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A Salt Lake organization is claiming a major victory in the battle to save dancing bears; that's right, bears that dance for tourists. They may look cute and fun, but when the bears dance for tourists, as they often do in India, there's a sad story behind it.
The Utah-based group Wildlife SOS is helping rescue the dancing bears. The organization got involved after the first of 500 was saved on Christmas Day six years ago.
When bears dance, it's because somebody trained them to dance. It's usually for tips from tourists, a centuries-old tradition in India. Nikki Sharp, with Wildlife SOS, said, "It started as a way to entertain emperors and, over the years, it has evolved to something that people do in order to obtain income."
She showed us videos of dancing bears, the nose rings their handlers use to control them, with pressure and pain, by pulling with ropes. "And the bear then responds by standing on its hind legs and dancing," Sharp said. "They also knock out the teeth because they have to keep them submissive. The males they tend to castrate."
The dancing bears of India are a species called Sloth bears. Poachers go into the wild to catch future performers. She said, "And so they kill the mother, and they take the cub that might just be a couple of weeks old."
She started the American branch of Wildlife SOS, an Indian group trying to wipe out the dancing bear tradition. "We see this is a problem we can solve, not just in our lifetimes, but maybe in the next three to five years," She said.
They realized that if they just bought the trained bears, the handlers would just get new ones. So they concentrate on retraining the bear handlers, helping them get into other ways of making a living. She said, "So if they need a taxi, we will help fund them with a taxi. If they're going to have a fruit stand, we'll help them get set up, not just the training, but they'll be given all the supplies in order to be successful."
The effort has now placed 500 bears in sanctuaries. The goal is to get the last 200 dancing bears off the streets in the next 18 months.
The Salt Lake branch contributed about 15 percent of the budget last year.
E-mail: hollenhorst@ksl.com
