First, you have to get a cub. Bears are exceedingly shy animals—it is harder to sight a sloth bear in the wild than a tiger, wildlife conservationists will tell you. You have to lure the new mother away, kill it, and steal the cubs. If it’s a male cub, castrate it with a blade. Smash out the canines so it can’t attack you. Then the crucial bit; pierce the bear’s muzzle with a red- hot rod and then thread the hole with a rope. It is important not to let the muzzle heal. It’s the pain—when you tug at the rope—that makes the bear jump. You have a dancing bear.

For years, dancing bears have been a wretchedly common sight. In 1997, when a survey was done by a young, firebrand wildlife conservationist-in-training and a veteran animal welfare activist, there were 1,200 bears performing on the streets across the country, spending their lives tethered to a rope not more than 4ft in length. By December 2009, the young conservationist who had done the survey, Kartick Satyanarayan, had grown to become one of the leading animal rights activists in the country, and he could claim that the last of the dancing bears was off the streets. It was a remarkable story, the result of 15 years of single-minded dedication to a project.

Satyanarayan grew up in Bengaluru, where, at the age of 7, he began to rescue birds, kittens and puppies on his way home from school. By 14, he was telling his mother that he was going to a friend’s house for the night to study. Instead, he and some of his friends—one frequent collaborator, Sandesh Kadur, is now a celebrated wildlife film-maker—would ride their bikes 30km to the Bannerghatta National Park. They would pick full-moon nights, walk deep into the forest to a watering hole and climb a tree. They would spend the night watching a variety of animals—elephants, leopards, bears, wild dogs—come to drink.

“It would get pitch dark first, and then the moon rose and poured light into the forest and everything became glisteningly beautiful," Satyanarayan says, sitting in his office in south Delhi. “That experience has been etched deep into my mind."

Satyanarayan is a bear of a man; he wears his hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, and has a genial, gregarious manner. He is also the co-founder of Wildlife SOS, along with Geeta Seshamani, a distant relative with whom he bonded because “she was the only other person in my entire family circle who had the same interest in animals". Wildlife SOS was formed in 1995 with the express purpose of rehabilitating dancing bears, with the co-founders the only employees of the organization. Now it runs 49 projects, including the unique and delicate work of rescuing wild animals in the National Capital Region (NCR), a vigorous anti-poaching unit, four sloth bear sanctuaries (including one in Agra which houses 300 former dancing bears, making it the largest bear sanctuary in the world), two black bear research centres, and an elephant sanctuary (Seshamani also runs Friendicoes, a shelter and clinic for street animals in Delhi).

“If there’s a wild animal that needs rescuing in the Capital, you have to call Wildlife SOS, they are the only ones doing it," says R.M. Kharb, a retired major-general and chairman of the Animal Welfare Board of India. “There are lots of odds stacked against them: They have to control the mobs if there is an animal-human conflict, they have to find a way to work with many government agencies.... They are doing an excellent job, very professional, very committed."

Wildlife SOS’ hotline for wild animals in the NCR started in 1999. “That was basically me in a beat-up Maruti Gypsy donated by a relative driving around day and night," Satyanarayan says. It now has six dedicated workers, two vehicles and 13 motorcycles. The 24-hour helpline handles an average of 30 calls a day—hedgehogs, snakes, jackals, leopards, civet cats, birds of prey—there is a long list of animals that stray into the cities as the cities push deeper and deeper into their lands. On a recent afternoon, around lunchtime, Wildlife SOS had already responded to calls reporting a krait, a sand boa, a Sarus crane, a painted stork, a nilgai, a monkey, and a mynah. A couple of days back, their anti-poaching team, along with the police, had managed to catch a woman transporting 123 endangered turtles in Delhi.

There is never a dull moment.

Satyanarayan almost did not become a conservationist. His early obsession with the natural world was thwarted by chemistry, a lifelong nemesis. When he finished school, he grudgingly enrolled for a bachelor’s in business studies. But in the very first year of college, he saw a recruitment ad in a newspaper calling for field biologists. The New York Zoological Society (now called Wildlife Conservation Society) wanted to conduct a study of Indian forests.

“I knew I had the field skills, it’s what I did all the time, but I was in no way eligible for this. Everyone else who had applied had at least a master’s in forestry." The test involved going out into the forest every day for five days and reading the forest.

“It’s like forest floor forensics," Satyanarayan says. “Look at faecal matter to see if it came from a big cat, a jackal, or a wild dog. And what did the animal eat? I loved it!"

He was one of the two people selected. Now he had to persuade his parents, who had no idea he was doing this, coax his college to allow him to sit for exams without attending classes so he could at least have a graduation degree, and convince the zoological society to allow him leave to give his exams.

For three years, Satyanarayan roamed various forests gathering data, but he yearned for more direct action. In 1995, he left the project and came to Delhi to join Seshamani on the bear campaign.

The two realized that the key to helping the bears was to also help the kalandars, a highly impoverished and marginalized Muslim community whose traditional profession was bear-handling.

“When we saw the way they lived; the ignorance, the poverty, zero literacy, the fear of not knowing any other profession, we realized that there was no point sending them to jail (sloth bears are accorded maximum protection under the wildlife protection Act)," Satyanarayan says. “It would not stop them from doing what they did, and the ones in jail would come out hardened criminals."

In 1999, the Uttar Pradesh government leased some land near Agra to Wildlife SOS for a bear rehabilitation centre, and the organization, all of five people now, began to run campaigns to raise awareness and funds. The plan was to offer a deal to the kalandars: Give up your bear to the forest department and sign an undertaking that you will never keep one again, and you will not be arrested; instead, you will be helped with seed money and training to set up an alternative business.

At the time, Wildlife SOS was still without the means to actually do this—Satyanarayan belly-laughs when I mention “corpus"—but as the awareness campaign gained momentum, the funds started trickling in; “from random people, people like you or me, small amounts".

In 2002, a former dacoit called Munna came to the Agra centre with his bear. The bear’s name was Rani. She was the first of the dancing bears to taste freedom. Munna became a close ally of Wildlife SOS. He was given ₹ 50,000 as seed funding. Part of that was used as a down payment for a 12-seater autorickshaw, part of it to support the family while Munna learnt how to drive. Soon after Munna started his business, it became apparent to the community that this was a much better source of income—making bears dance was a tourist season job; the rest of the year, most of the community begged for a living.

A few months after Rani was brought in, 26 kalandars queued up outside the gates of the Agra centre with their bears. Now, other international organizations began to send in money as well—Australia’s Free The Bears Fund and the UK-based International Animal Rescue were the first.

When the last of the bears walked into the Agra sanctuary in 2009, the centre had grown from 17 acres to 160. In all, 628 bears had been taken off the streets across India, and over 3,000 kalandar families helped with seed funding, schools for their children, and vocational training programmes for the women.

The bears went through extensive rehabilitation and medical care. “We had to teach them to climb trees, recognize and eat fruit, to socialize with other bears. We had to teach them to be bears," Satyanarayan says.

Wildlife SOS now has a staff strength of 200. Eighty of them are kalandars. Rani lives happily at the Agra sanctuary.

Wildlife SOS’ new focus is captive elephants, used in circuses and other places for entertainment, begging or tourism purposes. Like the bears, elephants are subjected to extreme cruelty to keep them subjugated, hit with metal spikes over the head, and kept shackled by their feet when they are not being used.

In 2010, working with the Uttar Pradesh forest department, Wildlife SOS established an Elephant Conservation and Care Centre in Mathura. Eleven elephants live there now. The latest to join the ranks is Raju, a begging elephant from Allahabad. Kept shackled for 50 years by multiple owners, and severely injured and diseased, Raju was freed in July 2014.

“There are hundreds of elephants like Raju...they are desperately in need of rescue," Satyanarayan says.

HOW TO GIVE

MAIN SPONSORS

International organizations like International Animal Rescue, Free The Bears, Born Free, and individuals.

BIGGEST NEEDS

Funds and volunteers for their elephant initiative and NCR hotline. Medicine for the animals and ambulances.

A DONATION OF ₹ 10,000 CAN

Support a rescued elephant for three months, support a rescued leopard for five months, support anti-poaching or community projects for two months. (Please note that the cost of fully supporting an elephant is around ₹ 60,000 per month.)

VOLUNTEERS CAN HELP

With both community projects and rehabilitation centres.

CONTACT

www.wildlifesos.org

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