Sloth bear

• 1. Introduction

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  The sloth bear, Melursus ursinus, makes a sucking sound when it feeds on termites, and the noise carries as far as 180 m. Few large animals advertise their meals so loudly. This shaggy bear lives on the Indian subcontinent, where it is also called the Indian bear. It is the only species in its genus, Melursus. Its odd face and loose fur raise questions that this documentary will follow. Why does a bear look and feed like an anteater? How does an animal that seems so clumsy hold its own against the predators that share its forests? And how have people treated it, and can it survive them?

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• 2. Built For Insects

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  The sloth bear has also been called the labiated bear, a name that points straight at its mouth. A long lower lip and a long palate work together to suck up insects. The lip can be stretched over the outer edge of the nose. The bear has no upper incisors, which lets it draw in large numbers of insects at once. Its jaws are small, its snout is bulbous, and its nostrils are wide. Its premolars and molars are smaller than those of other bears, because it chews little vegetation. In adults the teeth are usually in poor condition, worn by the soil the bear takes in while feeding on insects. The back of the palate is long and broad, as it is in other ant-eating mammals.

  At 4 in long, the claws are the most striking tools on the body. They are sickle-shaped and blunt, and they sit on disproportionately large paws. A hairless web joins the toe pads. The tail, at 6-7 in, is the longest in the bear family. The ears are large and floppy, and this is the only bear with long hair on them. The back legs are not very strong, yet they are knee-jointed and let the bear take almost any position.

  Adult females typically weigh 55-105 kg, and adult males 80-145 kg. Exceptional animals reach 124 kg among females and 192 kg among males. At the shoulder the bear stands 60-92 cm high, and its body is 1.4-1.9 m long. Females are smaller than males, and they reportedly have more fur between the shoulders.

  A mane up to 30 cm long grows behind the neck and between the shoulders. The coat is black, or rusty in some animals, and it stays long, shaggy and unkempt even in a warm climate. The belly and underlegs can be almost bare. An Asian black bear is usually about the same size, but the sloth bear is immediately distinctive. It has a shaggier coat, whitish claws, a rangier build, a longer and narrower snout, flappier lips and a paler muzzle. Mistaking it for a sun bear is unlikely, since the sun bear is considerably smaller, with much shorter fur and wrinkled, folding skin.

  Most sloth bears carry a whitish Y- or V-shaped mark on the chest. Asian black bears and sun bears share the feature, and it is thought to work as a threat display, because all three species live alongside tigers.

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• 3. Lineage And Range

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  In 1791, George Shaw gave the species its first scientific name, Bradypus ursinus. A string of other names followed. Meyer called it Melursus lybius in 1793, and in 1817 de Blainville chose Ursus labiatus because of the long lips. Illiger used Prochilus hirsutus, with a genus name pointing to long lips and a species name pointing to long, coarse hair. Fischer proposed Chondrorhynchus hirsutus, and Tiedemann proposed Ursus longirostris.

  A fragment of fossil humerus from the Pleistocene, found in the Kurnool Basin of Andhra Pradesh, is identical to the humerus of a modern sloth bear. That fossil supports the idea that the animal reached its present form in the Early Pleistocene, when the bear family specialised and spread. Fossil skulls from the Shivaliks belong to a bear once named Melursus theobaldi. Some authors see it as an intermediate stage between sloth bears and ancestral brown bears. Its teeth fell between sloth bear and other bear teeth in size, while its palate matched the sloth bear's. That pattern led to the theory that it was the direct ancestor. Sloth bears probably arose in the Middle Pliocene and evolved on the Indian subcontinent. They show signs of convergent evolution, like other ant-eating mammals. Among bears, the species is one of eight living members of the family Ursidae and one of six in the subfamily Ursinae.

  Two subspecies are recognised. The Indian sloth bear, named by Shaw in 1791, has a large skull with a condylobasal length of about 290 mm in females and 310 mm in males. It is the most widespread bear in India, mostly in forested country and in the low hills bordering the outer Himalayas from Punjab to Arunachal Pradesh. It is absent from the high mountains of Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, from the northwestern deserts of Rajasthan, and from a broad unforested swath in the south. In Nepal it is restricted to the Terai.

  The Sri Lankan sloth bear, described by Pucheran in 1855, is smaller. Its skull measures about 250 mm in females and 264 mm in males. Its body hair is much shorter, and it sometimes lacks the white chest mark. Six Sri Lankan males averaged only 74.8 kg, and four females averaged 57.5 kg. That suggests these bears may be around 30% lighter than the Indian race, with more pronounced differences between the sexes. They once occurred throughout Sri Lanka. Upland forests were converted on a wide scale into tea and coffee plantations, and the bears are now restricted to the northern and eastern lowlands.

  Across the whole range, sloth bears use moist and dry tropical forests, savannahs, scrublands and grasslands below 1500 m. In Sri Lanka's dry forests they stay below 300 m. Bhutan is also part of the range, but the species is regionally extinct in Bangladesh.

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• 4. Mound Hunters

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  Termites, ants and bees are the sloth bear's favourite prey, and it locates them by smell. Its nose is strong enough to detect grubs 3 ft below ground. At a mound, the bear scrapes at the structure with its claws until it reaches the large combs at the bottom of the galleries. It then disperses the loose soil with violent puffs of breath. Unlike other bears, sloth bears do not gather in feeding groups.

  In March and April, the bears eat the fallen petals of mowha trees. They are partial to mangoes, maize, sugar cane, jackfruit and the pods of the golden shower tree. Sloth bears are extremely fond of honey. They may also eat other plant matter and carrion, and very rarely other mammals.

  Mothers feeding cubs are reported to regurgitate a mixture of half-digested jackfruit, wood apples and pieces of honeycomb. The sticky mass hardens into a dark yellow, circular, bread-like lump. This "bear's bread" is considered a delicacy by some of India's natives.

  In Neyyar Wildlife Sanctuary in Kerala, researchers tested seeds of tree species that sloth bears had eaten and excreted. The share of seeds that germinated did not differ significantly from seeds that had never passed through a bear. Three species, Artocarpus hirsuta, Cassia fistula and Zizyphus oenoplina, germinated much faster after being eaten. The experiment suggests that sloth bears may help disperse and germinate seeds, with effects that vary by tree species.

  A sweet tooth sometimes leads the bears somewhere less natural. Rarely, sloth bears become addicted to sweets in hotel waste and visit rubbish bins all year, even inside populated towns.

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• 5. Family And Rivals

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  In India, sloth bears mate in April, May and June and give birth in December and early January. In Sri Lanka, breeding takes place all year. Gestation lasts 210 days, and sows usually give birth in caves or in shelters under boulders. A litter is usually one or two cubs, and rarely three.

  Newborn cubs are blind and open their eyes after four weeks. They start walking a month after birth, which is quick compared with most other bears. Independence comes at 24-36 months, and sexual maturity at three years. Intervals between litters can last two to three years.

  A young cub rides on its mother's back when she walks, runs or climbs, until it reaches a third of her size. Cubs fight to hold their individual riding positions. Mothers carry their cubs up trees as the main defence against predators, rather than sending them up alone. Cubs are decent climbers on accessible trees, but they cannot climb as fast or on as many surfaces as black bear cubs, because of the sloth bear's elongated claws. Even so, with smaller bodies and shorter claws, cubs probably climb better than adults.

  Adult sloth bears may travel in pairs, and males are often gentle with cubs. They may fight for food. They can gallop faster than a running human. Though they look slow and clumsy, young and adult bears alike are excellent climbers. They climb to feed and rest, but not to escape enemies, since they prefer to stand their ground. They swim well, mostly entering water to play. To mark territory, they scrape trees with their forepaws and rub against them with their flanks. Howls, squeals, screams, barks and trumpet-like calls sound out during aggressive encounters. Huffing is a warning, and chuffing means the bear has been disturbed. Mothers keep in touch with a grunt-whicker, while separated cubs yelp.

  Bengal tigers occasionally prey on sloth bears. Most give the bears a wide berth, though some become habitual bear killers, and sloth bear fur is not uncommon in tiger droppings. Tigers typically wait near termite mounds, creep up behind a feeding bear, and seize it by the back of the neck. One tiger was reported to break its victim's back with a paw, then wait for the paralysed bear to exhaust itself before the kill. Face to face, a sloth bear charges and cries loudly. A young or well-fed tiger usually retreats, and most tigers give up if the bear notices them before the pounce. Sloth bears may even scavenge on tiger kills. Tigers are known to mimic the calls of sambar deer, and the bears react fearfully even to real deer. In 2011, a female with cubs was seen to stand her ground and prevail against two tigers in rapid succession, first a female and then a male.

  Leopards pose a threat because they can follow bears up trees. One leopard killed a three-quarters grown female sloth bear in a lengthy fight that ended in the branches. In Yala National Park in Sri Lanka, a sloth bear apparently killed a leopard but was badly injured and later put down by park rangers. Sloth bears also occasionally chase leopards from their kills. Packs of dholes may attack, and they try to stop the bear from retreating into caves. There is little evidence that dholes endanger fully grown bears, outside exceptionally rare cases. In one case, a golden jackal, a much smaller animal, aggressively displaced an adult bear that simply loped away. The episode suggests the bear does not see other carnivores as competitors.

  The bear's large canine teeth, big for its body and large compared with other bears, may have evolved as a defence against dangerous animals. Candidates include the tiger, the elephant, the rhinoceros and the prehistoric Megantereon.

  In Assam, Manipur and Mizoram, in the hills south of the Brahmaputra River, sloth bears live with both Asiatic black bears and sun bears. These are the only places occupied by all three species, and they do not act aggressively toward each other, perhaps because their habits and diets differ. Asian elephants apparently do not tolerate sloth bears nearby, and the Indian rhinoceros will charge them. The reason is unknown, since elephants that stay calm near tigers have been reported to charge bears.

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• 6. Attacks On People

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  Between 1989 and 1994, sloth bear attacks in Madhya Pradesh killed 48 people and injured 686 others. Dense human populations and competition for food probably contributed. In absolute numbers, no other bear attacks humans as regularly. Only the Himalayan black bear, a subspecies of the Asian black bear, comes close. Reserves that hold sloth bears are often surrounded by large human populations, so encounters are frequent. In some places the attacks seem to be a reaction to bumping into people by accident.

  Sloth bears likely see humans as potential predators, because they roar and then retreat or charge, as they do with tigers and leopards. Claws built for digging termite mounds leave adults less able than Asian black bears to climb away from danger. The bear seems to have evolved to meet threats with aggression. Brown bears face a similar problem and show similar non-predatory aggression. Some bears make mock charges without touching a person, but sloth bears frequently seem to attack almost at once. Where villagers near an aggressive population carried rifles, the weapons proved ineffective. The bear charged and knocked the victim back, often knocking the rifle away first.

  In the North Bilaspur Forest Division of Chhattisgarh, 137 attacks occurred between April 1998 and December 2000, and 11 of them were fatal. Single bears carried out most of the attacks. They happened in kitchen gardens, crop fields and adjoining forests during the monsoon season.

  Robert Armitage Sterndale described the danger in 1884 in his Mammalia of India. He judged the sloth bear more inclined to attack a person unprovoked than almost any other animal. He added that victims are often terribly disfigured, because the bear strikes at the head and face. He noted that William Thomas Blanford was inclined to rate bears as more dangerous than tigers. Captain Williamson, in Oriental Field Sports, wrote that sloth bears rarely killed victims outright. He said they would suck and chew on the limbs until they were bloody pulps.

  One animal, the sloth bear of Mysore, was responsible for the deaths of 12 people and the mutilation of 24 others. Kenneth Anderson shot it, and it had partially eaten at least three of its victims. Even so, sloth bears rarely become man-eaters. Dunbar-Brander's Wild Animals of Central India describes a sow with two cubs that began a six-week reign of terror in Chanda, a district of the Central Provinces. More than one of her victims had been eaten. R.G. Burton compared statistics and concluded that sloth bears killed more people than Asian black bears. Theodore Roosevelt considered them more dangerous than American black bears.

  A man named Watts Jones left a first-hand account after failing to score a direct hit on a bear he had targeted. He believed the bear had knocked him over backwards in its rush, and when he next remembered anything, it was biting his leg. He wrote, "I felt the flesh crush, but I felt no pain at all. It was rather like having a tooth out with gas." A shikari fired a shot into the bear, and it left him. The main wound was a flap of flesh torn from the inside of his left thigh.

  In 2016, according to a forest official, a female bear killed three people and hurt five others in Gujarat's Banaskantha district, near Balaram Ambaji Wildlife Sanctuary. Some of the casualties were colleagues of the official. An attempt to trace and cage the bear failed and cost the life of one official. A team of officials and policemen then shot it. In Karnataka's Bellary district, most attacks occurred outside forests, when bears entered settlements and farmland in search of food and water.

  In Mount Abu town in southern Rajasthan, bears came into town and attacked people they met by chance. The attacks coincided with rising tourism. Remarkably, local residents have not retaliated. The same absence of revenge appears in many parts of India, and it seems related to cultural norms and to Hinduism, in which nature and animals are worshipped as deities.

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• 7. Hunted And Captive

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  Hunters who waited on a post while beaters drove a bear toward them could shoot it through the shoulder. If the bear came straight at them, they could aim at the white chest mark. Sloth bears resist body shots and can charge when wounded, though a hunter of steady nerves could score a direct hit from a few paces. In the wet season, clear footprints could be followed straight to a lair. Most bears killed in forests were met by chance during hunts for other game. In hilly country, hunters either lay in wait above a lair at dawn for the bear to return from its night foraging, or fired flares into the cave by day to drive it out. Some bears were speared from horseback. In Sri Lanka, a baculum was once used as a charm against barrenness.

  Officers in British India often kept sloth bears as pets. The wife of Kenneth Anderson raised an orphaned cub from Mysore and named it Bruno. The bear ate all sorts of food and was very affectionate toward people. It learned numerous tricks, such as cradling a woodblock like a baby and pointing a bamboo stick like a gun.

  Dancing bears were a popular entertainment in India as far back as the 13th century, in the pre-Mughal era. The Kalandars, who captured sloth bears for this trade, were often employed in the courts of Mughal emperors to stage spectacles with trained bears. The animals were once common in the towns of Calcutta, where they often disturbed the horses of British officers.

  A ban on the practice came in 1972, yet as many as 800 dancing bears were still on the streets of India in the latter part of the 20th century, particularly on the highway between Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. Cubs were usually bought at the age of six months from traders and poachers. They were trained to dance and follow commands through coercive stimuli and starvation. Males were castrated at an early age, and the bears' teeth were knocked out at the age of one year to stop them from injuring handlers. Each bear was typically fitted with a nose ring attached to a four-foot leash. Some were found to be blind from malnutrition.

  In 2009, after a seven-year campaign by a coalition of Indian and international animal welfare groups, the last Kalandar dancing bear was set free. Organisers helped the bear handlers find jobs and education, so that they no longer relied on dancing-bear income.

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• 8. Protection And Baloo

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  Fewer than 20,000 sloth bears are estimated to survive in the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka. The IUCN lists the species as vulnerable, mainly because of habitat loss and degradation. Indian law gives the bear legal protection under Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972. Commercial international trade in the bear, including its parts and derivatives, is prohibited because it is listed in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Poachers still catch the bears. Some are found dead in traps or electrocuted, and parts such as canines, claws, gall bladder and paws are removed for the illegal wildlife trade.

  A 'Sloth Bear Welfare Project' in India aims to end the use of sloth bears for entertainment. Many organisations help preserve the bears in safe places. Bears once used for entertainment are being rehabilitated at facilities such as the Agra Bear Rescue Facility, run by Wildlife SOS. Major sanctuaries include the Daroji Sloth Bear Sanctuary in Karnataka and the Jessore Sloth Bear Sanctuary in Gujarat. A Sloth Bear Conservation Reserve is proposed in Mirzapur district of Uttar Pradesh.

  The suggested remedies target the conflict between people and bears. Educating local people about conservation ethics is one. Improving the deteriorating habitat, through government or community-based reforestation programmes, is another. The population grows when bears live in high-profile reserves that protect species such as tigers and elephants. Directly managed reserves could also conserve the sloth bear. Managing garbage, especially hotel waste, matters wherever bears have learned to enter towns and accidental attacks on humans are rising.

  Charles Catton included the bear in his 1788 book Animals Drawn from Nature and Engraved in Aqua-tinta. He described it as an "animal of the bear-kind" and said it was properly called the "Petre Bear".

  The most famous bear in English fiction may also be a sloth bear. In Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, Baloo, "the sleepy old brown bear", teaches the Law of the Jungle to the wolf cubs of the Seeonee pack. His most challenging pupil is the "man-cub" Mowgli. Kipling drew most of his knowledge of Indian fauna from Robert Armitage Sterndale, who used the Hindustani word bhalu for several bear species. Daniel Karlin edited the Penguin Classics reissue of the book in 1989. He stated that, apart from colour, Kipling's descriptions of Baloo fit the sloth bear, since brown bears and Asian black bears do not occur in the Seoni area where the novel is set. The word sloth also suggests sleepiness. Karlin adds one doubt. Baloo's diet of "only roots and nuts and honey" is a trait more common to the Asian black bear than to the sloth bear.

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