Activists thought they'd rescued India's last dancing bear. Sadly, they were mistaken
It was during a routine check last month for evidence of animal cruelty that a YouTube video caught the attention of Wildlife Trust of India staff. The grainy video showed a crowd of onlookers watching a bear dance, in clear violation of a practice India outlawed in 1972.
The trust's surveillance team analysed the video and checked car registration plates, eventually identifying Bari Naki village in Bihar state, bordering Nepal, as the location of the performance. The forest department was alerted and three bears were discovered at the village and seized.
Since then, forest department officials have seized five more bears across villages in Bihar and neighbouring Jharkhand state.
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"[This] points to a resurgence [of people forcing bears to dance]," said Jose Louies, enforcement chief at the Wildlife Trust of India.
"It's not just money that villagers pay to see the bear. Once you have a crowd, you can sell them bear hair, claws, or nails as lucky charms to make money," he said.
India banned the practice of forcing bears to dance in 1972, but critics say enforcement is lacking. The Wildlife Trust of India, Wildlife SOS and many other environmental groups have worked for years with the nomadic Kalandar tribe - which traditionally relied on dancing bears for their livelihoods - to persuade them to stop the practice.
For four centuries, the Kalandar tribe has specialised in finding and killing mother bears in India's forests to take cubs for "training".
Advocacy and environmental groups have taught the tribe other skills such as driving, accountancy, carpet weaving, bicycle repair and welding, to introduce new sources of income for them that do not involve bears.
But some "Kalandars who fail to succeed in their new jobs might have been tempted to go back to their old ways", Louies said.
He called it "operational memory", meaning that the practice is likely to resurface as long as some of the tribesmen possess the knowledge of how to locate and hunt the bears.
Sloth bears, with their shaggy black fur and long noses, are forced to perform by having their noses and jaws pierced with a hot iron rod so that a coarse rope can be passed through the open wound and into the roof of their mouths.
Bear handlers tug on this rope, with the pain making the bear move in what looks like a dance. Handlers also break the bear's teeth and claws to make it easier to subdue the animal.
To date, more than 600 bears have been rescued and taken to animal sanctuaries in India after being forced to perform. Indian conservation NGO Wildlife SOS rescued what it though was the country's last dancing bear in 2009, rehoming it at one of its sanctuaries in Agra.
The eight bears rescued in the past six weeks have been sent to rescue centres in Bihar and Jharkhand.
There are around 6,000-11,000 sloth bears left in the wild across India, according to Wildlife SOS figures from September last year. They are commonly found in the country's central and northeastern regions, and are vulnerable to poaching and habitat loss.
Animal cruelty has been a criminal offence in India since 1960, with exceptions for food and scientific experiments. Rights groups in India have long campaigned to ban the use of elephants for temple rituals and to stop the sale of dog meat in northeast India, often clashing with traditionalists and cultural norms.
"True Indian culture is based on compassion for animals and the constitution enshrines this compassion, so any form of animal cruelty should not be permitted even if it is an old tradition like dog fights, bull running or dancing bears," said Hiraj Laljani, India-based media manager for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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