oodles of cash. But, since no bear gets a single penny, or a salmon as payment for the use of our image, everybody else makes money on our furry backs: the store that sells the bears, the bear manufacturer, the factory workers (who probably get paid in sardines), the importers, the exporters, everybody, but us! We bears should go on some kind of strike, take some form of action so we could get a bit of that cash that everybody else is doing using our image. This is a form of cultural appropiation, the appropiation of our nature. With that money we could set up feeding stations when the ice is too thin to go out hunting seal. We could buy decoys so hunters will get confused ("I shot that bear six times, why does it keep looking at my with that funny smile?") I wonder if the Queen of England gets royalties for the use of her image in every stamp, coin and bill used in this country.