Dancing bears and their human owners: Where cruelty and caring co-exist

They were so small they fit in the palms of my hands. Their eyes had just opened and they were crying in distress. Every time they felt my finger in front of their mouth, they started to suck on it. They were trying to climb up my arms on to my back. The feel of my hair comforted them...

These two babies were rescued from a poacher who would have sold them on to a community called the Kalanders who use them as dancing bears in India.

A few years before this day, I was in Agra to do a story on the dancing bears. As I drove on the highway towards Fatehpur Sikri, I saw dozens of bears on the side of the road. I was astonished to see this in the open as ostensibly owning and displaying this animal was against the law.

On that hot dusty day, as I got out of my car and started to film the dancing bear, I knew I had to make this a strong news story. I had to ask why a Schedule 1 animal could be paraded on a popular highway so blatantly and not have anybody do something about it. The tiger is a Schedule 1 animal too. It would be absurd to watch a dancing tiger on the side of the road, it would never happen. So why was nothing been done about the bears?

The bear was standing on its hind legs and swaying from side to side as a drum was being beaten. Have you seen a sloth bear? They are quite peculiar-looking in that their bodies are a dense mass of coarse fur, usually black in colour with some brown and reddish highlights. They have pale muzzles and their lower jaw juts out further than their upper jaw. Their lips seem fleshy and they have long claws on their paws.

When they are on all fours, a fully-grown male adult can stand at about 85 cm at the shoulder. That is nearly three feet tall at the shoulder. When they rise up on their hind legs they can come close to five feet sometimes and a band of light yellow hair in a U-shape is visible on their chests.

A sloth bear is an intimidating and dramatic sight and this dancing boy was no different.

On closer inspection, however, I could see that he had no claws, his mouth looked like it had no teeth. Sloth bears possess the same number of teeth as other bears (six upper and six lower incisors, two upper and two lower canines, eight upper and eight lower premolars, and four molars in the upper jaw and six in the lower). Clearly this one had had them all extracted.

Then I saw the real horror. a large thick rope went in through the nose and upper palate of the bear’s mouth. The rope was then looped through an iron ring, the other end of which was in the handler’s hands. The bear’s every movement to the beat of the drums was governed by the jerks of the rope. I was to learn later and see for myself that when they are still young, a red hot needle is used to punch this hole through their nose and upper palate and it never quite heals as the rope constantly chafes the wound. This makes the wound sensitive and every jerk on the rope causes immense pain.

A jerk to the left and they move their head to the left, because if they don’t, it will be too agonising. It was also a way the handlers could control the animals even when they were not dancing as adult sloth bears are super strong and can rip into a human in minutes.

Sloth bears are solitary but not aggressively territorial. In many forests they are nocturnal, so they move around mainly at night. Mothers with cubs have been observed moving around in the daylight and this might be to avoid predators. In the wild, a bear lives up to twenty-five years. In these captive conditions, they die in seven to eight years from malnourishment and infected wounds.

A wild sloth bear is mainly an insectivore and a fruitarian. The insects consist mainly of ground-living termites and ants. They use their strong claws to dig deep into the termite mounds and soil to look for them. They like sugar-rich fruit and also climb trees looking for beehives, as they love honey. Fallen ripe fruit are their usual go-to for fruits and they have been observed feeding occasionally on carrion or left over rotted kills of predators.

In captivity, while fruit can be made available to them, it’s harder to provide them with termites and ants. It’s a major protein requirement for them and this lack of protein in their diets is a huge problem. In the Kalander community, poverty is so prevalent that even fruit is a luxury and often, some milk and maybe bread with the odd banana becomes a staple. This bad diet combined with their wounds and stress kills them young.

More cubs are then needed to take their place creating a never ending loop of poaching in the wild. The animals are slow breeders and do not breed well, if at all, in captivity. Sloth bears are predominantly nocturnal but mothers with young cubs might move around during the day.

In order for them to be effective as dancing bears, they need to be trained and handled from a young age on.

To capture young wild sloth bears, their mother has to be killed. Baby bears do not go anywhere without their mothers. In the wild, cubs are born in secure dens. These dens are either natural caves or dug out by the mother bears. The mother bear stays in the den for close to eight weeks without leaving her babies. At this time, she survives off her own fat and water reserves. Baby bears are born blind and cannot see until they are about four weeks old. To get to the cubs, the poachers often have to kill the mothers.

Cub mortality is very high. They need the powerful nutrients in their mother’s milk to survive and need her guidance to reach maturity. A sloth bear mother will carry her cubs on her back until they are almost ten months old and protect them by fighting to the death with any threats. A female sloth bear with cubs has been observed fighting and standing down two tigers when confronted. So when the poachers take the cubs they are also taking out a viable breeding female, endangering the future survival of these animals.

Adult bears are not spared either. Bears are often killed for their gall bladder which is used in Chinese traditional medicines. Many bears also get captured and used as live bile producers. Black bears and brown bears are also killed or captured for the same reason. The bears are trapped and confined in small cramped cages which force them to stay in a supine position. An incision is made into the side where the gall bladder is and the bile is extracted through a tube. It’s a horrific barbaric practice that exists to this day even though there has been strong international condemnation.

That day, on the hot highway, watching the dancing bear, I felt anger and a deep sense of outrage. I wanted the bears seized, I wanted the men arrested and I wanted them to pay for what I saw as extreme cruelty. Two years later, I would have a very different view.

It was then that I met a Kalander family and spent time with them.

As part of the story, I wanted to get an understanding of why the Kalanders were engaged in such a cruel livelihood. My day with the family turned many things for me on its head. I can’t say that this was the first time my line of thinking changed profoundly but I can say that this was definitely one of the times I remember feeling a whole seismic shift in the way I would start viewing people in this landscape of conservation.

The family was an extended one consisting of an old grandfather, an aunt and uncle and their children, and a mother and father and their children. They were about twelve members in all. They owned two sloth bears. There was also a large horned owl. The bears were tied up in the courtyard and the family sat outside on charpoys in front of their small mud dwelling.

This family had volunteered to give up their bears to wildlife SOS. In return, they would get a small stipend and a loan to start a new life. The father was being set up with a small shop and the women were learning to sew. Small donations were also being sourced to send the children to school. It was only then that I saw the human faces behind the people I only thought of as cruel bear oppressors. I had never once wondered, why would people want to be in this business?

Kalanders are a community of wandering nomads who travel from place to place with their dancing bears, earning money by making them perform. entire families depended on this meagre income and it was the only way of life they knew that was accessible to them. A community of the minority religion, it was also not easy for them to become assimilated into mainstream life. Their children were never in any one place too long to go to school and often, there was no money to send them either.

Also seen as low caste and dirty because of their practice of living with their animals, they were not exactly welcome everywhere they went, even if they wanted to settle down. Some communities had set up small places near Agra and Jaipur. Here, with the highways bringing in tourists, they figured business would at least pay for their food.

Some reports suggest that the Kalander community had started this practice in the thirteenth century in the courts of the Mughal emperors, while other reports suggest that the practice started as early as the Indus valley civilisation (7000-300 BC). While the historians might not be able to agree on an actual date, it is very apparent that it is an old and traditional practice.

Sloth bears, when young, are very needy. They stay with their mothers until they are almost two-and-a-half years old. They crave contact and need to be held a lot. This makes them animals that are relatively tameable. I say relatively because once they reach sexual maturity, they become very big, strong and dangerous unless handled very carefully. Of course, just like with any other animal or us human animals, different personalities abound, making them more or less tame like the other animals, but for the most part, they stay wild at heart.

This family knew no other way of life.

The old grandfather could remember his old grandfather with bears and he grew up with them and that’s the way it has always been. Sitting under a tree that day and watching the young children stroke the bear and feed it small bits of roti, I had an epiphany. They were not being cruel. They lived in a world where every meal was a challenge, every day a struggle, and the future was a hazy mirage that actually did not exist. Their lives were cruel. They actually loved their bears.

Apart from the horrific nose ring and rope, there were no other marks of daily abuse inflicted on the bears. Yes, some families declawed the bears and removed their teeth, but that was done while they were still young. There was no daily beating, starving or casual cruelty. They could not even understand why I was distressed about the bear’s nose. It is what had to be done to control them. The family was scared, puzzled and wary of what their new future would bring.

It struck me then. It is so easy for us in our comfortable lives to freely wave around words like cruelty, abuse and evil, but if our comfortable lives were ripped away and we were left on the streets, what might we do? Yes, poaching was an awful scourge and had to be stopped, but how much of my lifestyle was leading to the sloth bears’ habitat being destroyed and them dying because of that?

It was an afternoon of uncomfortable questions and intensely uncomfortable answers. when the mother brought me a small cup of tea and causally gave a banana to the bear and I watched the children stare at the food, I wondered, how many evenings had this family gone to bed hungry and yet found some food for their bears?

Kartick and Geeta, via Wildlife SOS, wanted to not just seize bears and arrest people but they wanted the bear handlers to voluntarily hand in their bears and then help them with rehabilitation that would set them on their first steps into a new future.

There are people I have met who find even this shocking. They only feel for the Kalanders and say that this kind of “do good” rehabilitation does not help in any way except in making us, the elitist conservationists, happy. I have only one counter argument to that.

According to an eminent field biologist and conservationist, Dr Yoganand, who has studied sloth bears for years, given the degradation of habitat and the fact that sloth bears are only found in 10 per cent of the available forests of India, there are only about 7,000 of them in India and perhaps between 10,000 and 12,000 in the world. These bears are found in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Bhutan. Their populations are dropping by the day.

Let’s say we do nothing, one day there will be no more sloth bears to be had and then where will the Kalanders go? what will they do? By then it will too late to even receive help. Here, at least they were getting something in return for handing in their bears. No one was being arrested and thrown in jail as per the law. That would be no justice nor would it solve the problem.

Five years to that day, the last dancing bear in this area would be rescued and the families helped. If the programme had not been successful, more bears would have not been handed in voluntarily.

Excerpted with permission from Born Wild: Journeys Into The Wild Hearts Of India And Africa, Swati Thiyagarajan, Bloomsbury.