Sun Bear's Future Showing a Few Rays of Hope
Date: 29-Aug-03
Country: CAMBODIA
Author: Ed Cropley
Pacing back and forth inside their tiny steel cage, the only thing the two female sun bears have to look forward to each day is another bowl of kitchen slops pushed in at the end of a long wooden pole.
Bought as cubs to draw guests to a sprawling open-air restaurant on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, they have now grown too big and dangerous to be let out of the cage, their home for the last nine years.
"We don't let the bears go for walks any more because they are naughty," said a waiter, rolling up his trouser-leg to reveal a huge scar dating from the last time Sok, now weighing in at 50 kilos (110 lb) of teeth, claws and muscle, tasted life on the outside.
Bears caged for the amusement of guests and tourists in hotels and restaurants are becoming a less common sight across Cambodia as it slowly emerges from decades of war, including the 1970s Khmer Rouge genocide.
Alongside the U.N.-led economic and political reconstruction, wildlife groups have been active since the late 1990s promoting the notion of animal welfare - an alien concept to most of the impoverished Southeast Asian nation's 13 million people.
Now, they say, those efforts are bearing fruit as local attitudes to large and endangered animals such as the sun bear slowly change.
Government-backed radio campaigns and huge billboards showing chained-up, weeping bears having paws lopped off by meat cleavers have resulted in the virtual disappearance of bear from Phnom Penh menus, says Suwanna Gauntlett of animal charity WildAid.
The use of body parts such as the gall-bladder or penis in traditional medicines is also on the wane, as is the habit of keeping caged animals as a sign of personal power and prestige.
"It used to be that anybody who was anybody had to have a tiger in his living room," said Gauntlett. "But in many cases now we are successful in getting people to hand over bears, even if they are rich and powerful."
BEAR FACTS
Also known as the honey bear for its reputed love of sweet food, the sun bear is the smallest of all the bear family as well as being the least understood and one of the most endangered.
Recognizable by a splash of cream-colored fur under the throat, the jungle-dwelling mammals are thought to live in an arc ranging from northern Burma and Bangladesh to Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia.
But with their natural habitat under increasing pressure from logging and man's relentless expansion, the future of sun bears is looking bleak.
"Estimates range from 20,000 to 1,000 left in the wild," says Ally Humphries of Australian charity Free the Bears, which runs a sun bear rescue center south of Phnom Penh. "People know they are endangered, but not how critically endangered they are."
However, there are signs the message might be sinking in as thousands of Cambodians, including school children, flock to see the rescued bears running round a large, leafy enclosure rather than the iron cages more normally seen in developing-nation zoos.
As another sign of changing times, Humphries cites the example of Bibi, a year-old sun bear bought by a local in a market near the border with neighboring Vietnam solely so she could be spared the cooking pot or a life of caged misery.
BEAR MARKET
Unfortunately for the sun bears, however, Cambodia is not like other countries in the region in that it has become more receptive to Western influences as a result of the international reconstruction work and the presence of so many aid agencies.
The price of a sun bear cub may have dropped from $650 in 1998 to around $350 now as the local market dries up, but prices show few signs of falling further because of continued demand from Vietnam and China, conservationists say.
"The problem now is trade," said Suon Phalla from TRAFFIC, the WWF-backed wildlife trade monitoring group. "People are hunting the bears now for selling, not for meat."
Sun bears, often stuffed into sacks on the back