Hi everyone, just wanted to say thanks for coming to my live chat earlier - it was quite an experience, I haven't done that before!
I know that there are still questions on the blog here that I didn't manage to answer in the chatroom (sorry, we had a few problems with the software!) so as soon as I can, I will answer those next week.
In the meantime I wish you all a good weekend and leave with you with a photo of two of the first bears to come to the sanctuary, Lydia and Christi.
It’s a big day for the Sanctuary’s best known resident – Max.
For years, Max was kept chained to a railing near a restaurant for tourists to take photographs. Max cannot be out there in the forest enclosures with the rest of the bears because he is blind. A crack ophthalmology veterinary team from the UK have been flown out by WSPA to see if they can help. Their challenge is to get Max out under the sky in a natural forest environment and make sure that he is healthy enough to be let out of quarantine.
If you can't wait until tonight to see what happens to Max, then you can view a news story from the WSPA UK website here
Like Max, the sanctuary has had to overcome considerable challenges. Its mission has always been to free all the captive bears in Romania. And, in just over a year, already more than half the caged bears in the country are free in the forest enclosures. It’s an enormous achievement that WSPA and I, and all of the sanctuary staff are very proud of.
Cubs are helpless to feed themselves and defenceless when very young, just as Rudi was when we first brought him into the sanctuary.
They have to be fed a milk substitute as they can’t eat solid food until they are six months old and the only way to feed a cub of this age is by hand feeding.
When a cub gets to six months, they are weaned off milk and human contact is phased out. Often with rescued animals (not just bears) a sanctuary is a haven which gives them the chance to live an almost normal life and should be a vast improvement on where they were previously.
However, wild animals ultimately belong in the wild and phasing out human contact is a vital part of this. At six months, Rudi needs to start learning how to act like a bear and that will mean eating food on his own, for a start!
Bear Sanctuary airs on Thursday nights on the Animal Planet channel.
Find Animal Planet on SKY: 525, Virgin: 215, Tiscali: 107
Episode 5:The Bear Sanctuary team goes behind the fence and among the bears (!) to install extra safety measures. The local authorities have demanded that we install these because of concern over wild bear attacks. Sanctuary boss Christina heads to the capital to try to persuade the Romanian Government that it’s safe to release more bears into the forest enclosures.
Winter arrives early and it looks like the rescue bears will have to hibernate in the quarantine area rather than under the trees of the forest enclosure…
Episode 6:
Winter is over and the Romanian Government has given permission to start moving bears out of quarantine. The sanctuary team release the bears from the quarantine area into the leafy new enclosures. Martinico’s first taste of the outside world gives him a bit of a shock!
Meanwhile Rudi, a four-month old cub must be cared for. He was brought into the Sanctuary during the winter after being found alone and hungry. Now he is drinking 12 bottles of milk a day!
Hi all! Glad you're enjoying my blog and for those of you who are able to watch the show on Animal Planet, I'm pleased that you are getting a good feel for the work we do at the sanctuary.
I wanted to thank you all for your generous comments - they haven't gone unnoticed. I know that I have a few questions on the same subject (like bear farming), so I will put up a post to try and answer all those comments in one go so everyone can see the info.
In the meantime, I thought I'd give you this fun fact to chew over...
The bears eat two and a half tonnes of food each week! While they can and do forage for food in the forest – staff continue to supplement their diet as the bears have been used to being fed in captivity.
Earlier this year, when the sanctuary staff and I went to Buhusi Zoo to rescue Benny and Ala (the bears you saw featured in episode one last week) we also saw an old Asiatic Black bear called Ursula, in a barren and tiny cage. Asiatic black bears are also known as Himalayan bears, Tibetan bears, or Moon bears. They are called this because of the white crescent moon on their chest.
Click here to find out more about Asiatic Black Bears
Ursula had spent all 26 years of her life in this 3 metre square cage and we all wanted to get her out and into a better environment. The problem for us though, is that she is a different species of bear to all the other bears at the sanctuary, which are brown bears.
Click here to find out more about European Brown Bears
Different species of bear can't live together. They have very different needs and can fight, so the race was on for us to find a small enclosure that was suitable for an elderly blind bear with cataracts (that's right, Ursula is also blind). We had to find just the right home for her before we could arrange to go back and free her. Buhusi Zoo is about 200km north of the sanctuary and it was hard for us to leave her behind.
We moved Ursula into a smaller enclosure that would normally be used for a cub, but as she is blind she needs less space - she wouldn't be able to cope with more. Most of the rescued bears have never come into contact with earth, grass, trees or water before and Ursula was no exception.
Now at 27 years old, Ursula's life has finally taken a turn for the better. She's really taken to her new enclosure and now she knows the layout, she's adapted well! Because of her advanced age, we decided that it would be too risky to operate on her cataracts - it could cause potentially fatal heart and respiratory problems - but this hasn't held her back. It's great to see her doing so well.
3000 metal posts and 1.5km of fencing were used in each enclosure.
Although the bears have plenty of room to roam about, I've found that their curious nature means that they often come to the fence perimeter to see who’s there and what’s going on!
150 trucks of gravel were used in each enclosure.
Bears need different textures – grass, gravel and dirt are what real bears are
used to in the wild.
Firstly, I want to thank everyone for your comments! It means a lot to us that you've visited my blog and it's wonderful to get such positive feedback from you on the bear sanctuary project and our other work.
I wanted to tell you a bit about the amazing Christina Lapis, the sanctuary's founder and how WSPA and I came to get to know her. Her unwavering dedication and devotion to animal protection has driven the sanctuary project from the very beginning.
WSPA have known Christina and her husband Roger, for almost 10 years. I first met her when I went out to Romania to investigate the stray dog problem with her, but while I was there, we heard about two bears that were being kept in a small cage next to a restaurant as a tourist attraction.
Those two bears turned out to be Christi and Lydia, two of the first bears at the sanctuary. Read our news story from 2006, when we rescued them: http://www.wspa.org.uk/latestnews/2006/romaniansanctuary.aspx
From that date, Christina went back to the restaurant every week to feed Christi and Lydia as they weren’t getting the food they needed and were desperately malnourished. The aim was to keep the bears alive until we could rescue them.
In the meantime, we started to hear about more and more bears in similar situations across Romania. Christina began put together a list of the other captive bears, so we could go back and run an investigation.
Christina and Roger have put a huge amount of their time and personal lives into the sanctuary project and without them, the sanctuary would never have happened. They started to speak regularly with Romanian government officials and wildlife authorities, explaining the situation to them.
By the time we were able to go back to Romania to investigate the extent of the captive bear problem in 2004, Christina had made good progress with the government. I went back and with her help, we found there were around 50 bears that needed rescuing from captivity.
With the Romanian government backing the project from an enforcement and legal point of view, WSPA was able to provide the financial backing and the wildlife rescue expertise and building work on the sanctuary started in 2005.
In Romania, Christina is now one of the most well-established and recognisable figures working on animal welfare issues. Known by the media, government and public alike, whenever there is there is an animal welfare issue in the Romanian news, she is the authority that the media go to for answers. Here she is being interviewed by a journalist from a major daily newspaper in Brasov, about the Animal Planet series. These days, Christina splits her time between the bear sanctuary and stray dog refuge she runs in Brasov.
Learn more about each new bear as they join the series...
Martinica's story:
Martinica was confiscated in June 2007 from a makeshift, private zoo, near a hotel in the mountain resort of Straja, near Lupeni. Martinica is male and was born in 2002. During the series you see Martinica being castrated. This is an important thing to do, even if it looks painful! The sanctuary is meant to be a lifetime care facility for bears which have been in captivity for a number of years – these bears would not survive if they were put back into the wild. Because of this, it would not be right to start breeding bears and keep them in the sanctuary for life, especially when every space is needed.
Did you know?
Martinica is a common name for a bear in Romania. It’s just like a British person saying ‘teddy bear’.
Max's story:
Max was confiscated from his owner who had chained him to an iron fence for years as a roadside tourist attraction for people to take photos and kept him in a tiny cage when he wasn’t ‘working’. 
Max had been at the fence for so many years that you can still see where the metal fencing has bent under his weight. It was clear when Max was rescued, that he was a bear who had been badly affected by his captivity. Max’s eyes showed signs of cataracts and othre sight problems. It was clear he could not see very much of anything, but did react to sounds and smells, which are vital senses for a bear.
Max is the largest bear in the sanctuary, but despite his past, is a bit of a gentle giant. Here he is in a sanctuary transport cage.
Learn more about each new bear as they join the series...
Benny and Ala’s story:
Benny and Ala are two of five bears rescued from Buhusi Zoo. When Romania joined the EU in January 2007, the country’s zoos had to be brought up to certain standards for the animals. Not all zoos can reach this standard, so they have to close or find new homes for the zoo’s animals. Benny and Ala were rescued in July 2007. It was clear that Benny (the male bear) is very old and has suffered while in captivity.
Ala was released into the second enclosure and is doing well. Benny has been kept under observation until staff decide that he is healthy and ready to be released into a quieter enclosure, to enjoy a leisurely pace of life…
Miro’s story:
Miro was bought into sanctuary in the summer of 2007 as a young bear cub – he was found in a forest in Persani. His mother is thought to have been shot by hunters and he was the first cub at the sanctuary. Like most orphaned cubs, Miro sucks on his paws as a comfort – a bit like a baby sucking on a thumb. In the series you see Miro being treated by a vet as he has sucked his paw so hard it has broken the skin.
You’ll get to find out what becomes of Miro as the series progresses…
Recent Comments