A fluffy star is born: a German polar bear cub is being prepared this weekend for a lifetime, or at least a year, in the limelight to replace the increasingly jowly and charmless Knut.

The first step came yesterday when the bear keepers at Nuremberg Zoo dubbed the month-old bear “Floske”, German for Flake.

“That’s because she is snow-white and fragile,” said Horst Maussner, one of a team of three that will try to keep the rejected cub alive.

The omens are good – the cub is guzzling a special milk cocktail every three hours – but the zoo leadership says it will not officially approve a name for the animal until it is certain that she will survive.

As the TV cameras and satellite dishes parked themselves in front of the zoo entrance – “looks like we’re in for the long haul” said a hardened cameraman, veteran of Somalia and Afghanistan – Germans were beginning to ask themselves serious questions. The media caravan that has made a world celebrity out of Berlin Zoo’s Knut for the past 13 months is now transferring its attention to Floske.

Dag Encke, the zoo director, did not want it this way. There was deep suspicion among zoo professionals about the way that Knut was marketed, indeed about the whole principle of hand-rearing rejected animals. Cubs raised by humans become emotionally attached to their keepers and find it difficult to mate or fit in with the group. In Knut’s case the bear became addicted to the presence of people, to their applause: he is suffering all the problems of a human celebrity.

Frank Albrecht, an animal rights activist, suggests that Knut has become a freak. “For me Knut is a problem bear,” said Mr Albrecht, who spent several days recently chronicling Knut’s behaviour. The bear, he claims, is hooked on the sight and smell of men.

Easy to understand: he was brought up by Thomas Doerflein, his keeper, who sang him to sleep with Elvis Presley numbers, who taught him to swim and wrestled with the bear. Now the damage has been done. “Already at the entrance [to Berlin Zoo] you can hear him howling and it doesn’t stop until a person approaches his compound,” Mr Albrecht said.

He is antizoo rather than antiKnut but his view is increasingly shared by zoo managers. When Mr Encke originally decided to let nature take its course – there were two sets of cubs in Nuremberg and both mothers looked ready to reject them – he received backing from other zoo professionals. In the end, though, Mr Encke buckled to popular and political pressure for a new superstar bear.

One of the bear mothers, Vilma, was quick to discard her two offspring. On Monday she emerged from the artificial cave licking her lips. She had just eaten her babes. From that moment the tabloids mounted a full-scale campaign to save the cub who was to become Floske. “Why weren’t the babies saved like Knut?” thundered the front page of Bild.

Angry visitors crowded in front of the bear pit and shouted Rabenmutter! – “Evil Mother” – every time Vilma appeared. So Mr Encke ordered Floske to be scooped out of the compound. It was a popular decision – politicians had weighed in saying that Floske had “a right to life” – but not necessarily the correct one. The fact is that infant animals are dying in zoos all the time. But baby polar bears, unlike, say, baby giraffes, have been pushed up the evolutionary scale by an unholy media alliance. Polar bears, it has been implicitly decided, are just like you and me. And so a discussion that is nominally about the nature of zoos has actually become one about human responsibility: parents to their children and humans to their planet.

Two fallacies are at the heart of the cult of Knut. The first is that siding with Knut can demonstrate your concern about global warming. The habitat of the polar bear is shrinking, runs this logic, so we humans who have caused the damage have an individual responsibility to save every polar bear.

Yet the shrinking of the ice floes does not mean polar bears face extinction. “Polar bears are more numerous now than they were 40 years ago,” said Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, where a fifth of the world’s 25,000 polar bears roam.

The second fallacy is that Knut – because of his dependency on humans – feels human emotions.

There is something ineffably sad about visiting Knut nowadays – 120kg (265lb) and growing by the day – as he covers his eyes to simulate a game of hide and seek with zoo visitors or waves his heavy mitt. These are conditioned responses, not emotions: bottle-feeding him and then giving him star status have turned him into a performer, made a circus out of a zoo.

Fame is fickle and Knut has become as vulnerable as any other celebrity. If Flake survives she will be the fluffy star of 2008 – and Knut will be left waving in a void, as abandoned by the public as he once was by his mother.

Growing cult

400,000 visitors went to see Knut in August. The usual August figure is 232,000

Source: Berlin Zoo

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