Making Bears Dance is Animal cruelty

This is an act of animal cruelty that I never knew existed until this week. I shudder at the depths to which humanity can sink. And yet, there are some of us that reach out into the dark to save a fellow creature from pain and abuse. I hope to encourage more of these kind people to reach out and save the Indian sloth bear from any more suffering and cruelty.

Every year Indian sloth bears, aka. Indian dancing bears, are poached from their wild habitats and subjected to a life of pain and slavery. Snatched from their den or mother after she has been brutally killed, their misery begins. Sloth bear cubs as young as 3-5 weeks old are fair game for the poachers, who throw them terrified, into sacks and take them to a Kalandar village. The Kalandars are the traditional trainers and owners of the "dancing bears". Dragging the bears from village to village, forcing them to perform 6-10 hours a day in the blazing heat, they earn maybe about $65.00 a month. Because of this abusive treatment a captive sloth bear can seldom survive more than 7-8 years. In the wild, the average lifespan is estimated at from 20-30 years.

Up to 70% of the baby sloth bears don't survive long enough to be "trained" to perform for the tourists. Many cubs die of neglect, hunger, and dehydration before they reach the Kalandar village. Others die from the cruel treatment they receive from their captors. Starved and beaten if they don't cooperate, the sloth bear cubs get no medical attention for wounds inflicted by sticks, rocks, or metal rods used to punish them and break their spirit. The young bears weaken as the wounds become infected and without the proper nutrition in their diet, the sloth bear cubs get sicker and sicker, until they die of malnutrition and disease. Many end up with tuberculosis from exposure to people in villages where it is a problem. The cubs are stressed and not fed their regular diet, so because they are babies and still need the care of their mother, they aren't strong enough to make it on their own.

The training of the sloth bears by the Kalandars is passed from father to son. This "profession" is the means of supporting large family groups and other means of employment usually aren't even considered. Due to the constant travelling from one village to another, children aren't able to attend school. When that happens the opportunities are minimal for other employment due to the lack of education. So poachers go into the forest and steal bear cubs out of unguarded dens to sell to the Kalandars to use for their travelling performances.

Although once common, some species of Indian bears are killed by the thousands every year for their gallbladder and other body parts. Their populations are now fragmented throughout the country of India and becoming increasingly rare. Sloth bears are hunted and killed in India along with other species of bears in other countries as well. They are killed for the bear bile in their gallbladder. It may be that the bears who are killed for the bile are the lucky ones. The most cruel and painful abuse of the bears happens when they are captured and put in a "bear farm", where the bile is "milked" from their gallbladder every day. A cruel operation to stick a tube in the bear's gallbladder is done by workers who usually have no veterinary training, so the bear is put through what amounts to torture. The bear's wounds are never allowed to heal, so without proper treatment the wounds become infected. This causes intense suffering until they finally die.

The bile, which is used in Chinese traditional medicine, can be made synthetically, so the brutal treatment of the bears is not necessary to obtain the compounds needed for the medicines. However, illegal trade in bear bile and other bear parts continues to exist. This cruel harvest, accompanied by the poaching of baby sloth bears and the killing of their mothers for trying to protect the babies, has decimated the wild population. This animal cruelty cannot go on, or the sloth bears could become extinct in as few as 10 years.