One of Nepal’s last known dancing bears, which was rescued in December last year, has died after being transferred to a zoo, an animal rights campaigner said on Wednesday, blaming the death on “negligence.”
The two sloth bears were rescued in southern Nepal from a pair of itinerant street performers who used the animals for entertainment.
Shortly after their rescue, the bears — 19-year-old male Rangila and Sridevi, a 17-year-old female — were transferred to a zoo near Kathmandu, where they were put in cages on display.
Photo: AFP
A few weeks later, the female bear died.
“[We] were told that she had some problem in her liver and that it was jaundice,” said Niraj Gautam of the Jane Goodall Institute Nepal, who was involved in the rescue of the bears. “These animals should have been thoroughly checked. There was nothing. That’s the negligence we want to point out.”
Gautam said that the bears should have been given special care and medical attention to help them rehabilitate after years of abuse as performing animals.
The bears were kept in small cages that were not properly cleaned and were displaying behaviors that suggested they were distressed, Gautam added.
“It feels like all our work was in vain,” he said.
The government defended the care the bears have received, saying that the zoo is the only facility in Nepal able to house them.
The institute and the World Animal Protection rights group are lobbying the Nepalese government to have the surviving bear transferred to a special sanctuary for rescued dancing bears in neighboring India, where the tradition of using the animals for entertainment was largely eradicated in 2012.
“There are legal hurdles in transferring the animal to another country and the zoo is the only facility we have,” Nepalese Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Deputy Director Gopal Prasad Bhattarai said. “The zoo is giving the best care they [are] capable of [giving] to the bear.”
Nepal outlawed the practice of performing bears back in 1973, a year after it was officially banned in India, but the tradition lingered on in parts of the country’s south. Dancing bears are trained as cubs to dance on their hind legs. Their snouts are pierced with a heated rod so they can be controlled by the tug of a rope or chain.
Dancing bears on the Indian subcontinent date back to the 13th century, when trainers belonging to the Muslim Qalandar tribe enjoyed royal patronage, and performed before the rich and powerful.
Sloth bears, a critically endangered species, are found in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bhutan, but shrinking habitats and rampant poaching have reduced their numbers, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
They can grow up to 1.8m tall and weigh up to 140kg.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the