Knut, the once-cuddly celebrity polar bear, has made the director of the Berlin Zoo the best-known keeper in the world. Bernhard Blaszkiewitz is the man who ordered Knut to be scooped out of his compound and hand-reared when the cub’s mother left him to die.

Yet if the German tabloids are to be believed, the burly 54-year-old Mr Blaszkiewitz is nothing short of a monster: killing stray cats with his bare hands, letting surplus tigers be sold to China to make potency tablets, feeding goats to the wolves and watching passively as Knut, overloaded by fame, suffered a nervous breakdown.

He admitted breaking the necks of cats because they constituted a health hazard, but most of the allegations are nonsense that reflects the growing envy in the zoo world about the commercial magnetism of Knut. Three million visitors saw Knut last year, swelling profits to more than €6 million (£4.7 million). Then there were the Knut toys, mugs, T-shirts, films, books and seven chart-topping songs.

So the spotlight has turned on Mr Blaszkiewitz and the philosophy of zoos in the age of global warming and disappearing species. Are they outdated (Berlin Zoo was founded in 1844 and is the oldest in Germany) or even immoral? “Of course animals are restricted in a zoo compared with the possibilities that they have in the wild, but that also goes for animal livestock,” he said. “For humans, bars almost automatically translate into an image of prisons. But our monkeys just see the cage as a climbing frame. As for our deer, when they were divided from the public just by a moat they tended to stay inside their sheds. As soon as we put up a light fence they came right up to it, not inhibited at all.”

Has the celebrity status given to Knut – who appeared on the front cover ofVanity Fairwith Leonardo Di-Caprio – distorted the whole nature of an animal kingdom?

After splashing around a bit yesterday he clambered up the rocks and stared at the public as if waiting for applause. Psychiatrists have been fretting about this, concerned that he is becoming addicted to the positive response of humans. “Don’t you believe it,” says a zoo employee, “the reason he stares so intently at visitors? He smells the food in their bags.”

“I hope he lives out the natural life span of 30 to 40 years,” Mr Blaszkiewicz said. The question is where: the Neumünster Zoo, which lent Knut’s father, Lars, to Berlin, wants a slice of the profits. Mr Blaszkiewitz, only half jokingly, hoped to buy them off with a couple of penguins.

The confusion about Knut is that he seems human. He was saved by humans, brought up by them, taught to swim by his keeper. Knut even has a human profession: he has become a lobbyist against greenhouse gases.

The German Government has adopted the bear, who now weighs 220kg (485lb), as its symbol for the fight against global warming and is sanguine about the scrapes that the bear and his zoo director have got into. Animal rights activists complained that Knut was allowed to scoop carp – put there to eat the algae – out of his moat, thus violating the rights of fish.

Star animals

— The “sacred” bullock Shambo tested positive last summer for bovine TB, provoking a stand-off between the Hindu community in Skanda Vale, West Wales, and the authorities. Shambo was slaughtered after three months

— Pheonix the calf was discovered alive in 2001 five days after the slaughter of 15 other cows and 30 sheep on her farm in Devon. A campaign resulted in a reprieve

— Marjan the lion, Kabul zoo’s biggest attraction, lost an eye to a grenade. The Mail on Sunday paid £2,000 to adopt him in 2001

— Two piglets – the Tamworth Two – escaped from a Wiltshire abattoir in 1998 and spent a week on the run. The Daily Mail bought them after their capture and paid for luxury lodgings

— Blackie the Donkey, below, was saved by the animal rights campaigner Vicki Moore from being crushed to death in 1987 in Spain, where a village tradition says that the fattest man should be carried through the streets annually by a donkey

Source: Times archives

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