Setting Free the Bears

Here’s a heart-warming success story, at a time when good news is a bit thin on the ground.

I visited Wildlife SOS' Agra Bear Rescue Facility earlier this winter. This is part of a program to rescue dancing bears from captivity, and to rehabilitate both the bears and the kalandar families who once depended on dancing bears for their livelihood.

- The rescue facility is a very nice retirement home for the former dancing bears, on a reserve forest between Delhi and Agra

- The past these dancing bears have endured is terrible. Typically, young bears are captured by poachers after the parents have been murdered. They are sold to kalandars, who torture the bears their entire lives to make them perform

- The rescue program essentially buys bears back from the kalandars, and relocates them at this centre where they are well looked after by professional vets. I was especially impressed that the vets were thinking about the bear’s mental state, getting traumatized rescued bears to engage by playing with a ball or climbing a trestle

- Visitors are allowed in only by prior appointment, and are accompanied by wildlife professionals. Otherwise, visitors who have paid good money to see bears may expect to be “entertained” to get their money’s worth, which would create exactly the wrong environment for the bear’s rehabilitation

- There is no breeding program. The rescued bears are simply not in shape to sire a bloodline. The rescue facility is supported only by charity

- The main reason to believe the program will work, longer term, is that it is a buy back coupled with social services. Kalandars get a substantial lump sum, and are being supported in moving on to a new life. One family featured on the visitor centre video used this buy-back money to buy a second hand autorickshaw. Kalandar children are now sent to school, for the first time in over 500 years

- Dancing bears, and the attendant cruelty, have been around since medieval times across all of Eurasia. The Indian program is a part of a larger worldwide effort to rescue dancing bears. The last dancing bears in Europe were rescued as recently as 2007, in Bulgaria. Turkey rescued its last dancing bear in 1998

There is a tantalizing moral question hanging at the edge of this story. Why does this matter? Why is it worth ending the bears’ suffering? Is it because of the acuteness with which bears can experience suffering? I’d be less moved by the suffering of invertebrates. Is it because so little is at stake? I can see the argument for testing life saving drugs on higher mammals, but suffering for the sake of entertainment feels unambiguously wrong. Is it because the horrors we have inflicted on ourselves, from Auschwitz to Abu Ghraib, have taught us that to be human is to be humane? Or more plausibly, that to be civilized is to be humane? Does a society that experiences success in preventing suffering, of whatever sort, build momentum and commitment that serves the cause of preventing even more grievous suffering?

I’m not trying to answer these deeper questions here. I’m just happy that Ravi the bear can gambol down a forest path, keeping pace with my sprinting five year old nephew, just because he wants to.