The saddest thing is a baby polar bear in Alaska waiting and waiting for his mom to come home, but the mom never comes home because a hunter killed her, for sport. And this will always be the saddest children's story, because now the lonesome motherless bear is condemned to live forever in a zoo, in Buffalo.

Are you familiar with the hunting industry in Alaska? Here's what happened on a "routine expedition" by a person who goes out to kill polar bears:

The bear was orphaned in March after James Tazruk, a big-game Alaskan hunter, shot and killed the mother bear on a routine expedition detailed by the Anchorage Daily News.

Tazruk didn’t realize the bear was a mother and felt terrible about shooting her. So he followed the bear tracks back to the bear’s den, where he found the bear cub, later named Kali, sitting by himself.

Now why would that baby bear be sitting by himself? Oh right, because the heavily armed human who just burst into the den also just murdered Kali's mother, for fun.

Everything about this story is delightful. Did the hunter who "rescued" the cub he orphaned then want to name the cub after the corn-syrup drink Coca-Cola? Yes, of course. Did the terrified baby bear then get dropped off at a police station in the nearest town? Yes, obviously. Did the zoo in Alaska where the cub wound up then decide to get rid of it, because there "wasn't enough room" at the zoo in Alaska for an orphaned baby polar bear? Was the traumatized orphaned baby polar bear then put in a stainless steel box on a UPS cargo jet and flown halfway around the world to Buffalo?

Yes. Yes. Yes to every horrible thing.

The Alaskan cub—at least allowed the dignity of the Inuit name "Kali," which we can only hope has some etymological relationship to Kali the Destroyer of Worlds—will share his prison enclosure with another lonely little polar bear, Luna.

Luna was born in a zoo but has since been separated from her family. Her father was an "orphan," too, meaning somebody shot Luna's grandfather in Alaska, and then he was caught and put in a zoo as a captive breeding specimen.

These two young bears will have a lot to talk about, if they prove they can get along and are allowed to be around each other.

[Photo by Associated Press.]