Polar bears have large home ranges in the wild and require complex, cold environments in captivity that are challenging to provide, making their zoo welfare particularly difficult to achieve.
Polar bears face a fundamental challenge in captive settings: their ecological needs are so extreme that replication is practically impossible. Large home ranges, the need for cold environments, complex hunting behaviour, and solitary adult nature make captive welfare provision inherently limited. Stereotypic pacing in polar bears is widely understood as a welfare problem that enclosure improvements can reduce but rarely eliminate entirely.