IQALUIT, NUNAVUT–For thousands of years, Inuit hunters have stalked polar bears across the Arctic, killing animals they revere to keep themselves, and their culture, alive.

Now the movement to stop climate change has adopted polar bears as furry symbols of global warming's perils, making Inuit feel endangered by moves to protect their prey.

Canada is home to two-thirds of the world's polar bears, animals that are still central to the Inuit way of life long after snowmobiles replaced dog sleds as the chief means of chasing their quarry.

"We harvest more polar bears in Nunavut than the rest of the world combined," said Drikus Gissing, Nunavut's head of wildlife management. "Our annual harvest is between 450 and 500 bears a year.

"For us to justify a level like that, we need to put a lot of emphasis on research. And we believe the harvest is sustainable. We believe we have a very good management system to support it."

But climate change is warming the bears' habitat faster than anywhere else on Earth and some scientists say many are starving because it's harder for them to catch seals, their staple food, as ice sheets melt.

Inuit hunters insist those experts have it all wrong because they are using computer models based on outdated data and ignoring the traditional knowledge of people who share the land with wildlife.

Inuit fear pressure from conservationists will lead to polar bear prohibition, and turn Inuit hunters into international pariahs, as east coast sealers have been demonized by the campaign against killing baby harp seals.

"If that happens, we will still continue to hunt in traditional ways, for food only, while the hide will be our clothing," said Lootie Toomasie, who heads the Nattivak Hunters and Trappers Organization in Qikiqtarjuaq, a hamlet on eastern Baffin Island.

"We will kill anyway because it's our culture. We need to hunt polar bear meat. Once we haven't eaten it for a long time, we miss it. Just like if you haven't eaten steak for so long, you miss it."

The debate over polar bear numbers has heated up because the government of Nunavut is considering a possible cut in the quota that can be killed in the Baffin Bay region.

Polar bears live in genetically distinct groups, or sub-populations, that migrate across home ranges. When Baffin Bay freezes over in winter, the territory's bears usually head east to Greenland and return to Canada for summer, Gissing said.

While computer models suggest the Baffin Bay polar bear population is being over-hunted, the number of polar bears across the Arctic has more than doubled over the past 30 years to 25,000, Gissing said.

Greenland and Nunavut set separate hunting quotas for the polar bear population that migrates between the two territories. One option in front of Nunavut's Wildlife Management Board is to cut its quota from 105 bears to 64. Greenland's hunters are allowed to kill 68 polar bears.

On October 30, federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice agreed with Greenland and Nunavut to set up a commission to protect and manage shared polar bear populations in Baffin Bay and the Kane Basin. But the memorandum of understanding, signed in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, doesn't guarantee the three governments will agree on what's in the best interests of polar bears.

Under a 1973 agreement to protect polar bears, experts from Canada, the U.S., Denmark, Norway, the U.S., and Russia monitor efforts to conserve 19 distinct groups of bears roaming in Arctic nations.

In July, the Polar Bear Specialist Group's experts concluded that only one of those subpopulations is growing, while three are stable and eight are declining. There wasn't enough data to assess the health of the other seven groups.

"The total number of polar bears is still thought to be between 20,000 and 25,000," the specialist group added. "However, the mixed quality of information on the different subpopulations means there is much room for error in establishing that range.''

Toomasie and other Inuit hunters say they are not only seeing more polar bears, but the animals are becoming more aggressive, attacking camps and communities.

As Inuit argue with their government over quotas, the U.S. has raised the stakes by calling for a ban on international trade in polar bear products, which some experts see as a bigger danger to the animals' survival than climate change.

On October 16, President Barack Obama's administration said the U.S. will join 175 countries that have signed the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species to close their borders to polar bear products.

Inuit leaders quickly called on Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government to defend the hunt, an important source of income in isolated Arctic communities, where jobs are scarce and living costs painfully high.

"In Canada, our management system is based on conservation hunting, which involves regulated sustainable harvest," said Simon Awa, Nunavut's deputy environment minister. "This helps protect polar bears, in part by maintaining their cultural and socio-economic value to people in Nunavut."

Foreign sport hunters pay $25,000 or more to Inuit guides for the chance to bag a polar bear under a quota system, which also provides food and income from sales of trophies, clothing, and other items made from harvested bears.

A hamlet allowed to hunt 30 polar bears typically sets aside 10 for sport hunters, raising around a quarter of a million dollars for a community desperately short of jobs and money, Toomasie said.

Washington banned import of polar bear trophies into the U.S. last year, and Nunavut's sport hunting business lost American clients.

Hunters continue to come from countries such as Mexico, Spain and France, but they would likely stay away too if the U.S. succeeds in banning the global trade in polar bear parts, turning their trophies into contraband.

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The last count of polar bears in the Baffin Bay region was carried out in 1997 and Inuit hunters insist that computer models built on that study are full of holes.

It is based on a technique called mark-recapture, in which all polar bears spotted along a designated stretch of coastline are shot with a tranquilizer dart. They are marked with ear tags and lip tattoos.

The process is repeated for several years, and scientists use the percentages of tagged polar bears that are recaptured, and others caught for the first time, to estimate the total population and how fast it is reproducing. When the last study was completed 12 years ago, scientists calculated there were 2,074 polar bears in the Baffin Bay region.

The research also concluded the bay's polar bears are among the world's most productive, reproducing so rapidly that the group could withstand a loss of around 120 each year to hunters, Gissing said.

But by the year 2000, Greenland was allowing hunters to kill close to 200 of the animals annually, or 10 times the figure initially reported when Canadian authorities calculated hunting quotas for three Baffin Bay communities, Gissing said.

Flawed estimates, based on the misreported Greenland numbers, pushed the annual loss of bears to double the number scientists considered sustainable, he added.

Greenland imposed quotas four years ago to steadily reign in its hunters, and voluntarily banned all exports of polar bear products. The combined Baffin Bay region hunt has dropped down to around 174 polar bears a year, Gissing said.

"To sustain that, you need more than 2,000 animals in that population," he added. "When scientists took the Greenland harvest plus our harvest, and put that into the (computer) models, the population has actually declined to about 1,500."

Inuit don't trust the rejigged numbers. Gissing says "the only way we can know exactly what's happening with the population is to actually go back and get a new study."

But a new, 3-year study would cost around $3 million. Nunavut's government, which already spends $1.6 million a year on polar bear research, has trouble paying for costly social problems such as a shortage of housing and health care facilities.

"I think more money is being spent presently on meetings to talk about polar bears than what is being spent on actually managing the species," Gissing said.

Nunavut's Environment Minister Daniel Shewchuk will make the final call on quotas in the coming weeks, after reviewing advice from the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board. Awa, his deputy, called the Baffin Bay hunters' threats to ignore any reduction "worrisome."

"If there are violations of our wildlife laws, then our department will meet its legal obligations and conduct an investigation," he warned.

The most pessimistic studies of climate change predict the Arctic Ocean will be ice-free during summer within 20 years.

Conservationists worry that vanishing multiyear ice, or ice that has survived at least one summer melt, could decimate polar bears because they hunt, give birth and raise their young on sea ice.

But Inuit hunters say polar bears can survive without thick, multiyear ice. "Thick ice is not good for polar bears to hunt on," Toomasie said. "They only go walking along the shore, along thin ice, looking for seal holes."

The search for food often draws bears to Inuit hamlets and camps, where they can be shot as "defensive kills" that are deducted from the communities' quotas. Ending sport hunting would remove any incentive to hold fire, Awa said.

"With no economic benefit to harvesting polar bears, and no incentive to deal differently with problem bears, polar bear kills may actually increase," he warned.