It’s not the same when the conversation comes down to the human level. Age? Thirtysomething. Education? Ecologist. Dreams? For the bears to have a better life. And of course other animals too.
Ivanov brushes off most of my questions about human beings with a telling silence.
He became manager of the Dancing Bears Park five years ago. Since then he has spent most of his time with the creatures in his care.
His life’s passion is to exercise their instincts.
“There’s no other way to return the bears to nature,” he says.
2.
“I have a vivid memory of the first time my parents showed me a dancing bear. It was spring, and a Gypsy had come to our small town. I didn’t yet know how terribly those people tormented them. I took it as something normal. We watched as the bear stood on its hind legs, the Gypsy played his fiddle, and my dad gave him a few coins. I can’t even remember if I liked it. Just that one image: the Gypsy and the bear. That’s what used to happen in Bulgaria for years—parents showed their children dancing bears as the most normal thing in the world. Once in a while a Gypsy comes along, with a bear, so we go take a look. What’s wrong with that? Nothing. I’m glad I work for an organization that has knocked that mentality out of us. We’d probably never have managed it on our own. It was only pressure from the Four Paws foundation that helped us—they knew how to get a campaign going against bear keeping all over Europe.”
Four Paws was founded in 1988 by Austrian ecologists to protest against the conditions in which chickens and animals bred for their fur are kept on farms. Nowadays it has offices in twelve countries. As the first organization to be involved with domestic pets, it set up a group that goes to help them in places where there have been natural disasters—in the aftermath of earthquakes or hurricanes, when hardly anyone thinks about the animals. They also run major international programs; for example, to castrate stray dogs in Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Kosovo, and Bulgaria. The head office has an annual budget of several million euros, all sourced from charitable donations.
The park at Belitsa is one of its flagship projects. On thirty acres, twenty-seven bears live in seven sectors, of which only one animal—Monti, the youngest—was not a dancing bear. He had been kept as an attraction at a restaurant.
“To understand the point of our work you need to know how those bears were prepared for dancing,” says Ivanov. “You already know about the rings they had in their noses. But do you know that in the hand in which the Gypsy held the bow for his fiddle he also held a stick, attached to the chain, at the end of which was the bear’s nose? The bear would try to keep up with the bow, and it looked as if he were dancing to the rhythm of the music. But in fact it was an attempt to get away from the pain. Their lives were one long, constant pain. And they had a poor diet. They lacked appropriate exercise and suffered from stress.”
Now a number of the bears at the park are sick with cancer. Of the original thirty-five, several have already died of it: Kalinka and Milena in 2010, Isaura in 2012, and Mariana and Mitku in 2013. Isaura was the oldest, aged about thirty-five.
They lived with people, and now they’re contracting the same illnesses as people.
At the park they are given regular tests to check their blood, blood pressure, urine, and temperature. Supplements are added to their food to build their strength. Their feces are constantly checked for signs of worms.
But even so, situations arise for which the park’s employees are not prepared.
Early in 2013, the bear called Mitku began to lose weight at a rapid rate. In a month his weight dropped by almost half. He had no appetite. He trailed about his sector for days on end, looking absent.
The vet began by testing his feces, thinking he might have a form of giardia. But nothing showed up under the microscope.
Mitku was put in a cage, which was loaded into an ambulance that took him to Sofia, where he was given an ultrasound. He turned out to have cancer of the kidneys, liver, and entire digestive tract. He never came back to Belitsa. The tumors were metastatic, and he wasn’t fit for treatment. He was euthanized on the spot, and that same day the city crematorium reduced his body to ashes.
Isaura turned out to have such a complicated form of cancer that not even Ivanov can remember its name.
It began with a small spot on her left cheek. At the park they thought it was a pimple that would disappear in a few days. A week later it hadn’t gone but had actually started to grow bigger.
The vet tested Isaura’s blood. The results were tragic. She was low on erythrocytes (red blood cells), and leukocytes (white blood cells)—low on everything. “Something was gnawing away at her from the inside, but we didn’t know what it was,” says one of the staff.
In a short space of time the spot had changed into a patch. The patch spread from her cheek to the upper then the lower lip. In less than two weeks it had reached her eye.
Meanwhile Ivanov sent photographs of Isaura’s snout to Sofia. “An hour later we knew we had no chance of saving Isaura,” he says. “And that we had very little time left, because this vile disease spreads at a monstrous rate.”
A month later Isaura was dead.
According to Ivanov: “It’s awful to watch an animal that in nature is very strong, and never even has a cold, start to fall sick with diabetes, cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, and cataracts because of contact with human beings. What we do to ourselves, we do to them too. I’m sorry, could you repeat your question? Oh, you’re saying that speaks badly for us as a species—you say we’re killing ourselves with bad food, stress, and alcohol. Well, perhaps you’re right.”
3.
The staff at the park say their work involves observation and reacting to problems. But above all their task is to arouse the bears’ instincts and restore their nature to them. As Ivanov puts it, they have to destroy the slave bear and awaken the strong, free, independent wild animal that each one of them should be.
The basic problem is that in nature a bear spends three-quarters of its day foraging for food. Meanwhile, at Belitsa the food comes to them ready to eat. But something has to be done with the day.
So a major task for the staff is creative feeding, or, in simpler terms, hiding the food. One of the first instincts that can awaken in a bear is the instinct to hunt. “Well, let’s say the instinct to forage,” the staff members correct me. “Because they don’t hunt. They search for food that we hide for them.”
The food is hidden all over the park. In the hollow of a tree, for example. And first the bear has to scent it out, find it, and then climb up to extract it. Or it’s buried underground. Under stones. Or else chicken hearts are cut into small pieces and tossed about a large area—then the bears have to work pretty hard to gather and eat them.
The staff also come up with various interesting devices. For example, they fill a pipe with nuts that can only be extracted one by one. The bear has to make quite a mental effort before he gets his fill.
Unfortunately, the staff tell me, bears are highly intelligent. Misho, for instance, soon got bored with extracting the nuts individually, so he whacked the pipe against a tree and ate the entire contents.
“Every minute they spend concentrating is a success for us, because we prefer them to use their heads, not their muscles,” say the park staff in these situations. And they’ve thought up a way to secure the pipe so Misho won’t break it next time.
The bears’ diet is adapted to the time of year, according to what they’d be eating in each particular season in nature. In the spring they eat the early crop of vegetables. In summer they have lots of summer fruits and other vegetables. In fall they eat plums, apples, pears, and nuts.
In the early days they were given nuts all year long, but they started to gain too much weight. That cannot be allowed. In Germany, at a park similar to the one in Belitsa, there’s a bear that’s terribly obese—he weighs over 880 pounds. So the
bears at Belitsa are only given nuts in the fall, to put on some extra fat for hibernation.
Now their diet is almost perfect, except that it’s impossible to wean them off wheat bread. It’s a shame, because that’s what ruins their digestive system. But they’re already so accustomed to this diet that trying to take them off bread might only cause them harm.
Ivanov’s dream is to release the real predator’s instinct in them. But how can that be done? “Of course, we could release some chickens and see if our bears would go after them,” he conjectures. “But that would be contrary to our values, which hold that every creature deserves respect. We’d never do that.”
How do you exercise that instinct in these conditions? It’s a very good question, to which Ivanov has been seeking the answer for several years. And he has an idea. In the near future he’s planning to tie thin ropes between two trees at two different heights, to form a square. He’ll attach a dead fish to the ropes. With the help of a special small motor, the fish will move up, left, down, and right around the square. And to satisfy his hunger, the bear will have to catch it.
For bears from Alaska it wouldn’t be the slightest problem—they do that sort of thing on a daily basis.
But for the ones at Belitsa it’ll be a major challenge. And for many long minutes their attention will be successfully riveted.
However, Ivanov can tell that over the course of this game he’ll have to observe the bears closely. “Nobody has tried anything like this before. Nobody has managed to restore nature to animals that have lived with people for whole generations. I do have some concerns. I can’t be sure we’re not opening Pandora’s box. We could be unblocking other things in their minds—who knows where that will take us? Wild bears would find a way to get out of here in two days flat. They wouldn’t have the least problem, not even with the electric fence. They have far greater self-confidence and they’re more creative. Perhaps one day our bears will go for the electric fence too, destroy it and be off into the forest. That would be a success for us, but on the other hand it would also be our failure. Why? Because our bears wouldn’t survive as much as a week at liberty. I’ll be happy to tell you about it, but right now it’s feeding time. The guys have brought the bread. Come on, you can help us to scatter it.”
4.
Misho, Mima, and Svetla, Europe’s last dancing bears, spent their first two days at Belitsa exploring the artificial lake, rubbing against trees, and staring at the bears in the neighboring sector.
After a few days it turned out that Misho and Svetla were sweet on each other. Misho started walking around her, roaring, but in a completely different tone from usual. The staff at the park joked that he was singing her serenades.
And that freedom had awoken his basic instincts.
Svetla responded to these amorous advances like a princess who’s aware of her true value and knows she deserves all these tributes. At the sight of Misho, she pretended to be occupied with something. Anything at all—eating, extracting nuts from a plastic tube, or ruffling her fur. But she started driving the youngest bear, Mima, away from the male. When Mima refused to go, she got a few blows across her snout from Svetla’s paw. Drawing blood.
According to Ivanov: “We’re pleased they’re fond of each other. It was the first romance of this kind at the park. What about aggression, you ask? Well, it’s part of a bear’s nature, and if it appears, it has to be recognized as part of their return to their roots. We want them to be able to express their emotions. If anger appears, aggression is the natural way to offload it. When we let the bears out of the ‘zero’ sector into the others, we have to expect it. Though of course everything happens under our control—we can’t let them try to kill each other.
“The first sector is for peaceful bears.
“The second is for more dominating ones.
“The third sector is for the strongest and most aggressive bears. Here we have Bobi, Charlie, Dana, Natka, and Rada, who is actually a small bear—she only weighs 265 pounds—but she likes to be dominant, and we had problems with her in the other two sectors.
“We sit in our observatory and watch how they behave, and we work it out—how much aggression we can allow them, whether they’ve already crossed the boundary, or whether we can still give them a while to cool down.
“They have a need to separate within the sector into ‘dominating’ and ‘dominated.’ We don’t want that, because if none of them feels more aggrieved than the others, there might be a bit of claw waving, and a bit of growling, but that’ll be as far as it goes.
“But if one of them were to feel aggrieved, he’d sit there quietly, until finally he’d erupt and attack the others. That has never yet happened here, but it could happen at any moment. Enraged bears are not incapable of killing each other.”
VI. Hibernation
1.
There’s one thing that’s key to restoring the bear’s freedom and to all the work with the bears at Belitsa.
It’s hibernation.
In other words, the winter sleep into which wild bears fall.
For the staff at the park, it’s a major test. If their bears go to sleep, it’s a major success. If they don’t, it’s a failure.
In captivity the bears didn’t hibernate at all; they lived just as their owners did. Some sank into a sort of semihibernation, a lethargic state, but there were others that went on moving around all winter, eating as usual, and didn’t have enough body fat to allow them to sleep for several months.
Hibernation is also a test of a bear’s resourcefulness and sense of his own value. If he feels confident enough to be able to care for himself—in other words, first put on some body fat for harder times, then find a suitable place, dig a cave, line it, and finally fall asleep—it means the work done with him is having an effect.
2.
For bears, hibernation is a natural phenomenon that we cannot fully explain. First, the body temperature of hibernating animals usually falls quite considerably. But not in the case of bears—theirs only falls by two degrees, from ninety-seven to ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. At any moment, they can easily wake up; their ears are working, they’re alert, and if someone comes too near, the bear will get up.
Second, bears do not relieve themselves for the entire time they hibernate. They sleep for three to four months without producing urine or feces. Nobody knows how that’s possible.
Third, and finally, they lie in the same position for several months, often without moving an inch. They don’t become stiff or suffer from pressure sores. And then they get up as if nothing had happened, and go to look for food.
3.
A bear at Belitsa has too much time, which he has to fill somehow. Formerly, he spent day after day working for the Gypsy. He had to dance and perform various tricks.
But here suddenly he has the whole day to himself.
The bears find this terribly confusing. If they were wild, three-quarters of their day would be taken up with foraging. But here they’re fed. What are they to do with the rest of the day?
The fact that the bears of Belitsa are unable to manage time is very plain to see when winter comes. “Hibernation is based on the idea that you have to prepare yourself for tougher times,” says Dimitar Ivanov. “You need to build up the fat you’ll burn off when the snow falls. If you don’t prepare, you might die. In Belitsa they’re not going to die, of course, because we’ll save them. But we want to do everything as if these bears were living in their natural state. We don’t interfere for as long as possible.”
Elena, a bear who came from Serbia in 2009, made exemplary progress all year and led the way in her sector as the first to work out how to unearth treats hidden under stones.
Until suddenly, as winter approached, Elena went haywire. When the first snow fell, she started going around in circles, rocking on her feet, and was totally flummoxed. Her organism was trying to suggest a key to th
is situation, but she couldn’t understand the signals at all. She couldn’t respond to them, so she reacted with compulsive behavior and started rocking all day long, like a child suffering from separation anxiety. She almost entirely stopped eating, which made no sense at all, because before hibernating was the very moment when she should have been eating the most.
The whole park wondered how they could help her in this situation.
The people from Four Paws tried distracting her, by hiding her food in completely new places. But then she stopped eating entirely.
They tried moving her to another sector, but that just increased her stress.
They tried digging a cave in the ground, to prompt her to do the same, but that didn’t help either.
Then somebody thought of building her a shelter—like a dog kennel, but bigger. The staff quickly nailed together some planks and scattered them with leaves. And that was a total success. Elena started clearing aside the snow, stopped rocking, and three days later she went into hibernation.
“Since then we’ve built five or six of those kennels every winter,” the staff tell me. “Last year Seida used one—she had actually dug herself a pit in the ground, but it collapsed. Already in a mildly lethargic state, she moved into one of our shelters and went on sleeping.”
4.
In the first two or three years, only a few of the bears hibernated.
Two years ago, as many as eighteen did it.
But best of all was a year ago, when twenty-six out of twenty-seven bears went into their winter sleep.
Dancing Bears Page 7