In India, new job opportunities aim to stop bear dancing

The practice has been banned in the country for 35 years, yet hundreds of bears still perform to this day.

from the December 13, 2007 edition

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Besides the Kalandars, the other major focus of the program is the bears themselves. Roughly 15 minutes from Biharsharif, in the village of Mrig Vihar, and 100 yards behind a red iron fence, three former dancing bears are tied to the base of three leafy trees. The bears were recently surrendered to the program, which oversees a 160-acre lot that will eventually become a lifelong sanctuary capable of housing 50 bears.

Dancing bears are actually sloth bears, best recognized by their shaggy dark hair. They also have noticeably long, ivory-colored front claws and lengthy, light-colored muzzles – perfect for feeding on ants and termites. In the wild, sloth bears are not known to be territorial, nor do they appear to be aggressive toward other bears.

It's unclear to project officials where most sloth bear cubs are captured, but the project is now training forest guards and bolstering wildlife intelligence capacity to stop bear poaching. Often when a cub is taken, its mother is killed. Cubs are staggeringly cheap: Kalandars pay about $6 for one.

At about 3 months of age, the cub's nose is pierced. A Kalandar restrains the animal and a piece of heated metal is forced into its muzzle, through the upper palate, and back out again. A thick rope is pulled through the hole. The cub's teeth are filed down or knocked out with a hammer. Soon after, the bears undergo training.

"Initially when the nose is first pierced, it is very raw," says Neil D'Cruze, wildlife projects officer at WSPA. "So, as a result, when the Kalandar trained the bear to move, a stick was lifted [as a warning] and the rope was pulled – which caused pain. If the bear did not behave correctly, it was beaten. A lot of people believe that on a day-to-day basis, it's the pain of the raw open wound which causes the bear to dance. But it's not – it's actually the way it was trained."

The Indian Bear Dancing Programme recently took in four sloth bear cubs, confiscated by WTI before they were trained. Eight more adult bears are due to arrive at the sanctuary soon. The project is also in the beginning stages of doing something that Mookerjee says has never been done before: rehabilitating sloth bear cubs back into the wild.

When it comes to the practice of bear dancing, Mookerjee expects it will take generations for it to be stopped. "I don't think what WTI is doing has changed the Kalandar perception of animal welfare," he says. "It's really something that will take far longer. This generation will not understand that. This next generation, the children, with education and a little more exposure to life, might be able to understand that."

As Mookerjee sits on a stairwell overlooking the new sanctuary, he remains cautiously optimistic about the program's future.

"Well, I'll be monitoring it for at least two years, and we need to see whether the rehabilitation is working. If it is not, we will know within six months. And if it is not working, we will have to start thinking of something else," he says.

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