Of course, it would be better if they knew how to do it all for themselves. “Perhaps they’ll learn to do it eventually?” wonders Ivanov. “But you can’t just let a bear go and expect it to cope with everything for itself. Freedom is a terribly complicated business. You have to give it to them gradually, in small doses. And the fact that they’re hibernating means our bears are making progress on the road to freedom. They’re no longer living from one day to the next. They’ve learned to prepare for tougher times.”
VII. Lions to Africa
For several years Four Paws has had no trouble with the dancing bears—they’ve all been taken away from the Gypsies and resettled in their bears’ paradise at Belitsa. That doesn’t mean the staff at the park can start looking around for new jobs, because the organization has found another important goal. What is it? Sending lions to Africa.
Dimitar Ivanov has personally already sent two.
“Some people have so much money they don’t know what to do with it, so they buy a lion,” he says. “The first of these guys we heard about was living near a town called Melnik, and he’d made his fortune selling drugs. Apparently, he used to have a factory producing amphetamines, but once he’d made enough cash, he closed it down and set up a hotel in the north of the country, on a beautiful lake. The lion was kept there as an attraction for the guests.
“As in the case of the bears, we had to define our goal clearly.”
Our goal—the lion.
Our mission—to free the lion.
The lion, of the lion, for the lion, with the lion, about the lion.
“First of all, I went to the restaurant to reconnoiter. I have to prepare well for that sort of trip. In Bulgaria I appear in the media quite often, and I never know who might recognize me from the television or the press. So my main rule for these trips is this: act dumber than you really are. Best of all, much dumber.
“So I put on dark glasses and a straw hat, and made myself look like an ignorant tourist, then I went straight to the hotel. I said I wanted to bring my kids there for a stay, and I’d heard they had this very special attraction. And they said indeed, yes, they had.
“The second principle is that once they’ve swallowed the bait, I let them babble away as much as possible. I just make faces and nod; at most I ask the occasional question, nothing too clever. At this hotel it worked perfectly, because they gave me all the details right there at the reception desk—what sort of a lion it was, how long they’d had it, what they were giving it to eat. Finally, I went to take a few pictures.
“With this documentation, I could go to the police.
“But this is often where the hard part begins. In the Bulgarian provinces the owner of a big hotel knows everyone locally—all the officials, the policemen, and the mayor. So on the day they’ll nod their heads and say, yes, keeping a lion on private premises is indeed against the law. But afterward they’ll drag it all out and think up endless obstacles. ’Cause, what the heck? Take away their pal’s lion? So they’ll say the police aren’t trained to transport that sort of animal. And to come back in a year, or best of all five years, and in the meantime they’ll give them some training. The transformation may be a reality, but some things aren’t going to change in Bulgaria for a very long time yet.
“What can you do in this situation? You have to strike a rung lower down. You don’t go straight to Sofia but to the regional capital. The local back-scratching won’t apply there, and you’ll find someone to help. They’re also aware that our organization is well connected at the ministry and in parliament, and that we can always strike a rung higher up if we want to.
“The Ministry of the Environment has its local branches. In theory, they’re the ones who should be doing the work, but if we were to rely on them, the Gypsies would still be traveling about Bulgaria with bears on chains. Those state officials get a monthly salary of eight hundred leva, and unfortunately their main concern is to make sure they don’t lose their jobs.
“So we knew we had to do everything ourselves.
“It took us a few months to gather all the documentation to confiscate the lion. Finally, we’ve gotten the papers, we’ve gotten the police who are going to confiscate the lion, we have a vet who’ll check his state of health and stamp all the essential documents. So we go to the hotel and say to the owner, ‘Good morning, we see you have a lion. According to Bulgarian law, owning a lion is illegal. We’ve come to confiscate it. Please hand it over.’
“The guy looks at us, then at the police, and then at our papers. He takes his time, probably wondering who to call and whether it’ll be of any use. Finally, he works something out in his mind, opens the gate, and says, ‘If that’s the case, we have no alternative. Come this way.’
“You’re thinking that was easy, aren’t you? That’s what I thought at first too, and I was pleasantly surprised. But it was just that the guy was convinced we had no way of taking the lion, and that he was going to get off lightly. We’d do some talking, we’d teach him a lesson, but the lion would stay there. It was only when he opened the gate and saw the ambulance driving up, with the vet and our staff members, that he finally realized this was for real.
“The guy went ballistic. He started shouting. And people like that have a perfect sense of whom they can shout at and whom they can’t. He didn’t pick on me or anyone from Four Paws, or on the policemen. He chose the vet. He stood over him as he was trying to anesthetize the lion, and he just yelled and yelled and yelled straight into his ear.
“‘Who the fuck gave you a diploma?’ he screamed. ‘Do you know how to give a lion an injection? Have you ever seen a lion before?’
“The vet was shaking, and I don’t blame him in the least. The guy was six foot six, and he looked as if he was about to start hitting us, but the policemen were pretending none of it was happening. They just stood by their car. We were going to take the lion and get the hell out, but they had to go on living there, passing him in the street. And the vet knew that if the guy had picked him as a target, nobody could help him.
“Could I have helped him in some way? Unfortunately not. For me, the most important goal was the lion. I had to get it into the ambulance as safely as possible and dispatch it by plane to South Africa. And that’s what happened.
“I had a similar dilemma just over a year later, when we rescued another lion from a private property.
“The guy who kept this one had spent years running the customs service on the border with Turkey. Whether it was smuggling cigarettes, gasoline, or people, he was paid bribes for everything. He’d earned himself a beautiful property.
“We found out from several independent sources that he was keeping a lion there. It was hard for us to get a picture. I circled around it for several months, but nobody was in a position to help me. Until finally the man himself decided to come out to meet us. He felt so sure of himself that he gave an interview to one of the color magazines in which he and his wife showed the readers around their property. The highlight of the feature was a big picture of them with the lion. ‘Our purring pal,’ said the caption.
“As he’d laid himself wide open, there was nothing to wait for. In a few days we’d organize a team, we’d drive up to the house, the police would present themselves, and we’d show a document authorizing us to confiscate the lion.
“When we arrive, the guy’s not at home, but his wife is very nice. ‘If it’s illegal, then of course, please take the lion away,’ she says. In exchange I promise her they’ll only pay the minimum fine. She even says thank you. She’s about to let us into the house, but first she has to tell her husband about all this.
“So she calls him, and suddenly the whole situation reverses one hundred and eighty degrees. Shortly after, the wife hands the phone to the police chief, and I see him stiffen. And all I can hear him say is, ‘Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.’
“Then the policeman hands the phone back to the wife and tells me that
according to the latest information there’s no lion in the house. A little later we see a jeep driving away from the back of the property in an unknown direction.
“The owner’s wife suddenly disappears, and someone like a head butler appears in the doorway. ‘A lion?’ he says in surprise. ‘What lion? But, gentlemen, surely you know it’s illegal to keep a lion . . .’
“Halfheartedly we search the house and grounds. There’s even a cage and evidence that the animal was there not long ago—the remains of food, and droppings. But the police have no intention of gathering evidence. ‘Presence of lion not confirmed,’ they write in their report. We can go back to Belitsa.
“Less than a week later the owner of the lion calls me on my private cell. ‘I’ll hand it over, but with no police, no witnesses, and no fine.’
“I didn’t stop to think twice. The lion was the most important thing. If I didn’t rescue it, the guy might shoot it. There were plenty of cases of people keeping a lion while it looked like a sweet little kitty. But as soon as it reached full size, they got hold of a hunter pal, or grabbed a gun themselves, and killed it.
“So we agree to meet in the woods near his home. We drive up in the ambulance, and the guy who’s like a sort of butler drives up with the lion in a cage. We take possession of the cage and drive to the police with it. There we report that the lion was running about the town loose—we’ve managed to catch and cage it in the local park, and here it is.
“Everyone knows what’s really happened, but this is Bulgaria. Sometimes things like this don’t have to be written down in the records.
“We sign the transcript, the lion gets anesthetized, and two days later it’s on the plane to South Africa. And I’m pleased that in addition to saving bears, we can help other animals too.”
VIII. Castration
1.
Although the management and staff at the park are achieving ever greater success in their efforts to develop the bears’ instincts and restore them to nature, unfortunately it has to be said that the residents of the local town, Belitsa, are not quite mature enough to have a Dancing Bears Park in their neighborhood.
Why do I say that?
Because when park manager Dimitar Ivanov tells them the beautiful story of how the lives of the bears and lions have been saved, the citizens of Belitsa respond with comments that miss the point.
They ask, for example, “How much is an air ticket to South Africa for a lion?”
Or “What’s the monthly cost of keeping a bear?”
Or “How much does their food cost?”
There’s no acceptable answer to these questions. If the park staff don’t reply, the people start to invent sums of several million leva and pass them off as true. But even if they’re told the correct sum, things are no better.
For example, the monthly cost of food for one bear is four hundred euros (US$425).
The monthly cost of maintaining the entire park is twenty thousand euros (US$21,000).
These figures are not a secret, but the citizens of Belitsa use them to criticize the park. Whenever there’s talk of park finances, they start to compare how many of them could live on the same amount, how much firewood they could buy for the winter, how many pairs of shoes they could buy for their children, and how many free school meals could be supplied—despite some twenty-five years of economic transformation, many children in the Bulgarian provinces still suffer from malnourishment.
When they hear that a bear’s food costs four hundred euros (US$425) a month, their hair stands on end. Very few families in Belitsa have that much money, and dozens of them have lots of children.
And when the citizens add up all those large sums, they come to the unpleasant conclusion that far more care is taken of the bears than of them. While the animals are being taught resourcefulness, conflict solving, and hibernation, while pools are being built for them and playgrounds adapted to their needs, the people of Belitsa are being left to fend for themselves. Although they’ve been learning freedom for longer than the bears, they don’t have a team of experts to help them with the transformation.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t born a bear,” the former mayor of Belitsa, Hasan Ilan, once said bitterly, as he compared the park’s budget with the town’s.
The staff at the park do their best not to take this sort of comment to heart. They know perfectly well that they’re not the people to whom they should be addressed. It’s not their fault that Four Paws is successfully raising funds for the bears and other animals, and not for the residents of the Bulgarian provinces who’ve been cast adrift in the process of transformation. The people of Belitsa should go and complain to their government, and expect it to improve their fate, and forget about the bears.
2.
Despite all these misunderstandings, the staff at the park regard being on good terms with the people of Belitsa and the local area as one of their priorities. They do everything they can to encourage them to visit the park, and they invest in good relations. They put up notices in the town with pictures of the liberated bears. The local council uses the animals to promote the town on the Internet. The park staff have even thought of inviting the children from the schools in Belitsa to come and receive an annual Easter egg.
The first year they made very careful preparations. There were competitions, a clown, a small snack, and puppeteers at the playground. The party was a huge success. So the park staff were very resentful when it turned out that the only response from the parents of the invited children was to ramble on about what would happen if one of the bears escaped and started attacking people and eating them. “Nobody had a good word to say—no one mentioned what a great party it was, how nice it had been or how happy the children were,” complains one of the staff. “But they all kept asking: ‘Are you sure you’re able to control those bears?’ We’d reply that, yes, we are—after all, we have a live electric fence and it’s very high. But then they ask: ‘All right, but what if a bear digs a tunnel?’ To which we say: ‘We’ve got cameras. If one of them starts getting up to something, we’ll notice at once.’ And then one guy asks: ‘But what if one of them tries to escape across the tree tops?’ Words fail me!”
Luckily, several years went by, none of the bears escaped, and on top of that several people from Belitsa started working at the park. The local people have become accustomed to the retired dancing bears, and it began to look as if relations between them could only get better.
Unfortunately, soon after, the citizens of Belitsa found out that every few months Dr. Marc Sven Loose, a dentist, comes from Germany to see the bears. And once again people began to sound off, saying how could a special dentist be brought in for the bears, when in actual Belitsa 90 percent of the citizens had no money for treatment, and either went about with holes in their teeth or with no teeth at all. “Few people can afford a filling,” admits Liliana Samardzhyeva, the local dentist, who receives patients at a small cottage with a red roof. “Usually, they just have their teeth pulled. If someone comes along and I say it’ll cost thirty-five leva to fill the tooth and twenty to extract it, the choice is almost always the same—we’ll extract it. Though most people can’t even afford that. Then what do I do? I do the extraction on credit. Once they have the money, they can come and pay it.”
“People shouldn’t look at it like that,” says Dimitar Ivanov, the park manager. “Nobody knocked their teeth out on purpose. But these bears were deliberately tortured. To begin with, many of them are incapable of chewing anything, and if we don’t help them, they’ll die of hunger or they’ll be seriously sick. It’s a really sad sight to see a rescued bear trying his hardest to chew nuts, first with the left then with the right side of his jaw—he obviously wants to, but he can’t manage it at all.”
3.
But the biggest fuss at the level of “park vs. town” occurred at the very start. The manager at the time was eager for as many of the local people as
possible to come and see their new neighbors.
Special vehicles were provided for anyone who was interested to travel to the park and take a look at the bears. But since everything in the park is accessible, the visitors were taken to every part of it—including the observation tower, the small café, the gift shop, and finally the bears’ larder.
It happened to be spring, and as the bears’ diet is adapted to whatever they would be eating at each season in the wild, there were several boxes of strawberries in the larder. “And that was the trigger,” one of the staff tells me. “There were no questions at all about what we actually do or how many bears we’d managed to rescue. Or how important it is for the town of Belitsa, which thanks to us is becoming world famous, as well as for the bears, whom we have saved from barbaric practices. Oh no. There was only one topic of conversation: these bears chow down on strawberries.
“‘Our children don’t eat strawberries, because we can’t afford them,’ the people said. ‘But they’re throwing strawberries to bears by the boxful.’
“Nobody bothered to calculate that if there were five boxes standing there, that only meant a pound of strawberries per bear. Nor did anybody notice that the bears have to eat strawberries, because if we’re going to create a semblance of freedom for them, we have to do it through their diet too. When I talk to people, I wonder if they have any understanding of the concept behind our park, the point of the major change we’re making here. One guy once asked me: ‘Tell me, why is your park called the Dancing Bears Park, when they don’t dance at all?’ Words fail me when I hear that sort of thing!”
4.
“Officially there are said to be about five hundred wild bears in the mountains surrounding our park,” says Ivanov.
“We thought at great length about what effect that could have on the bears in our care—wild bears all around, while they’re suspended somewhere in between freedom and captivity. Please come onto the terrace and take a look. Before us lie the Pirin Mountains. Over there, on that slope, last year we saw a female bear with two cubs. On our left we have the Rila range. Over there we’ve seen a solitary male; we suspect that’s his territory. Another male sometimes comes along from the left too.
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