O human! How brutal thou !!!

Sunday morning and I was sitting in a restaurant for my breakfast with a copy of The Hindu in my hands. Nothing special in the papers except some news on elections and some accidents in the local area. However one article that caught my attention was on bears and what sort of cruelty they have to face at the hands of the poachers. Honestly! after reading that, i felt as though all hell broke upon me.

To trap a baby bear, the poachers surround the den with burning twigs , after the mother bear goes out to forage the food. Often they will kill the mother bear and then trap the baby bear, which would hardly be weighing 250 grams. Next, after putting these cubs in a gunnybag, they are sold to bear-tamers, called kalandhars.

From here the next chapter of mercilessness begins...

To control the baby cubs, iron rods are pierced through their noses and then metal rings are passed through them. The bears are then made to learn dancing by beating their feet with sticks, to force them to lift their feet. Often burning pieces of coal are placed under a metal plate and the bear, unable to bear the heat, lifts their feet. At the same time, a dholak or damru is played in time to the lifting of the beer's feet. When the bear tries to rest, the trainer would pull the rope tied to the metal ring in its nose and the bear, to avoid this excruciating pain, would stand on its hind legs.

The living conditions are so pathetic for these poor creatures that it just burns my heart. They are often untreated and neglected. Unable to walk due to the pain in their feet, the open and infected sores in their nostrils and meagre food they receive (which mainly consists of ragi balls) becomes their life. As the bears grow up, their canine teeth are knocked out, claws cut and the male bears castrated with razor blades, all this without the use of any anesthesia, ensuring that the bears have no other choice than to obey their masters.

These poor creatures live in the same world as we do. But their pain and misery, often go unheard. Many wild-life organisations are trying recover these bears, but still the current recovery is very little.

During the recovery process, many wildlife organisations pay around Rs. 50,000 to these kalandhars to give these bears to them. Then they are put in quiet quarantine and fed with nutritious diets to ensure they gain their lost weight. The bears are allowed to roam freely in this closed controlled enclosures to ensure they can get back to the nature. Once they settle down they are injected with anesthesia using blow-pipes, and then checked for infectious diseases. The nose rings are removed, the painful mouths, wounds, rotting tooth stumps, etc are treated and a small microchip is embedded in them to monitor their health.

Once the bears have put on weight and their recovery started, they are placed into 'socialising enclosures' where they are free to roam about in open spaces, make friends with other bears and socialise. Food is generally hidden in bamboo pipes, like honey and dates, which the bear loves. The bears learn to discover these treats. Sometimes, the food is also hidden in 'artificial trees' and the bear learns to shake them and find them. Toys made out of bamboo, rubber tyres, etc help these curious animals to regain their natural instincts.

Certainly, one finds the account to be heart-rendering and one can't forgive the poachers, who were the real culprit of seperating the baby cubs from their mother. The law awards them a minimum two years of punishment for this inhuman conduct.

Even though the number of bears still out on Indian streets is pretty high, yet the encouraging news is that out the estimated such 700-1200 bears, nearly 370 bears have been rescued and are safe at various wild-life sancturies at Agra, Bhopal and Banerghatta (courtesy, The Hindu)