Photos from my trip to Bellary District (March 26th) with a rep from Wildlife SOS, an Indian animal rights NGO that is trying to save sloth bears from really rather painful and not terribly dignified lives as street performers. Most of the people in the photos are Kalenders, gypsy-ish Muslims who in days long past “danced” the bears for the pleasure of Rajas and other pre-Indepedence aristocrats but now make their living trotting out the animals out for local kids and tourists. [NOTE: A group from Park City (Utah) recently got itself involved in funding the NGO via adoptions of ex-dancing bears].
A Kalender camp outside Hospet; note how the older bear is controlled—with rope attached to a metal ring strung through nostril and top of the snout that is pulled and twisted, and when combined with various hand signals, can force the animal to stand up, turn around, shake hands and do a Stasi-style military salute. The Wildlife SOS rep, Samad, said the larger bear was among the healthiest he’d seen (apparently the result of the animal being fed sorghum).
Samad (foreground), a Wildlife SOS volunteer, tries to “educate” a Kalendar in Venkatapur, a village roughly 20km north of Hospet, into giving up to sloth bear cubs he and his brother had recently acquired. Education, at least as this stage, consists mostly of explaining what staggering quantities of jail time might be in store if the Forest Department finds the bears first.
Bear cubs loaded into the back of the SUV I’d rented from the hotel after Samad convinced the villager to give them up. (NOTE: None of this was expected; Samad: “You won’t see any bears in the village today. They’re all out on the road this time of year.” Instead, we had two of them sitting in the back of the car, mewing and urinating, for four hours.)
Two of the boys from Venkatapur and the SUV driver (left) sit at the Diroji bear sanctuary, a half-hour from the village, waiting to see sloth bears in the wild. Five bears later emerged, one with a pair of cubs clinging to her back, clambering all over a rock across the valley. A forest official, we later learned, had smeared honey on the rock so he could photograph the bears from a hidden jeep.
The boys hand the bears over to a Forest Department official after verbally agreeing (both are illiterate) to a statement written by Samad (2nd from right) that they would never, ever poach cubs again.
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Josh Chin is a freelance journalist based in Beijing. He also once worked as a sous chef in a French restaurant in San Francisco. Neither job has been good for his health.Photos
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