[00:00:03] Speaker A: Now the law of the jungle lays down that if there is any dispute as to the right of a cub to be accepted by the pack, he must be spoken for by at least two members of the pack who are not his father and mother.
Who speaks for the cub? Said Akela among the free people. Who speaks?
There was no answer. And Mother wolf got ready for what she knew would be her last fight. If things came to fighting, then the only other creature who is allowed at the pack council, Baloo, the sleepy brown bear, who teaches the wolf cubs the lore of the jungle. Old Baloo, who can come and go where he pleases because he eats only nuts and roots and honey, rose up upon his hindquarters and grunted.
The mars cub.
The mars cub, he said.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: I speak for the mars cub.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: There is no harm in a mars cub. I have no gift of words, but.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: I speak the truth.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: Let him run with the pack and be ended with the others.
I myself will teach him.
There is a place in the remote Northwoods of Minnesota, North America. It's located near the town of orr, population approximately 300.
Outside of this town is an area where normal rules are put to one side. It's a place where humans and wildlife meet. It's a special place, wholly unique and not without its controversies. This is the Vince Schutte Wildlife Sanctuary, run by the American Bear Association, ABA for short.
The ABA is dedicated to promoting a better understanding of black bears and all wildlife through education, observation and experience.
I'm your host, Philip Stubley, and welcome to the Bear Den.
Hello, it's me, Philip. And this is the Bear Den, where we talk about bears, wildlife and those making a difference for them.
So that reading was Baloo's first appearance in Rudyard Kipling's the Jungle Book, set in India.
But a sleepy brown bear doesn't exactly sound much like a sloth bear. Yes, today we are talking about sloth bears. The bear with its shaggy mane of hair, long snout and white chest marking, and also apparently the bear species, on average, with the longest tail.
So we are going to discuss this most unusual bear. And I am joined by sloth bear expert Thomas Sharp, conservation and Research Director for Wildlife SOS Co Chair of the IUCN Sloth Bear Expert Team. I was fortunate enough to visit the Wildlife SOS facility at Agra on a trip to India at the end of 2025 and see the great work they've been doing rescuing not just bears, but elephants and many other animals as well.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: Said to be one of the least.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Studied bears, Thomas provides insights on distinct sloth bear behavior, habitat and threats and we talk about the differences and parallels with other bear species. We also talk about ongoing research projects including home range studies, denning behaviour and human bear interactions in India and wildlife SOS work to mitigate human bear conflict. Thomas also shares experiences from fieldwork and conservation efforts with elephants, as well as. And of course we get to the bottom of just what sort of bear baloo is. It's a cornucopia of information which I'm.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: Really thrilled to share with you, so I'll stop gabbing and.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: And we'll welcome Thomas into the bear den.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: I'm very grateful to have you here today and to talk to you about a bear that I'm. The more it's. Again, most bears, bear species, the more I read about them, the more I just get intrigued and fascinated. But I think sloth bears, they're quite sort of unique and different to most other bear species, as I suppose they all are really. But there's something about. I don't know what it is, there's something about sloth bears. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us where you're speaking to us from?
[00:03:48] Speaker C: Yeah. So my name's Thomas Sharp and I work with Wildlife sos So I go over to India a few times a year and generally I. Otherwise I'm in Utah actually in the United States.
[00:03:59] Speaker B: So what is your background? Like how. How did you get involved with wildlife sos Is it some like wildlife has always been a passion? Working with bears or.
[00:04:08] Speaker C: Yeah, I been doing wildlife work for, you know, went to school for wildlife, got my master's degree in wildlife and had worked for various organizations doing different things, including U. S Fish and Wildlife Service. I ran a field station out in the islands and then I worked for a private company doing wildlife research, doing surveys throughout the West, Western United States mostly a little back east, but.
And I've, you know, so I've done. Had previously done some work overseas, but not a ton. And I met Kartik and Kita, who are the co founders of Wildlife SOS and they were running a program to save dancing bears in India which were sloth bears and basically cubs that had been poached from the wild and what they would do, very inhumane practice of.
Basically they put a rope through the nose of these bears and kind of dance them for people, for money. I guess it began because they would entertain moguls, that type of thing. But as time went on it became a.
Entertaining tourists and hoping to get tips on the street, that type of thing. Anyway, Kartik Sachin, Orion and Gita Session, the co founders of Wildlife sos, saw this and wanted to put an end to it. I met them when they were already working on that. Things were going very well.
But since I had a wildlife degree at some point, Kartik had asked me, oh, you know, would you like to work with some of our researchers and do some research on wild sloth bears? Which of course I was interested in and I did as a volunteer for years.
Now I work for Wildlife SOS full time for about the last 10 years, so that it's been my full time job. But it kind of started very slowly. I'd go out there on my own time, work with the team, and we've expanded since then and we're. We actually work on four different species of bear in India now. So not only the sloth bear, but the Himalayan brown bear, Asiatic black bear, and even a little work on the sun bear, which do barely make it into India in the northeast corner of India.
So that's kind of the background of how I got started working with Wildlife SOS and Kartik and Gita and then the rest of the researchers over there.
[00:06:41] Speaker B: You've already said so much that I could go off topic, but I'll try and stick to. Stick to bears.
[00:06:45] Speaker C: Feel free, feel free, whatever you want to do.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: I was going to ask, I heard about the overlapping sort of territories with sun bears and sloth bears and I just wondered if, do you know of much competition between the species? Do they kind of avoid each other? Do they do their own thing?
[00:07:01] Speaker C: Great question. Because bears as a group, right? So there's eight living species of bear and they have specialized to some degree.
However, bears are basically bears. Most of these bears are omnivores. Even pandas will eat some insects. Polar bears will eat some grass or do other things potentially, you know, but polar bears and pandas are a bit of the outliers. Most of them are pretty much omnivores. And the kind of point I'm getting at is that there is competition between different bear species.
Of course, the most competition in the wild is between individuals that are the same species, but the second closest would be individuals from other species that are very closely related.
And so when you have, if you look at the biogeography of bears, there will be a lot of competition between different bear species. Now, soft bears. And I've done a lot of work on the biogeography of bears in India and largely northeast India, but also Kashmir area. And I've done some of that work with Dave Garcellos, who you know, Dave was actually our team leader on that one. But we were looking at it for a location in northeast India where you might have the overlap of three species, which is very rare, which would be sloth bears, Asiatic black bears, which are found in the mountainous regions of India, and then sun bears, which barely make it into India.
And we've located one area where they might overlap seasonally. But. But the truth is with sloth bears, there isn't a lot of overlap with other bears. If you look at Kajuranga national park, for example, in northeast India, within the park, which is largely a floodplain, it's an incredible park in India and it's got rhinos and elephants and big rivers and. But if you're in the park where it's very open, I mean, there's forested areas and then there's open grasslands, you basically have sloth bears in those areas.
If you go to the Carby Hills, I think it's east of there, then you have Asiatic black bears.
So.
Or if you look at other parks in India like Corbett national park or Rajaji, both those areas have both soft bears and Asiatic black bears. But you really don't. It seems like. Now I'm open if, you know, anybody comes out with any research showing otherwise. But it seems very much that in the high elevation areas you have the Asiatic black bears and then the lower grasslander, lower areas you have sloth bears. So that they don't overlap to such a huge degree, actually.
Now why they don't is probably very complex. Like biogeography is, of course, very complex.
But I think part of it is that just using Asiatic black bears, Asiatic black bears are more a forest bear sloth bears can inhabit. They can be forest bears or open forests or even grasslands. So in place like Kajuronga, you have sloth bears.
If, I mean, I've been there several times, we were doing soft bear surveys there. A lot of soft bears in the park.
But you get outside the park where it's more heavily forested, and that's where you have the Asiatic black bears.
So several things are going on. The soft bears probably evolved to take advantage of that type of habitat.
Soft bears have also evolved an aggressive, defensively aggressive behavior towards tigers. So in the park you have tigers. Sloth bears can deal with tigers to a large degree by becoming very aggressive. Tigers do occasionally eat sloth bears, it's just a fact, but they have a defense against it. Whereas tigers might be helping actually keep Asiatic black bears out. Because Asiatic black Bear defense for tigers is usually simply to climb a tree. If you're in a very open area and there's nowhere to climb a tree, they don't have a lot of defense for that.
So you have a different habitat, you have a predator which might be involved in this. There's just a lot that goes into it.
And in terms of sun bears and Asiatic black bears, those two species overlap throughout a lot of Southeast Asia. And there is a lot of overlap in their habits, in their diets and that type of thing. Rob Steinmetz, who's also a grad student of. Well, he's not a grad student anymore, but back in the day of Dave Garcelles, he did. He's done a lot of work on looking at, you know, how these two species overlap. And I'm not an expert in it. I do know that it does seem like in. In certain areas you'll have many more Asiatic black bears than sun bears. Other areas, it seems like there's more sun bears and Asiatic black bears. Why that is, I. I don't know.
Rob would know better than I would. But, yeah, there is a lot of competition between bears. And if you take this even further to, say, United States, in Canada, if you go to little offshore islands off the north, off the west coast, you usually only have one of the two species, right? So on the mainland, you have American black bears overlapping with grizzlies throughout big parts of their range.
But if you go on smaller islands, you tend to get only one species or the other. And of course, the reason would be that there's enough competition between those two species and there's a small enough space that only one of the two is really going to make it.
So on some islands you only have brown bears. On other islands you only have American black bears. And that's basically due to the competition between these two closely related species. I don't know if I just went a little too long there, but that's.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Oh, no, no. It's fascinating. I mean, I was actually in my head, made the connection when you were talking about how sloth bears are, you know, open plains, so they go attack while age out of black bears will climb a tree. That sounds very much like sort of grizzlies and black bears.
[00:13:14] Speaker C: Very much.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: And yeah, and it's weird. I know that obviously Asiatic black bears and sun bears overlap a lot, especially in places like Vietnam. But then. So they have very similar sort of diets and habitat. But then you've also got Asiatic black bears that you know are in Russia. Right.
[00:13:30] Speaker C: And.
[00:13:33] Speaker B: So they. They can adapt to the cold as well. But where. I can't see some bears doing that as much. But I could be wrong.
[00:13:40] Speaker C: No, you're right. That's exactly right. And in fact, Asiatic black bears in some of their range, they actually hibernate. In other parts, they don't hibernate because. Yeah, I mean, we've, you know, they're found everywhere from warm climates to very cold climates. So, yeah, and you're right about sun bears as well. They're the most tropical of all the species, you know, very much further south indeed.
[00:14:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:04] Speaker B: Just going back to sloth bears, they got their name initially when they were first classified by science because it was believed they were related to sloths of South America, which, as we know, they're very unlike sloths. They're very agile and like, you know, I'd say like quite aggressive or defensive.
And, yeah, they're pretty much found across India.
It's like, it's Nepal, Bhutan, and there is a subspecies in Sri Lanka as well.
[00:14:31] Speaker C: That's right.
[00:14:32] Speaker B: And as I said, I think they're quite different to other bear species. And I kind of wanted to ask what their distinct characteristics are.
[00:14:40] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a great question.
I once put together a talk for a group on kind of looking at very generally on soft bear evolution or how this species would come to be. And certainly the big thing that happened with soft bears is they became myrmecophagus. They basically became a specialist in eating termites and ants. If you look at India over the last 6 million years, roughly, there's evidence to suggest that the country has been drying out slowly.
So soft bear split off about 4 to 5 million years ago. It seems like every paper I see on this has it a little different. So we'll ballpark it. Say somewhere between 4 and 5 million years ago, soft bears split off.
They probably evolved from something like the Etruscan bear.
And as there became less fruit available on the landscape, they needed other food sources to kind of fill in.
And so over time, they became a specialist in eating termites and ants. Now, what this meant was that they were going to evolve to be diggers rather than climbers, so they could dig into termite mounds, go after insects. And a lot of other changes happened with them, physical changes, not just longer claws, but they had a raised palate so they could suck in insects.
They're able to close their nostrils independently, probably to keep soldier termites out of their nasal passages so they can do all these things that specialized in taking Advantage of a very plentiful food source across their range.
So that's great. And that solved one problem. But of course, like life, you know, every time you solve a problem, another problem arises, because you did that. Now, probably their biggest problem, as they evolve slowly to become myrmecophagus, or termite eaters, basically termite and anteaters, was that they're no longer great climbers. And the reason now they can climb. Don't get me wrong, you'll see sloth bears in trees and they can climb trees to get it food, but they're no longer an efficient climber. And what I mean by that is, if you look at bears like Asiatic black bears, sun bears, American black bears, Andean bears, they're incredible climbers. They can just shoot up a tree, no problem.
And where that comes in handy is with predators. How do you deal with large predators on the landscape?
So while these other bears are climbers, then you have other bears that really aren't climbers, like adult brown bears, say, in the U.S. but that's a large bear, you know, much larger. Sloth bears are the second smallest bear, so a brown bear would have a little easier time dealing with potential predators and a very small, soft bear. So soft bears then evolve a very defensively aggressive behavior to deal with species like tigers.
This is a paper I wrote up with Dave Garcelles and Wes Larson about this behavior that they show towards tigers.
It's how they deal with that issue.
So that works part of the time. And then the other thing that sloth bears do, other than becoming defensively aggressive, which works great for tigers, but is a problem for people, and we could talk about that later, but they also became day dinners. They use resting dens in the middle of the day. And that's probably. I mean, it could be two things, and it's hard to parse these things out, but they probably use these resting dens, one, to stay out of the heat of the day so they can stay cooler, and secondly, to avoid predators again.
So as they evolve through time, they're staying in dens for part of the day. They come out and feed at night. They have a behavior they use against predators.
And so all these things make for a very unusual kind of unique bear, which is the sloth bear.
[00:19:06] Speaker B: I'm glad you said myrmacophagus, because I always struggle saying that.
[00:19:11] Speaker C: You know, to be honest with you, I have Peter in the. Like. I think I was pronouncing it incorrectly for a while, but so I try to say just termite eaters.
[00:19:19] Speaker B: Termite.
Oh, it's interesting you say about that. Well, obviously with the denning because well, sloth bears, they don't hibernate. I mean the females use dens for giving birth and raising cubs. But because a bit like sun bears, the warm weather means they don't have to hibernate.
[00:19:36] Speaker C: Right, Correct, yep.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: Yeah. And I believe it was a paper I came across that you recently co authored was all about a particular behavior that soft bears have. It's where mothers carry their cubs on their backs.
[00:19:49] Speaker C: Yes, yes, yeah. And that, that's interesting as well because that's probably also related to predators, both large predators and maybe smaller predators like leopards which are very stealthy and could pick cubs off. But they, you know, it's hard to take a cub off a mother's back in this.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: Yeah, I wouldn't try.
[00:20:14] Speaker C: But yeah. So all these are kind of these anti predator behaviors because in fact I was just looking into this recently where the question kind of came up because even brown bears, right, their cubs climb trees to get away from predators or male brown bears.
And so the question came up, why do soft bear cubs actually climb onto their mother's back?
Is it because they can't climb trees or is it because for some reason they shouldn't be climbing trees to escape?
So I talked to several people who had raised sloth bear cubs, including from Wildlife SOS as well as some zoos in America which had had cubs. And, and the question was basically, you know, at what age if they're coming out of their dens after being in there between two and three months, let's say can they actually, could they climb a tree at that age?
And the feedback that I'm getting is that they actually could, which is very interesting because then the question quickly becomes so why don't they do that? And the answer which were we've been talking about recently because actually we're doing a follow up to our soft bear tiger paper and this one is on soft bear and leopard interactions.
And it had been Lori and Siding Sticker had said long ago that they don't climb trees because of leopards. And I always thought, I don't think that's really true. Leopards aren't important predators. But now that we're looking at the cubs it, they might be important predators for the cubs. So in other words it might be a mistake for a sloth bear cub. Like, like if it's an American black bear and she sends her cubs up, well, American black bear send her cubs up a tree and she can either run off or climb the tree herself.
Grizzlies will send their cubs up the tree. If a soft bear were to send her cubs up a tree, and that predator was a leopard, we all know how well leopards climb. They're incredible climbers.
So that cub is really much safer with the mother than they would be climbing up a tree. So that I think the Karen comes on the back might be because of leopards as well. And when I say as well, it's because, you know, I read a paper by Sariadkin, who did, who does tiger bear research in eastern Russia, and there is a line in there about how it seems that tigers, they're smart enough to use a mother's cub against the mother.
The tiger can actually make the mother put herself in jeopardy by threatening the cubs, which is an advantage to the tiger.
But in India, if, if a soft bear comes across a tiger, the tiger, at least for young cubs, can't get between her and her cubs because the cubs are on her back.
So it actually would have an advantage for large predators like tigers or in the past, certain saber tooth cats, which soft bear evolved with like Meganturion or Dinophelis.
But it also has an advantage for those smaller, very stealthy predators like the leopard.
So it's I, I find that kind of thing fascinating, quite frankly. So, you know, and I'm lucky enough to have a network of people who, who I can talk to because I was actually talking with Dave Garcelles and we were asking that question about can these cubs climb? And so it was just nice to be able to go, well, let's reach out to our colleagues who have actually raised them, get some answers.
[00:24:20] Speaker B: So, yeah, yeah, it's funny, like again, I just making me think of some bears. We would get a variety of cubs, orphaned cubs come in and, you know, the story was mainly the same.
Their mother had been killed and they'd been taken to either be sold on the pet trade or people just wanted them because they thought they were cute. And it was interesting because they all had varying abilities. And the one there was like one came in and she, she couldn't, she couldn't have been more than a couple of months, two, three months old. And she could climb like, that was one of the first things she started doing. And there was another cub. We would, he'd come in and he was, he came in very young, couldn't climb at all. But because we took those two out together, he would watch her and then he would just copy her and start climbing and He. He pushed himself. Yeah. So that was really fun to watch actually, because you could tell they was all teaching each other almost really neat.
[00:25:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: And so I was also going to say as well, because they are classified as vulnerable in the wild, sloth bears and populations in decline. So, like, what are the kind of main threats sloth bears face?
[00:25:27] Speaker C: Yeah, it's an interesting.
Well, interesting. It's.
I will say first off, like, I think sloth bears are, are lucky to be in a place like India and Sri Lanka, where there is a. Generally a pretty good ethic about wildlife.
But obviously the problem, the big problem in India is just human population.
And when these animals are losing habitat, that's the biggest problem.
There's also some poaching issues for sure, in the past for things like the dancing bear trade, which I talked about earlier. You know, they would, you know, go in and take the cubs and if the mother came back, because when they den, there's a moment when after the mother has cubs, she stays with her cubs for about two months and then she'll, for about two weeks, she starts leaving the den to go out quickly to get water or some food before coming back to the den. And that's a very vulnerable time for the cubs.
And that's when poachers would actually try to go in and take the cubs. So when the mother starts leaving the den without the cubs, and if the mother came back, of course, you know, because they wanted the cubs and because software mothers would be very dangerous, they would kill the mother as well. So if you want to really hurt a wild population, you remove the cubs, the young, and then you remove the breeding females.
So, you know, poaching like that can have a huge impact on wild populations.
You know, and then I talked about this behavior they have of being aggressive towards tigers, which has served them well, served them well for tigers and other large predators for several million years.
But now in today's world, it is an issue because they use basically that same behavior that they use towards tigers towards humans. Now when they use it towards a tiger, if the tiger wants to, they can just kind of run off, which they do often. But, you know, a soft bear is not going to catch a tiger. But humans is a whole different thing.
And they have those long claws which are their big weapons. And so there are probably more attacks on humans by softwares than any other species of bear, possibly more than all combined. But it's hard to say that, but it is possible.
Now, part of that is that the encounter levels are high. They live in a Very populated country.
You know, they used to occur in Bangladesh, another very highly populated country, which now they're completely extirpated from that country. But they still obviously occur in India. And there's going to be encounters with humans. Now most of those encounters are not going to end in an attack. And I'm as guilty of this as the next person because I published papers on soft bear attacks and that's what we do as scientists.
But to get the idea that these are bears that are just willy nilly attacking people all over the place is not the case. They are trying to avoid people as much as they can. They will run away and they don't want to have to charge. That's a huge energy expenditure and everything else. But unfortunately, if you surprise a sloth bear and they're not the most aware bearer of all the species, they tend to have their heads down, they're foraging for termites or what have you. And so if you surprise one because of their biology, they're more likely to attack.
And those attacks can be really bad. Roughly.
I don't have the numbers on me, but I think in our study it was 7 to 8% ended in death of the human and some others could be very bad maulings, which can affect people throughout the rest of their life. Now most of them ended with not severe damage, but a significant portion did.
So that's always a problem for conservation because it's hard to go into an area and push the conservation of a species if somebody's mother, brother, whatever it is, has been attacked recently. You know, you don't have warm, cuddly feelings about that species.
And you know, I think they're an incredibly great looking bear and I'm in the minority with that. But they're not. My point here is they're not as charismatic as say a tiger.
Anybody can look at a tiger and it's like, that is a beautiful animal and I'm no different. Not everybody looks at a sloth bird, says, oh my God, that is a beautiful animal. I think they are, they, I think they're incredible looking. But it's, they're not one that catches the headlines the way other, you know, charismatic megafauna do. Even like brown bears do, or tigers or lions or elephants, that type of thing.
But one positive we have in terms of conservation is probably largely because they are termite eaters and anteaters is they have relatively small home ranges for a bear species. And that can be very useful for conservation purposes. Though I will say with the team in India, that I work with, that I'm part of. Swabi Nathan and Dr. Arun and the team Reagan and Yogaraj collared bears in India. And in our area that we do a lot of our work, we're going to publish a paper soon. But in our area we did get larger home ranges than were found in other areas for soft bears. For the females it was still larger but not, not hugely different. But for the males, we found that some of these males are really covering quite a bit of ground, over 100 square kilometers.
And that could be unique to our area or it could be that we're using a different technology. I mean we're using GPS collars and this is actually the first bigger study done with GPS collars for softwares. And with most, most bear species when they started using GPS instead of vhf, they got bigger home ranges because, you know, the technology is just better. So you're able to get more accurate. Yeah, yeah.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: Oh, that's interesting. So, because if the sloth bears home ranges are larger than you thought, I'm guessing there's a bit more overlap. And do they, I guess maybe it's something you're looking into. But they do, you know, like, do they share resources more do you think?
[00:32:17] Speaker C: Or it's a good question, like share resources which he. With each other.
[00:32:24] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I'm just thinking because I think pretty much sourcing with black bears that if, say one season, one season, you know, they're having a poor food showing in one area, then they'll go, oh well, it's not like they invite them around for dinner, but there's an understanding they can come over and eat there or yeah, vice versa.
[00:32:44] Speaker C: Isn't those Ben Killam's books? Right?
[00:32:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I've read those. Yeah.
[00:32:50] Speaker C: And he, yeah, I, I do think there is a lot of tolerance. Now one thing with bears and I, as far as I know, and I, I don't think this has been shown for all bear species but I know like for American black bears and from my understanding brown bears kind of work in the same way where females always try to stay home or they're going to try to den, make a little home range near where their mother is and the males of course disperse further off.
And this certainly seems to be the exact same case with sloth bears that you do get.
The daughters of the mother in our studies seem to be staying quite close to where the mother bear is as long as they can.
And of course at some point they can't. And we actually had a case where one female did A long distance dispersal.
Her home range overlapped completely with her sisters because we had documented them since they were cubs.
And one of the sisters ended up moving because at some point there's too much overlap, maybe not enough resources. But what I will say is that soft bears seem very tolerant of one another in that way. We have video of we in our study areas. We set up camera traps to follow bears at dens so we could get an idea of what they were doing, collect some behaviors. And we even have video of a mother bear with two cubs on her back. She has two cubs on her back and she's walking, she runs into another sloth bear which that bear reacted incredibly strongly when it saw the mother bear, like very happy, very.
I mean I, I know people will say I'm anthropomorphizing, but you could tell the bear was excited, let's say an excited state. And she went up to the mother. And mothers with cubs are very tentative about other bears, but the mother went right over and sniffed. I bet we have no data on this, so I am speculating to be clear, but I'm almost certain that had to be one of her previous cubs or it probably, it could be a sister, I suppose, but they actually ended up walking all off in the same direction together, even after just meeting in. My point of all that is that it does seem to be that they're very tolerant of one another and that the, the families do kind of set up shop near one another and they're not generally too aggressive with one another. The males are a little different, but I still think they're quite tolerant of one another. But we certainly documented like interactions between a young male and a adult male over a dead site that the young male was using.
And they would get in their squabbles and fight a little. And then actually the younger male which was there earlier was able to several times kind of fight off the larger male and because he was staying there. So it was, you know, I do think they are a tolerant bear. I think part of that is probably again, me being a termite eater and having that type of food on the landscape might make it so they're, they're not as. They're still in competition, there's no question. But not, they don't react as strongly, let's say.
[00:36:23] Speaker B: Oh, interesting. I'm, I'm really intrigued as well. Do you happen to know how many species of termite or ants that the sloth bears actually eat?
[00:36:31] Speaker C: I don't. I have talked to some termite specialists before.
And I. And I've never been able to get a clear answer.
And to be honest, we. When we've done diet studies, and I'm only speaking for our group, we haven't gone through the specific species.
So I don't. And we have been curious about that. Somebody will do it. I'm hoping so.
[00:36:56] Speaker B: All right, I'll make a note.
[00:36:58] Speaker C: All right.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: Next time I'm in India.
No, I only asked because I'm sure it's somewhere. I read it somewhere. But it's like, apparently this, like, 50 different types of species that some bears eat. Termites. And termites. So I was just like, oh, there was something for sloth.
[00:37:14] Speaker C: Yeah, there's a lot of species of termites.
[00:37:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:18] Speaker C: So I. I have no idea.
[00:37:21] Speaker B: All right, so you said. So your research is focusing on range mapping and human bear sort of conflict.
[00:37:27] Speaker C: Yeah, we have, like, I mentioned the home range studies, which we're looking at and we want to look at as well.
Mother.
We've had three bears, actually, that were collared when they gave birth. And so we want to take a very close look at movement patterns and behavior pre and post giving birth to the cubs, how their movement changes, that type of thing.
I'm looking at some behavioral stuff with leopards and soft bears and how the two species interact.
We also have another denning project going on where we tend to be looking at several different things at once. One big one, Swaminathan, is. Is spending a lot of time on his relocation of sloth bears because, you know, since there are attacks, sometimes bears are moot. Like, if a bear is deemed, like, okay, this one keeps coming back and attacking people or whatever, you try to move that bear to another location. And of course, as I'm, you know, I'm sure, you know, with other bear species, namely brown bears, American black bears, bears tend to come back if you don't move them far enough. And then even if they don't come back, what is the survival of these different bears?
So bears have been moved in India for a long time. And the question is, nobody's looked too closely at was it successful? Did they come back and have they survived? Did they come back? You know, how far do you have to move them so they don't come back?
And so Swami has been spending a lot of time, Swami and Arun, on that question and so trying to figure that out. So just so that we have some clue in terms of how far do you have to move them?
Because, I mean, it's not surprising. I don't think this is giving Anything away. But we have had males just go back to where they were before. You know, if it's 100 kilometers away, they'll just go back. You know, it's. And so moving an animal much further than that, you have, of course you need special permissions to move any be. But the further away you move, you have to get more permission. So that type of thing.
[00:39:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm imagining state lines and whatnot as well.
[00:39:51] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:39:54] Speaker B: I was going to ask if there were any parallels with like the conflicts you see with sloth bears and other bear species in the world or any sort of trends. Because if the behavior is quite similar or quite different.
[00:40:08] Speaker C: In terms of attacks.
[00:40:10] Speaker B: Or I guess in terms of attacks, but also I guess, I suppose in mitigating it as well. Can you apply the same sort of methodology to soft bears that you can with other bears or.
[00:40:22] Speaker C: To some degree, I think we have had areas where, you know, what we try to do in some cases is certainly in parts of their range and this doesn't apply to all of their range at all. But there are limiting resources like water. Like some of these areas can be quite dry, especially during the summer. Dry and hot.
And if there is a location where there isn't water, well, needless to say, the bear is going to walk to a different location.
So in other words, we have had cases where we have. We know we have soft bears in a certain area and at the driest part of the year, unless you build some water holes there, give them an opportunity for water, they're going to move. And what that means when I say they're going to move is they're going to come across people while they go from one area to the other to get water. And so there are cases where, you know, we try to help create water holes or work with the forest department. Everything we do, we have to work very closely with the government, the local government, the forest departments to try to mitigate those things. Though soft bears also do sub crop rating. They do like things like peanuts, they like to go in and take.
They will take corn. I don't think it's been documented to such a high degree. And there's several other things which they definitely do feed on crops and orchards. We know that, you know, if there's a fruit orchard that borders or even doesn't border too closely a natural area with soft bears, like some of the bears, they know where that orchard is and you can see it like they'll beeline it over to there to get some fruit. Now this is problem. It's a problem in terms of.
Well, obviously if the bears are moving more towards people, there's a possibility of attack. But there's also the bears are at risk from anthropogenic risks. Things like falling into open wells, which are a big problem in India, obviously getting hit by cars, which is a problem anywhere for bears as well as getting into getting in snares.
Sometimes people will set up snares or use other tactics to, you know, passive tactics to hunt. And usually they're not going after bears. Right. They're going after boars or wild pigs.
But you know, they kill, they kill bears just as much as they kill these other animals. So yeah, there's we, we've actually been looking into. We published a few paper on anthropogenic risks in southern India to sloth bears and there's. I mean it's a problem, clearly.
[00:43:21] Speaker B: Yeah, but what you say, I mean it just makes me think of sun bears in like Sumatra. We see a lot of issues of snares there as well.
Same thing, put them out for balls and then it's tigers and bears. The, you know, they don't discriminate, unfortunately.
[00:43:37] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:43:39] Speaker B: So yeah, it's really interesting. I mean it feels like there's so much we know, but yet so much there's still, still unravel.
One of the sort of differences that struck me, I watched one of wildlife SOS videos about living with sloth bears and one of the main differences to black bears is that you shouldn't fight back. Said you should drop down, cover your face. And it's kind of like the advice for. Feels like for grizzly bears and this, this kind of works. So like if you did come across a sloth bear, the best thing to do is to curl up in the fetal position.
[00:44:12] Speaker C: Well, if they charge. So the one nice thing, it's funny to say nice thing. The one consistent thing with soft bears is like you're saying they don't.
They never attack predatorily.
So American black bears and grizzly bears will.
It is rare, it is the minority the small amount of times. But those two species can attack predatorily. So in other words, with a grizzly, if you get attacked by a grizzly, if it's a defensive attack, you want to curl up in a ball. But if it's a predatorial attack, that's the last thing you want would want to do. So there is an aspect of being able to read an animal's behavior. If so like if a grizzly bear sees you from say, you know, half mile away, you're in an open area and that bear sees you and it's slowly walking towards you and continues to walk towards you and it's kind of making a zigzagging pattern or that type of thing. That's not a good situation because that bear knows you're human and it's still moving towards you. It can be a big problem in those cases. If that bear eventually does run up on you, it might not be great to curl up. But most attacks are defensive. So you curl up because all the bear is trying to do is it's trying to get rid of a threat and then it'll go off and do its own thing. What's nice with sloth bears is we don't have any predatorial attacks documented. So they are all defensive attacks.
And we know this because even their diet. Right. This is not a bear that eats red meat. Now, they have been documenting. Occasionally they will scavenge or, you know, if they're rooting around for insects, they might eat a few mice or small rodents. We've even had weird cases where they've killed a young deer or something. But that's really an opportunistic thing. They're not really hunting for them.
Oh, I'm not saying it can't happen, but basically, these bears don't eat red meat. We have no predatorial attacks by a sloth bear. And we know from their biology that like with tigers, if you see them react with a tiger, once they get that tiger on its heels, they will chase them off, but then they go the other direction all they want. They don't want to catch that tiger. What are they going to do with the tiger? They are simply trying to scare them off. So since we know that all sloth bear attacks are defensive.
Yeah. If I'm walking through the woods and I turn around and hear a huff and that bear comes charging at me, I would turn my back and fall to the ground and cover your face just like you would a grizzly bear. Because like most bears, they go after the face.
I've heard different reasons for why they go after the head, but I. I think it probably has to do with the eyes. I know people have said it's the teeth that can be used as weapons as well. But I think it, you know, it's a vulnerable space for any mammal, any living or any. Not every, any living thing, but things with eyes, that's very vulnerable and they go towards the head. So you want to cover up and protect your face and everything else. And then if the sloth Bear is not surrounded. Because I was once shown by a grad student who was studying soft bears.
She actually showed me an attack which I knew of before, but where the guy was kind of trying to cuddle up and the bear kept going after him. And she couldn't understand why. But of course, what was going on was that bear was completely surrounded by people.
It had nowhere to run to, and so it just kept attacking this guy, killed him, and the bear was killed.
But if they had just not surrounded the bear, it would have run off.
You know, it's. It's displaced aggression almost. I mean, the bear had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and it's clearly in an agitated state.
But because sloth bears can be so aggressive, people tend to think they could be predatorial or they're really. They're just trying to get out of the situation. That's all they want.
[00:48:30] Speaker B: Yeah. When you say if it's soft bears have quite defensive behavior, it feels like it's pretty much on us as humans. We, if we know this, we should know how to mitigate that and avoid these conflicts.
[00:48:43] Speaker C: That's right. And it's kind of the same stuff with other bears where, you know, if you make a bunch of noise, they know you're coming, they're gonna leave the area.
I will say it appeared. And I, I did give a talk at a.
At a conference once, a bear conflicts conference. And I. So there were a lot of people there who were basically people who work with brown bears and American black bears all the time. And I did ask their opinion because I showed them several videos and I said, I don't think.
My impression was that soft bears aren't quite as aware of their surrounding as American black bears or brown bears. And most, most everybody agreed with that. They were all like, yeah, that's what it looks like from the videos. Soft bears just don't seem. They'll deal with an issue. An issue being a tiger or a large predator or unfortunately, a human, only when they're very close. Otherwise they're engaged in what they're doing. And I, you know, they're kind of a loud bear. I mean, they could be digging in a termite mound, making a lot of noise. So it would be relatively easy for a tiger to sneak up on them, which we have video of. But that doesn't mean the tiger is going to kill them because they react so strongly and so violently that a sloth bear can actually survive that. We have one video where a sloth bear is digging in a little hole and it Opens up, the video opens up and you can see the tiger just crouched down watching the bear.
And eventually the tiger gets up and stalks right up to the bear, literally slaps it on its back haunch. And the bear just spins and huffs really loudly and charges right at the face of the tiger. And that tiger runs for the hills, like want nothing to do with it, you know, so they can actually survive by behaving that way. So that's fine for tigers, but in, in the modern world where they're going to come across humans more than tigers, it's not great, is it? Because, you know, the more you mow humans again, we go back to the conservation efforts, they're a little tougher. When people know this as being an aggressive bear, even though the bear, like you're saying it's really on us, you know, and that's what we try to get across. Like, you're responsible for your own safety. That bear doesn't want to deal with you, but you need to be responsible for your safety. Make noise as you go through the forest. If it does charge, fall to the ground and cover up.
And I've even had sloth bear people who'd worked for sloth bears with soft bears for a long time saying they'd have a hard time falling to the ground because I think the natural instinct is to fight back. But if you fight back, how. It's a software, and again, we know this for a fact from video. How is a software going to react when a tiger does not run, but stays there and fights? Well, the soft bear is going to fight. It's just obvious. It's why you don't fight back with a grizzly bear. Are you going to win a fight with a large grizzly bear? It's not going to happen.
So, I mean, it's the same thing with a software. They're much smaller than grizzlies, they've got really long claws and you're just, you know, I, it's just not.
Even if you survive it, chances are your wounds would be so much worse if you fight back. That doesn't mean that the bear might not take one swipe at you or take one bite at your back. It might happen. I mean, I hate to say it, but. But if it takes one swipe or one bite and runs off, you still survive the encounter.
[00:52:28] Speaker B: Is it similar with sloth bears? I mean, because. Because they've got such a specialized diet, do you see the kind of issues where there's food attractants and they, they enter sort of villages. Does that happen as well?
[00:52:41] Speaker C: Well, it does, but not to the extent. So soft bears, roughly half their diet is going to be termites and ants. The other half is largely made up of fruit and that type of thing.
Honey, you know, there are the odds and ends, things like that, but a lot of fruit.
Now I was recently in India and I had heard these stories about Mount Abu.
And in Mount Abu they say, oh, you know, sloth bears, they, you know, they're in these dumps, these human dumps. And I thought, that's odd. We really don't see that. I never thought that would be a problem.
And I went to Rajasthan with Utkarsh, who's a biologist, a soft bear biologist, great biologist. And, and someone he's working with, Nishith Daria, who's also a soft bear biologist.
And they took me and a couple other people up to Mount Abou.
And I gotta tell you, I was not excited to go because I just, I, I don't like seeing dump bears to begin with, but it really opened my eyes. Like they took me out at night and to this dump that was up there and we had like 10 soft bears just roaming around, eating the garbage. And I mean, for people who just work on brown bears and black, American black bears, of course that's normal. I never thought I would really see that with sloth bears. But in Mount Abu that's definitely happening. And in fact, the hotel we stayed at, we where we had dinner and I took a photo of it. They, when we got back the next day, the night, we were out looking at them in the dump. They had a bear break into the house right where we ate dinner. There's a bear print just so it broke into the kitchen there. And I gotta tell you, after all my years of working with softwares, I never thought I would see this. And I don't know, you know, and since then I've heard a few more stories of being there, you know, occurring in other areas.
My feeling, and this is more a gut feeling I shouldn't say, is that we overall, we don't have that same trash issue with sloth bears that we do for brown bears, American black bears, even polar bears.
But clearly it is an issue in certain areas, at least now. Is it getting worse now so it's going to spread and be everywhere? I don't know. I'd be very careful in speculating because I never thought I would see what I saw there.
And you know, just having that many soft bears behaving in that fashion where they really Seem food conditioned for human food.
[00:55:32] Speaker B: Well, that is fascinating. And I'm all bears seem to just love an easy meal, don't they?
[00:55:38] Speaker C: Yeah, they do, yeah.
[00:55:42] Speaker B: So you were saying you were just in India. So I suppose the way you conduct your research is a mixture of desktop and field based.
Did you have any sort of other memorable experiences in the field you could share or surprising interesting results? I mean, that one you've just said I'm really intrigued by as well.
[00:56:03] Speaker C: Yeah, there's always interesting things. So like I had told you, like we have a team led by Swami Nathan with wildlife sos and so we, you know, obviously I'm talking to these guys every week when I'm back here and we, and Swami Nathan leads a team out there and, and we have so many different things going on. The denning stuff is fascinating and of course when I go out it's, it's always, to be honest, largely like a show and tell. Like there's guys, I used to be in the field all time. The, the time and it as inevitably happens, I'm not. But when I get out there, you know, they take me to all the dens so I can visit the areas or where we're setting up a new project.
This past time we, I was able to visit like I mentioned Rajasthan and Guad with some colleagues of mine and we had a couple of what I thought was funny. I, I got to tell you this one story. We're in Gujarat and I believe it was Jar Soft Bear sanctuary.
And N then took me out there and they wanted to show us bears.
And so we're staying in the sanctuary and then we drive out to a little area where the local guy, I think there's a small temple there and he goes, yeah, you know, in the night the bears come by here.
And so we're like, okay. You know, the first night we were out there, I walked on with Nishi and Pratik and we saw a bear and I got a photo, but the rest of the group didn't see it. It was coming down this walkway just in the evening. So the next night we're like, oh, let's go back so that everybody can get a look at this bear.
And so there's basically between grad students and professionals. We've got about 10 people who have worked on sloth bears, some just in a zoo, a lot in the field who were used to seeing them. And there's 10 of us there, roughly 10 of us.
And we didn't want, we didn't want to scare the Bear away.
And so all 10 of us were huddled when we thought we heard a bear in this field.
And so we're all looking off in one direction, 10 people who are supposed to know sloth bears. And all of a sudden there's a sound behind us and Pratik flips around, turns on his. Like, there's a sloth bear like five feet from us.
Luckily the bear just scampered off. But it was unbelievable because, you know, we got 10 people, supposedly no soft bears, and this bear managed to get right behind us, which is very close for a wild bear.
But luckily that bear wanted nothing to do with, you know, wasn't going to charge a group of 10 people, but.
Oh, that was very, very.
I just thought it was ridiculous.
[00:59:08] Speaker B: Yes, it was almost like it's checking it. You're all looking out for, for the soft bear and it's looking out for you and. Oh, what are these all doing?
[00:59:16] Speaker C: Yeah, totally, totally.
[00:59:19] Speaker B: That's so funny. You're also like co chair, I believe, of the bear specialist group, sloth bear expert team. Could you tell us a little bit about that, like what the team's main objectives are?
[00:59:28] Speaker C: Yes, of course. So, yeah, it's. I'm a co chair and Nishif Daria is the other co chair and basically we have a team of soft bear experts across India, a few in Sri Lanka, a few in Nepal, which is basically all of its range though.
And one of our main things is to write up the Red List assessment for this species.
Our last one was in 2016, it was updated in 2020, which there wasn't too much to do for that quick update, but now we've got to.
In fact, this year it looks like we'll start writing the next assessment. So in this assessment we're basically looking at, you know, what's going on with the population, as far as we know. Is it, is it going down, is it going up? I mean, it's been a downward trend. That's not a surprise.
But other than the Red list assessment, we also do other projects. Our big project this past year was making a new sloth bear range wide map.
So with every Red list assessment, like we had a map with our last one, but there was a big effort this year, Dave Garcelles, and forgetting the other fellow's name, anyway, they put, got money, got a grad student, Chang Cheng, she's wonderful. She's at a university in, in Italy actually.
And the idea is to get a really detailed map on where we have these bears and it's one way to actually be able to document are we losing them or are we gaining finding them? You know, there's.
It's hard to quantify what the population is. Everybody wants to say, how many bears are there in India? Well, it's, it's very difficult to say.
And if you only look at that, it would be very hard to say what's going on with the population.
By understanding the current range of this bear, at least we can know we have bears.
You know, in 2026, we had bears in, in specific areas and you can at least track that. So, you know, if, if you no longer have bears in an area that we documented occurrence of bears, then, you know, you know, very factually you could point to something and say there used to be bears here, there aren't anymore. Or, you know, on the other side, if, you know, we never had bears in this area, now we've got bears over here. So something is going well.
So collecting that data for the last year, it's really been going on longer than a year.
Of course, again, this was split up between different members of the soft barracks per team. So we have different people in different states who can collect data.
Our team, my team, is largely in southern India. And so we were able to collect data for southern India, Nishit and his group, and Gujarat and Rajasthan collected for there. And then we have other bear experts from the other states or other countries, including Sri Lanka and Nepal, to get that sort of data.
So that's kind of what, what we've been involved in and where, you know, probably the big push will be between the red listing and finishing up the mapping.
[01:03:14] Speaker B: Because I know sun bears have like a species survival plan and I think, is there an equivalent for sloth bears?
[01:03:22] Speaker C: It is on our agenda. We don't have one done right now.
I mean, again, luckily, you know, India is pretty good about their laws are very strong in terms of wildlife, which is wonderful.
Whether those laws are always completely reinforced or not is another question I was.
[01:03:47] Speaker B: Going to ask as well. Like with wildlife sos, do you have any particular involvement with the elephants as well, or is it just the bears you focus on?
[01:03:55] Speaker C: Yeah, no, we do. And in fact, again, Swaminathan, our lead out there is he spent seven years, like tracking wild elephants in the Western Ghats. He's, he's a soft bear guy now, but he's definitely an elephant guy. And we have a wildlife SOS project where we are looking at. There's a population of elephants in the eastern side. It's one of the smaller populations so you have your big populations in the northeast. These are wild elephants in the northeast and in southern India, where we do a lot of sloth bear work. And then you have a couple of smaller populations. One in eastern area, which is Chattisgar, Orissa, West Bengal.
And then there's elephants in the north, which is also a smaller population.
So we're in one of the smaller populated elephant populated areas. But the place we've been working is in central Chattisgar. It's actually an interesting story in that elephants had for the most part been completely extirpated from central Chattisgar. They occurred in northern Chattisgar, but in central they hadn't been there in over 50 years. It's been hard to track exactly how long.
It could be 75 years or more war. But certainly a generation of people went by without really seeing elephants. Now occasionally you might get a migratory elephant moving through, but elephants started showing up and not leaving central Chattisgar more recently in like the last 20 years, less than 20 years, and just not leaving. And it actually, as most people know who work in these parts of the world, elephants can be incredibly dangerous. People who don't, you know, who only have seen them at zoos, you know, you think of tigers as dangerous. Elephants is not dangerous. Most people fear elephants more.
And so literally we were having horrible conflict in this area and literally people being killed or injured while taking selfies with elephants. They didn't realize how dangerous these animals can be, especially the males.
Something like 80 to 90% of the bad conflicts are with the males, who make up a much smaller part of the population.
But so the, the local government there reached out to wildlife SOS to see if we would help with some of the issues.
And Swaminathan being an elephant guy, Dr. Arun is one. Well, took the lead on this and basically went out there. And it's largely outreach to simply teach people. But the other major part that happened was that the elephants were being tracked in the area by trackers, which is great. But we were able to collar one female with the herd and so that we could track pretty much in real time where the herd was. And because of this, you know, like everybody there has a cell phone. India is like everywhere else, people have their smartphones and so literally warnings could go out to the villagers. The elephants are moving towards your village.
You know, if your kids are out playing, get the bed or what have you. And for the crops, because this is one of the other just major problems here is of course the elephants raid crops and an elephant herd can do an awful lot of damage to a crop field, not just by eating them, but by just, you know, a stamp, you know, a group of elephants, 20 elephants or more, that can do a lot of damage. So there are certain areas you certainly don't want the elephants to go, but, you know, if you know the elephants are coming, then you can use certain mitigation methods, not ones that are going to injure the elephants, just keep them out. Safe mitigation methods for both the elephants and the people.
Obviously what we want here is a level of coexistence which can occur, but it's, it's an ongoing project. I mean, it's, it's not easy. But the people there really are incredible, largely. And, and as long as you understand their concerns, it's like, you know, I go out and if I see a male elephant, all I think about is, my God, that is a beautiful animal. And it's true. But of course, if you live there and you see a large male elephant walking down your street, you know, they'll stick their head right through the wall of a house.
You know, I mean, it's, it's just you have to understand what the people are going through to try to get to some level of coexistence. And if you can help the people, you can help the animals.
[01:09:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
So, yeah, that's interesting and I like how it's a positive use of modern technology where you're able to kind of send alerts out to people, the elephants are coming.
[01:09:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean that, that really worked quite well. Now the collar's off the elephant now, but we still have trackers doing the natural tracking. This might seem quite good at it.
[01:09:49] Speaker B: Ah, that's good. It might seem like a silly question. Is that like a neck collar or something that goes.
[01:09:54] Speaker C: Yes, yeah, yes, it is. Yeah.
[01:09:55] Speaker B: All right. Yeah. Just wonder.
[01:09:57] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And it lasted about two years before, you know, an. Elephants can be quite hard on their collars, but this one lasted a good two years. And so not only were we able to use that data to obviously send out the warning messages, but now we have two year data of this herd working in this area, which we are just finishing our first paper now, just looking at the scientific data. So it really served two functions. One is in the moment to have real time and then secondly, okay, what can we learn from what these elephants, how they've been moving the last two years, how can that be used to mitigate problems as well?
[01:10:40] Speaker B: Yeah, and it'll be interesting to see if they go the same route. You know in future as well.
[01:10:46] Speaker C: Exactly, exactly.
[01:10:48] Speaker B: I also just, just go back to bears as well. In 2022, Wildlife SOS launched the first World Sloth Bear Day, which I believe is on October 12th. And I kind of wanted to hear what your thoughts were on why, why we need a sloth bear day. Why is it important?
[01:11:06] Speaker C: Yeah, it's funny that had come up like, oh, we should do a World Soft Bear Day. And, and the question was, of course, how do we do this?
And basically our executive director Nikki just was like, let's just move forward with it, you know, like, what's the point in waiting for permission from anybody anywhere? It's just a day to think about this animal and to bring it more into the limelight. And it's been very useful actually, like these types of, you know, you could say it's just a marketing thing. Marketing and information is important and it's once a year where we can highlight this and we every year on this day, it's not just wildlife sos, it's other groups across India, they go out to this, you know, they actually like people go out to the schools more than just once a year to actually educate about soft bears. But it's a day where you can bring more attention and get more notoriety for just doing that, that for getting out and you know, talking about this animal, its importance to the heritage of India, but how to stay safe in sloth bear country just, it just highlights the animal. And you know, for an animal like the soft bear, that, which tends not to get a ton of press again, it's not a tiger, it's not an elephant, it's, but it's a fascinating animal and you know, just to highlight that I think is useful.
[01:12:42] Speaker B: And are you quite optimistic about the future of soft bears?
[01:12:47] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, you know, with wildlife it's always one concern after another. But I think that I am, I'm optimistic. I think that there's been a lot of very positive changes in the last 20 years.
Wildlife SOS, ending the dancing bear trade, although that almost popped up again.
But, you know, everyone's keeping an eye on that to make sure it doesn't come back.
There's other groups, other good non profit groups doing a lot of good work.
You know, recently Dave had an article on the least studied bears in the world.
And basically it was three species.
Sloth bear, sun bear and the Andean bear.
And I always thought that was funny because I don't play sloth bears with any bear, sun bears, because of the fact that if you want to study soft bears, you, we know where to find them, you know, sun bears and you probably know this from your time, they're tough to find, like if to study.
And I've talked with a lot of sunbear biologists and they don't have nearly the amount of data.
I know an Indian bear specialist, ecologist Russ Van Horn, and you know, we compare denning data we get and he has a hard time getting data for Andean bear denning. I'm like, well, we know where the soft bears are denning, at least in my area. I will caveat this and say I have talked to soft bear biologists in Sri Lanka and this is one of those unknown things, is that whereas I'm trying, what I've been saying up to this point is we could know a lot about softwares and now I actually think we are getting to know a lot more, which means you can manage better for them. And I think we've come up with a lot of great data recently, you know, just more data about home ranges and building up what was known because a lot of the sloth bear studies were all about attacks. And there's only so much you can learn from an animal just by studying its attacks. We need to know the ecology, but it's there to be studied. But when I bring up Sri Lanka, I find this fascinating to this day, which is it has been suggested that sloth bears on the Indian mainland they breed at a specific time during the year, which is basically the beginning of summer, they give birth in the winter.
It's been suggested that in Sri Lanka they don't do this, that they will actually breed year round.
And nobody seems to know. And I thought this was fascinating because it's like, like I talked to a guy down there who studies some bears. We actually visited him a couple years ago in Sri Lanka and he was saying, you don't understand, we don't see mothers with cubs. So, like where our wildlife SOS study is, we can put up camera traps. We, we know where the sloth bears are going, we see mothers with cubs, we get them in the camera traps all the time out there. Because I just thought, well, this is simple. Just, you know, send me all the photos you have of soft bears with cubs on Sri Lanka in a dated photo and we can estimate the age and start to get an idea if they all, you know, if they seem to be breeding year round or not.
Enchantima was telling me, no, we don't see them with cubs hardly ever.
And he's in the Midst of collecting all the data they do have of sloth bears with cubs, just in an effort to start to get an idea of if they really are breeding year round. Now, the idea comes from the only bear which does not seem to be breeding at a specific time of the year is your species, the sun bear. They seem to breed year round. They're the most tropical of all the bears.
So there is an argument to say, well, you know, the Sri Lankan sloth bear is the most tropical of all the slot. They're found further south than any other bear. They've been isolated on Sri Lanka for how long, we don't know. But the LA. At least 10,000 years or thereabouts, let's say. But it could be that that subspecies has really been developing, you know, different.
I don't know what you would say, but they, you know, they probably crossed over the land bridge in the Pleistocene, so they, you know, we could have something different going on in Sri Lanka. It is possible they're the most tropical ones. Do they breed year round?
Now?
Most software people I talk to don't believe it. They think they're still probably breeding at a specific time during the year. And I gotta be honest, if I had to guess, that's the way I lead as well. Well, but that doesn't mean that is the case and we don't know yet.
So there are, like, very simple issues like that. We still don't know about this bear. And certainly the Sri Lankan subspecies is much less known than, you know, the one on the mainland, which is still one of the least studied bears in the world. It's still one of the three least studied bears in the world.
So.
[01:18:28] Speaker B: Oh, wow, it's so interesting.
I'm like, the thing about sloth bears, they're just, they, they're real. I, I find them really interesting. But partly it's because of the fact that they seem kind of slightly unknowable in, in a way. They've got like, an aloofness to them.
[01:18:43] Speaker C: They definitely do.
[01:18:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:18:47] Speaker B: It's really interesting.
I had just a couple more questions. I'm just checking. You don't have to get away or anything.
[01:18:53] Speaker C: No, I'm good.
[01:18:55] Speaker B: Great, thank you.
I suppose I, I kind of. It was just a general one about if you had any sort of advice for anyone listening that might want to be getting into wildlife work, if it's research or conservation or, you know, the budding researchers.
[01:19:12] Speaker C: Well, of course, I don't know if I actually do, but that's fair.
[01:19:19] Speaker B: I mean, you don't have to.
[01:19:21] Speaker C: No, I mean, I find it incredibly rewarding career. Obviously job market is not huge.
[01:19:31] Speaker B: No, don't worry, I, I know that.
[01:19:35] Speaker C: But you know, you know, though, the old saying about if you do something you love, you don't really work and certainly like it is funny because I do kind of feel that way.
Like if you're passionate about wildlife, first of all, to get involved in conservation, there's so many ways to get involved and there's more citizen science out there and everything else. And you know, you can work with non profits, you can volunteer for non profits, you can start up your own non profit even, but there's tons of ways to get involved in conservation and even research professionally.
I think it is a rewarding career. I think it's.
And, and I wouldn't be dissuaded by the fact that it's not a huge job market or anything like that.
[01:20:27] Speaker B: I also, this might, might be a bit facetious, but I wondered if you had any feelings either way on Baloo from the Jungle Book.
[01:20:37] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a great question because it's kind of funny. I, I know people who are very negative of. On Blue, the way the characters kind of played out in the, in one, one guy was saying Baloo was kind of a sellout to the jungle.
You know, I'm not a big Jungle Book guy. I do like the fact that, that a sloth bear is in there at all. But isn't it funny how in that cartoon, I mean, Baloo is a brown bear, looks nothing like a sloth bear. And maybe that's understandable for the old version of the Jungle Book, but even in the newer versions, they don't really go to an animal that looks at all.
[01:21:23] Speaker B: Well, no, I think they, they specifically refer to him as a sloth bear as well, don't they? And he looks nothing like one. So I don't know.
[01:21:29] Speaker C: He's gotta be because I mean, it's in Kado national park, which I've been to and spent time at. And I mean, there's only one bear there. You know, it is a sloth bear, there's no question. And for it to look like a brown bear, I, I don't know, I, I guess I don't understand it. I just think that probably back then when Disney was first putting this out, they just felt like a bear is a bear that looks like a bear in America. And they just couldn't even fathom, you know, how, like maybe they didn't think it would play well with the, the, their audience. I Don't know. I think it's so weird.
[01:22:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, well, I mean, it's a lot more global the world now than it was back then, I guess.
[01:22:13] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:22:15] Speaker B: Oh, that's great. And when you're next planning to get to India, you got something already planned?
[01:22:21] Speaker C: I don't know.
I usually will go in the fall, and I don't think I have plans to go before then, but it's always usually the fall because.
Yeah, what I do is I. I kind of double up on some of my chips because we. We do bring, like.
So we have, as, you know, soft bear sanctuaries. These are bears which can't be returned to the wild.
And so they're in captivity. They're in captivity because they were either danced as dancing bears and they have a lot of health issues, or they were brought in because of human bear conflict. Conflicts, and they can't be released.
So that's the first thing for people to know. The only reason we have bears in captivity is because they can't be in the wild.
And because we have them, we also have a program. It's an exchange program with beekeepers in the United States and in zoos, people. A lot of people who actually, some people who take care of sloth bears in the United States. States, but other people who just take care of bears, not necessarily sloth bears, and they come out to India and it's an exchange with. With our keepers.
I'm not a keeper and.
But I tend to go out to help facilitate some of that stuff going on. And then I go into the field with my team as well. So I tend to do both at the same time when I can, you know, put those types of trips together. But I bring up that trip because it has been very useful because the American zookeepers learn a lot about specifically sloth bears, because we've had more sloth bears. We have more now than probably most of these people have ever seen in their lives, you know, and. And so we have all this background information. We have vets who specialize in soft bears, which can talk to their vets, so that, you know, it's very useful for the Americans. And then the Americans are also able to help teach certain techniques to our staff that they don't know. So it's very much an exchange of knowledge type of thing, which I think has been useful for everybody.
And it's also helped me get to know a lot of the keepers, which I've actually.
I'm not a zoo person per se, but I've learned a lot Like I was telling you earlier during this call, I've learned a lot from people who are or have, even when I have questions about, you know, young cubs in captivity, because there's certain stuff in the wild we just, it's hard to tell. You know, you can watch sloth bear cubs in the wild, but I can't tell how good of climbers they are if they're just on their mom's back. But we can ask somebody who's raising them in a zoo. It's very different. Are they physically able to do this? And they can tell me, oh, yes or no or, you know, this is what we see.
So it's been interesting. But yeah, there's always stuff going on. Yeah.
[01:25:33] Speaker B: And yeah, I managed to get to visit the agro facility and I was very impressed by the, the level of care and the, the lovely big enclosures. And there are a couple of individual bears. There was one called Elvis.
Oh, yeah, he, he actually, because I was with Shivam, who I think he said he had helped hand raise him when he came in as a really young cub. And we were just looking at him and he was like, oh, he's really friendly. And of course he actually, he bluff charged right at the fence at me. But it was, I didn't mind that because it meant that because he went, you know, on his back legs and went up and it gave me a really good view of his chest and everything. But I was like, oh, sorry, I'll, I'll leave you be then. I don't want to bother you.
[01:26:15] Speaker C: That's great what you just described because that's that they do this with tigers where they first will stand and then they'll charge. And I think it might be to show how big they are, intimidating factor as well as obviously it gives them a better view.
Yeah, you know, they stand up just like brown bears do. But I think like you see in the wild with tigers, like when the bear stands up right away the tiger kind of is like, whoa, you know, what's this type of reaction to a bear just standing?
But I'm kind of glad you got to see one of their charges. Did it, did it huff at you? Did Elvis huff at you?
[01:26:54] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, he did it. He gave me a full show.
[01:26:59] Speaker C: I think sloth bears are like the badger of the bear world.
[01:27:02] Speaker B: Well, the honey badger.
[01:27:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:27:05] Speaker B: Well, yeah, it's funny because, I mean, sun bears are known as the honey bear, you know, colloquially. But I guess sloth bears, they like honey, but they're, they're more honey badger. Than sun bears, I'd say.
[01:27:16] Speaker C: Yeah. You know, Melursis of their.
I've seen sloth bears under the genus Melursis or Ursus but usually it's Molurses in Latin that is honey bear. I think every bear likes honey.
[01:27:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[01:27:32] Speaker C: You know, kind of across the board. I don't know polar bears do, but every other species as far as I know. I mean of course a wild polar bear would never come across healthy, but.
[01:27:43] Speaker B: Well, no, I mean you wouldn't expect it.
I was going to say as well. I'll, I'll put some links in the show notes. Specifically that bear specialist group, the, that website. I think it's global conservation.org or whatever. It's a great resource. It's like, I feel like it's a one stop shop. I go if I need to like just think, I'm like, oh, what's that again? Like quick fact about something, I'll just look on there.
[01:28:07] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean Dave did an incredible job with that.
[01:28:10] Speaker B: Oh yeah. Well tell him thank you from me. Yeah. But if there was for anyone interested to find out more about the work you're doing or even offer support. Is there anywhere you direct people to.
[01:28:21] Speaker C: Yeah, probably to wildlife sos.org it's our website.
There's a lot of information on there.
[01:28:30] Speaker B: That there is. It's great.
Was there anything else you'd care to mention, by the way? Anything we haven't covered that you think needs to be heard?
[01:28:38] Speaker C: I think I've talked probably too much.
[01:28:40] Speaker B: No, no, never, never. I.
Well, I always think in the back of my mind I'm like, is anyone but me interested? But I think there are, I think there is. And like I say, I kind of want with this, I'd like to highlight people and like yourself and organizations and I mean you're doing amazing work and it's very inspiring, I find.
[01:29:01] Speaker C: Well, I appreciate it, I really do.
[01:29:04] Speaker B: Oh lovely. Well, I mean, yeah, I won't keep you if you need to get away but I really appreciate the, the time you've taken.
You've given me more time and so much more information than I expected. But I've really enjoyed it.
Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure people will enjoy listening and hearing what's going on because especially I know majority of our listeners, you know, have come in from the sort of black bear world. But I think this is, it should be equally as fascinating because it might not be, it might be something they're unfamiliar with.
[01:29:35] Speaker C: Yeah, you know, it's, it is funny with software. You know, I, I, I'm ashamed to admit it almost, but the first time I met Kartik, I didn't really know what a software software was, you know, and I was in my 30s when I met him. So this is going back 20 years. But like, it is funny, I don't think a lot of, certainly not of Amer. A lot of Americans have no idea what a soft bear is or anything else. I know that's true in this country, but, you know, they're kind of a weird one. Yeah, don't worry that in a very good way.
[01:30:11] Speaker A: And thanks once again to Thomas. I'm especially thankful for his time and openness to speak to me.
[01:30:16] Speaker B: And like I say, I hope you.
[01:30:17] Speaker A: Enjoyed the journey with me.
In conclusion, soft bears are pretty cool and there's always something new to learn.
I want to end with a parting thought on what Thomas said, which is a good reminder for us all on living with and coexisting with wildlife. If you help the people, you can help the animals.
Thanks for listening and until next time, bye for now.
The Bear Den the American Bear Association Podcast was written and presented by me, Philip Stubley. The music was composed by React Music.
Thank you to everyone who has helped make this podcast possible, including Karen Hauserman, Bill Lee, Clarie Lee, Stephanie Horner, Donna Brzinka, Ross Coyer, and Angie Page.
[01:31:06] Speaker B: You can find out more about the.
[01:31:08] Speaker A: American bear
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[01:31:53] Speaker C: Sam.
