Polar Bear
Polar bears at a German zoo were sickened by a herpes virus found in zebras, despite not coming into direct contact with them. Reuters

The BBC has misled its viewers with fake polar bear videos filmed inside a zoo in its popular "Frozen Planet" show, it has been reported.

The footages of the polar bear giving birth and the cubs mauling their mother for milk were actually shot in a den underneath a Dutch zoo's polar bear enclosure. The BBC had fitted the den with cameras shortly before the birth of the cubs and the viewers were kept in the dark about the orchestrated filming during 2010 Christmas, the Daily Mail has reported.

The episode five of the series showed the cubs in the den with their mother, giving an impression to the viewers that they were born and filmed in the wild in the Arctic.

But the BBC has denied the allegation that it has cheated its viewers with fake footages. They maintained that the details of the filming were "clearly explained" on the Frozen Planet Web site.

The producer of the video maintained that it's impractical to film the carnivores in the wild. "The problem for us is that they give birth in these dens of ice and there's absolutely no way we can get our cameras down there," the Daily Mail has quoted Kathryn Jeff, the producer of the show, as saying.

Sir David Attenborough, who anchored the show, also defended the methods used in the filming of the programme. "If you had tried to put a camera in the wild in a polar bear den, she would either have killed the cub or the cameraman," the newspaper has quoted Sir David as saying.

"It's not falsehood, and we don't keep it secret either," he added.

A spokesman of the channel maintained that the particular sequence would be impossible to film in the wild and the viewers regularly look at the background information and extra clips from the "Frozen Planet."