Arturo was born for the ice. He spent his final days dragging himself across a blue-painted concrete floor, under a sun his body was never meant to endure.
He arrived at the Mendoza Zoo in 1993, when he was just 8 years old, and stayed there forever. When his companion Pelusa died in 2012, he became Argentina’s last polar bear. A British newspaper dubbed him “the saddest animal in the world” and that phrase spread around the planet: Greenpeace, activists, and thousands of signatures demanded his transfer to a sanctuary in Canada. Mendoza convened a medical board in 2014 and decided he would stay, that the journey would kill him before the heat did.
He remained there, cooled with hoses and fans, for two more years. On July 3, 2016, his body finally collapsed: he lost his appetite, his sight, his sense of smell, and an infection ate away at the bone in his nose. He was 31 years old. He never felt snow beneath his paws.
