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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but