[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, it's Philip and welcome to the Bear Den where we discuss wildlife and the individuals and organizations making a difference for them. We've talked around them already, but now in this episode we are focusing on the bear known as the most bipedal of all bears, the Asiatic Black Bear, also known as the Moon Bear, a bear of many names.
Sarah Van Herpt, the Director of Veterinary and Behavioral Husbandry Services Department.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Vice versa.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: Animals Asia Vietnam is joining us to talk all about moon bears with a sprinkling of sun bears as we never miss an opportunity to hear about them as well. You'll be hearing all about Animal Asia's mission of kindness in action. There are lots of moving stories of individuals rescued from the cruel bear bile industry.
We cover innovations the team in Vietnam has introduced over the years to help rescued bears with their rehabilitation, such as cooperative care and physiotherapy programs that treat the bears with care and respect.
And we hear about exciting developments happening this year.
All this plus ethical tourism and the price of limes. So I won't delay us any further.
Let's get to it.
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 Vinscooty 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.
[00:01:49] Speaker B: Hello, Sarah, Welcome. Thank you for joining me in the Bear Den. We've had a couple of Australians on, but you're our first Kiwi, so. Yeah. Would you first of all, could you introduce yourself and just tell us where you're speaking to us from?
[00:02:03] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:02:03] Speaker D: So my name is Sarah vanhert and I currently.
Today I'm in our Tam Dao Bear Rescue center in Vietnam. So that center is about one hour north of Hanoi.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: So. Yeah. So what's your background? How did you end up working where you are?
[00:02:21] Speaker D: Yeah, I don't know. It's a. I think I got really lucky, honestly. So I got a Bachelor of Science in Ecology and zoology and a Master's in Conservation Biology and somehow I ended up working as a zookeeper in New Zealand, which I think I got really lucky because that industry is just so competitive. So I was working in Wellington Zoo. And while I was doing that, I was really interested in vet nursing. So I thought, oh, you know, I'll study that, because I could distance study. So I. I got my vet nursing certificate as well and did a few years vet nursing in the wildlife hospital at Wellington Zoo. And then I sort of had reached about seven and a half years there and sort of got that itch of wanting to get out and explore and see what else is out there. And so I applied for a job with Animals Asia.
[00:03:15] Speaker C: And then.
And then I got it.
[00:03:17] Speaker D: So I started in Vietnam as a bear team manager and then sort of worked my way up to senior bear team manager. And now I am a director of our veterinary or the director of our veterinary and behavioral husbandry department. So my team takes care of or is responsible for animal care across all of Animals Asia programs in Vietnam. So bears, elephants and government rescue center support.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: Oh, amazing. And so how long have you actually
[00:03:48] Speaker A: been based there then?
[00:03:50] Speaker D: I've been in Vietnam for just over nine years.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: Oh, wow. Was it.
I'd say that's amazing. Was that a bit of an adjustment from living in New Zealand to Vietnam then?
[00:04:02] Speaker C: I guess, yes.
[00:04:03] Speaker D: Yeah. So it was quite a shock at first, just how busy everything is and crazy and lights and noise and everything.
But the people here are so friendly.
Everyone's really kind and really helpful. And gotta say, the cost of living in Vietnam compared to New Zealand is just next level great.
So, yeah, home is New Zealand and Vietnam, I have to say. So whenever I'm in Vietnam, when I'm talking about home, I'm talking about New Zealand, but whenever I'm in New Zealand and I'm talking about home, I'm talking about Vietnam. So. So they're both a big. A big piece of my heart each.
[00:04:41] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, yeah. Cost of living. I remember this is going back about 10 years. I visit. I visited New Zealand and I remember the cost of avocados was just astronomical. It was, yeah.
[00:04:53] Speaker D: I took a photo for the team once because limes here are like, they're almost free. It's ridiculous. And. And in New Zealand, the cost of a lime, it was $32 per kilogram.
And that was a few years ago. Oh, wow. They were like, excuse me. I said, yes, like, obviously limes are hard to grow in New Zealand, but, you know, the difference is next level.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: It's a good job I don't like limes then. So speaking of food, I'm sure that you're a fan of Asian food.
[00:05:26] Speaker D: Yeah, I am.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: Bon Maise and Fuzz. Fuz.
[00:05:30] Speaker D: Yeah, pho is a good one. There's another really good one, a crispy pancake called bantia.
That's my favorite.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Sounds delightful. Do love Asian food. So obviously Animals Asia do have like several facilities and around several countries. But today we are focusing on the Vietnam facility. And so I guess briefly we just ask about like, what's Animals Asia's story there?
[00:05:55] Speaker D: Yeah. So Animals Asia in Vietnam, we're working on three big, well, four main projects.
So obviously ending bear bile farming is our flagship project.
And I have to say I'm really proud to be a part of it. It's something that's going incredibly well.
There's just over 150 bears left on farms now. And we're working really hard with the Vietnamese government and authorities to get those bears out, out and rescued. So we have two bear sanctuaries. So one, the one that I'm at just north of Hanoi, and our new one is in BAC Ma national park, which is in sort of central Vietnam between Hue and Da Nang.
And so there are slightly this view of is there because it's brand new, but that our plan is that, you know, all rescues from now go to the brand new sanctuary and we fill that and have two sanctuary is full of happy bears as well as that.
The other projects that my team helps to work on, one is there's one to end elephant riding. So obviously that team has got a whole lot of amazing people working on sort of relationships and legalities and all of that sort of stuff. And we help out by provide advice and care for the rescued elephants who are at a couple of different locations. So we have three locations where we work with elephants in Dat Lak Province in Vietnam.
And then we also have. We're aiming to improve captive animal welfare just in general.
So we also work with government rescue centers providing support, education, funding, equipment to them.
So again, that's where my team helps out with this sort of education and teaching and that sort of side of things. And then the last project that we're doing in Vietnam is to end the dog meat trade. So that one is a lot of sort of investigative work, a lot of building sort of knowledge and awareness. We have a lot of focus on rabies vaccinations and, and education around rabies because that's one of the really big side effects of the ending of the dog meat trade is that dogs are captured or bred or from different areas in Vietnam and then transported up north where the sort of key dog meeting dog meat eating areas are.
And that's one of the vectors that spreads rabies across Vietnam.
[00:08:41] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:08:42] Speaker D: I think it's still quite open in Vietnam because it's not illegal.
So the restaurants quite openly say dog meat restaurant in Vietnamese.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, all right. I guess. Well, I guess some people, they, if they're brought up a certain way, they don't see a problem with it. Right.
[00:08:57] Speaker D: So, yeah, the belief is that eating it, in eating dog meat, especially in winter, helps to warm the blood and keep you healthy.
[00:09:07] Speaker B: And I'm guessing there's no science to back that.
No, yeah, no, no. Oh, well, that's some great. Some lovely. Some great work you're doing there. It's all very vibrant and exciting and then there's a lot of success, obviously. I know that Ricky Gervais regularly pops up my YouTube ads telling me that animals Asia is on the verge of ending bear bile farming in Vietnam forever. It's like, I've got it, like.
Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:34] Speaker D: We're lucky to have some very amazing, amazing supporters and donors and.
[00:09:40] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, just for people that might not be as aware of the bare bile industry for some context, can you just kind of tell us what it is and how it affects the bears and what you're doing to tackle this? Quite cruel.
[00:09:53] Speaker D: Yeah, of course.
So in Vietnam, the industry focuses on Asiatic black bears or moon bears, and basically they're kept in small cages, dark, damp, usually out the back somewhere, and bile is harvested from their gallbladder.
So bile contains a chemical called ursodioxycholic acid. Excuse me? It's a very long word that does actually have medicinal properties and it is used to treat liver disease and things in human patients. However, there are synthetic and herbal alternatives available that contain that exact same chemical. So there's no need to be using it from beer. Gallbladder matters. But that's sort of how it actually came about in traditional medicine. So in Vietnam, the way the bile is extracted is the bears are basically roped down and held down and anesthetized, and then they use an ultrasound guided sort of needle method.
The bears are often starved for extraction because that creates more bile and then they're not really given access to much water or food in general. Anyway, basically, we've kind of gone for a multi pronged approach because, you know, this is people's traditional belief and there's science behind it. Even though the science behind bare bile farming demonstrates that bare bile often contains pus, cancer cells, red blood cells, infection, and can actually make people really sick.
It is a traditional medicine that, you know, would have been effective. So in order to change the industry, we really approach it with understanding, compassion, and empathy and provide alternatives. So one of the really important things that we do is we've worked with the traditional medicine community in Vietnam, and they've agreed and no longer prescribe bare bile.
And then taking that further, we have published books in Vietnamese about what the herbal alternatives are.
If people don't want to take synthetic medicine. Here's herbal alternatives. We've also worked with traditional medicine practitioners and Cocoon, who is a beauty company in Vietnam, to create herbal alternatives to bear bile. So, like, beer bile is used a lot in Vietnam on skin conditions and bruises and things. And so we've created herbal alternatives to that as well.
Our education team goes out into schools especially focused around beer bile farming hotspots, and sort of educates the children, and they build herbal alternative gardens in the schools and help them look after them, you know, with the hopes that the next generation is going to go home and be like, you know, hey, hey, granddad. Like, I think this isn't right. Let's kind of make some change.
And then also, we have really good relationship with the Vietnamese government, and we signed an MoU with them in 2017 to sort of be their part official partners of ending be farming in Vietnam. So we work with them a lot on the sort of legal aspects. Because basically what happened is in 2005, it was illegal to take bio from beers, but they couldn't take the beers away from the farmers because they didn't have anywhere to put them. So they made it illegal. They made it so that from 2005, every beer on a farm was microchipped. And those were the only beers allowed to be held on private residences. So you could still have the bear as a pet, but you couldn't take bile from it. That's sort of where we came in and we started building sanctuaries. So we've built two sanctuaries free the bears has one in Vietnam, and four paws has one in Vietnam as well. And so that gave the government spaces to now start taking the bears. So it started a lot with illegal confiscations.
So people who were caught taking bile or with bile products or with bears who weren't microchipped, those bears could be confiscated. And then through all the education and all of the work with the communities and things, that's when we start to see more and more voluntary handovers of bears. And one story I'll always remember really vividly is our former country director, Tuan Bendixen. He and I were on my first rescue together down in Bing Zong, which is near Hoim City. And there was these six beers, and I watched one of them.
Her name's Dawny Grace. Just. We wheeled in a cage for. For conscious transport. And she just shot to the top.
And I was. I was like, tan. What's h. Like, what happened? She said. And he said, this is what she. She associates this cage with extraction. So that she's. This is. She's said, he's seen this a lot in these bears. And he said, but what's really kind of special about this farm is that earlier, quite a few years, they'd rescued, I think, 13 or 14 beers from that farm. And at that stage, they had still 30 bears remaining. And Tuan had said to the farmer at the time, you're doing the right thing.
And one day you're going to look
[00:15:45] Speaker C: back and you're going to realize that
[00:15:47] Speaker D: it was the right thing, and you're going to kind of regret this period. And then eventually, the farmer kind of came back to Tuan and he's like, you're right. Like, I see it now.
Please take the rest of my beers and close down my farm.
So really, over the time we've worked in Vietnam, you do really see a lot of attitudes changing, and a lot
[00:16:12] Speaker C: of people, you know, they realizing that the industry is on its way out.
[00:16:17] Speaker D: There's not as much demand for bile anymore.
There's a lot more education around welfare and things in Vietnam as well now. So together, it kind of all helps.
[00:16:31] Speaker B: Yeah, you're right. Yeah. Know, welfare especially, it's. I feel like it's much more on the conversation these days than it used to be. And, you know, it's not just good enough to, like, oh, well, I provide shelter and food for it. It's fine. It's like, no, there's much more to it than that.
[00:16:45] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: And also, I like how you're saying you've got to look after the people if you want to look after the animals as well, haven't you?
[00:16:51] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so there's another really sweet story that. That always gets to me, and that's of qq. So we rescued her a few years ago now. And I say rescue, but actually, so what happened is one of our Hanoi office staff, her friend had a father who had a beer. And so, you know, they sort of made a connection.
And her father came out to visit our sanctuary and, like, learn about what we did out there and what we could offer his beer. And it's the first bear Since I arrived, anyway, that arrived with their own name already.
And so we call her qq. But when he said it, it sounded like he was saying, cute. Cute.
That's very cute. Very sweet.
And so he came and he taught our sanctuary, and he saw all the happy bears and he saw, you know, all the things we could offer her. And he was, you know, kind of blown away. His only concern was we had so many beers, would we have enough food for her?
So we took him to the nutrition area and showed him all of the.
So much fruit and veg and every, you know, everything that she could ever want.
And he relinquished her to us. And he's actually visited twice since she came, and sort of both times she's been really happy to see him. She's recognized him, but she's also just kind of doing her own thing, and it's been really nice. And, you know, she's had some challenges since she's been here.
We've. We've moved her from one group to another group because she was having issues in the first one. But she found a best friend, and so we moved the two of them together.
She had to have her eye removed because of a recurring sort of eye issue. Sorry, I'm not a vet.
And we just, you know, explain those things to him. And he just was like, thank you so much for taking such good care of her. Like, he wasn't mad, he wasn't upset. He just could see the level of care and love that went into everything we did for her, and he was really appreciative.
We have had the same thing with some of our back ma bears.
[00:19:09] Speaker C: It's a bit different.
[00:19:10] Speaker D: They haven't been to visit, but last year we rescued a bear from Hai Fung, and the owner was a little bit nervous, but, you know, we just spoke with them and reassured them, and we were very respectful. We, you know, kept our staffing to a minimum. We didn't make a big fuss or anything like that.
And someone else who owned a beer saw how respectful we were and how smooth it was and called us up and said, I saw that and I want you to take my beer now. So really being respectful, being empathetic and being understanding is just really the core of our work. And it helps.
I think that's something really special about animals. Asia.
[00:19:59] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's. It's amazing. I just like how it's such a. You know, it's such positivity that you're putting out around it. You know, there's no sort of judgment, blame, or Anything, it's got to move past that.
[00:20:10] Speaker D: Yeah.
You know, I find it hard to read the comments sometimes on, you know, social media and things and, and hear people, you know, saying how bad these people are. And I just, I just want everyone to know that they're not bad people. That like of course this, you know, of course there's bad people out there, but the majority of these people who have these beers, they're not bad people. They just, they don't know any better and they love them. They love them so much. One of our recent riskies to tam down, not recent anymore, but her owner came with her and was crying.
Knew it was the best thing to do, but just loved that beer. So, so, so much so.
Yeah, I think we just as a, as a world, we just need to be, try to be more kinder and understanding of what's going on.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: Yeah, no, definitely.
So I mean you've talked about several rescue bears. How many actually bears do you actually have? You've got the two sites, I guess they're spread between them but like how many have you actually got?
[00:21:18] Speaker D: There is, sorry, 6, 10, 14 in Vekmar and they're all moon bears and I think at last count 167 in Tam Dao. And in Tam Dao we have 12 Malayan sun bears and everyone else is a moon bear.
[00:21:39] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:21:39] Speaker D: But I like to say that those 12 sunbears cause as much damage as those 150 odd moon bears.
[00:21:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I bet so. Yeah. Actually speaking of, there's moon bears, AKA Asiatic black bears, which I guess we'll get into sun bears. I mean they're very active, got a lot of nervous energy. I'm just kind of thinking are moon bears, like, are they quite similar temperament wise or like quite different?
[00:22:03] Speaker D: Not at all.
I like. So when I think about sun bears, my take on them is that they're a very, very, very intelligent, very emotional species of bear and they kind of like live on the outside of their skin. They're very.
Yeah, emotional is a good word. I would kind of. Yeah, yeah, maybe they're like the, the border collies of the dog world, whereas moon bears are the Labrador. So they're sweet and they're a bit goofy and they're much more slower paced. They are also equally as smart but some of them just don't show it very well.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: They're not good with their pr.
[00:22:46] Speaker D: Yes.
They're just gorgeous. They're much more relaxed than sunbears.
Very, very different temperaments. I, I have found.
But you know, as a Person who's worked with them in a sanctuary setting and received them from, you know, really not ideal backgrounds. I don't know if that's true of all of the species, but in my experience.
[00:23:11] Speaker B: Well, yeah, probably is close enough. I mean, like you say, they're all individuals, so.
So I mean, one of the things I always notice, especially comparing with sun bears, moon bears. Like, their ears just look so much bigger.
[00:23:25] Speaker D: So much bigger.
[00:23:26] Speaker B: They're so big.
[00:23:27] Speaker C: So for, I guess, any of your
[00:23:29] Speaker D: audience who hasn't really seen a sun bear or a moon bear, Moon bears are named for the crescent on their chest.
So they're Asiatic black bears, but that's really long word, so I'm just going to say moon bear because it's easier. So they have this beautiful individualized light yellow crescent on their chest. So that's where they got their name.
And they are bigger than sun bears. So they are about, we say about 140 to 160 for females, 160 to 180 for males.
[00:24:02] Speaker B: Double the size of most sun bears then, basically.
[00:24:05] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.
They have a longer coat, shorter claws, not, not short claws, but definitely shorter than sun beers, bigger ears.
They're real fluffy.
And they do show seasonal behavior in terms of going into hyperphasia and dormancy and that sort of thing. So whereas sunbears are more, not, not really seasonal in that kind of sense, their breeding season is only once per year, whereas sunbears will cycle throughout the year. Yes, some of the, some of the differences.
Mm.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: Well, as I was gonna say as well, because with moon bears, obviously they're in Vietnam, but they are found in other climates, kind of like, you know, you find them in Russia and whatnot and all around. So. But I'm guessing, I mean, they don't really go into hibernation properly in Vietnam, do they?
[00:25:02] Speaker D: No, no. So I would say Vietnam is really at the southern end of their range and a lot warmer.
They, we don't get, we don't have them go fully into dormancy, but we do try to encourage that behavior if they want to.
So the sort of cues that we use are the day length and temperature, which obviously we can't change.
But we do mimic hyperphasia by increasing food amounts in autumn, increasing or sorry, adding mass species. So we use chestnuts and then beginning a decrease sort of as we come into winter.
So we do, we do see seasonal weight trends still. And then in winter, you know, those that want to go into dormancy will, you know, keep them inside with lots and Lots of bedding and you know, monitor the appetite and begin to sort of decrease their food if they look really sleepy and stuff. It's definitely not how you would manage dormancy in a traditional zoo environment where you can just kind of lock them away for however many months and you know, they kind of be fine. Because, you know, one of the difficulties of running a rescue sanctuary is that in order to rescue enough. Well, not enough bears, in order to rescue the bears, we need to keep them in large groups. And so, you know, sometimes that sort of space or that environment of having more noise and more activity, it's not so conducive to a really proper dormancy. But we have had some beers that we felt really needed that proper, really shut down environment where. And we've created and found space for that where we've boarded up walls, we've boarded up any light, we've, you know, we've managed them in a lot more quiet and it's been really good because it's helped to sort of reset those beers behaviorally.
Yeah. Which is actually something I learned at one of the BFK group conferences in Edinburgh from one of the talks there. Yeah.
So there was. Yeah, it worked beautifully for her. But yeah, the bears. Well, we're all off dormancy now, so we're in start of April. It's only started getting pretty warm in the last couple of weeks. So.
[00:27:30] Speaker B: Yeah, and just circle back to the hyperphasia there. So like on average, how many calories is a Asiatic black bear eating during that time?
Oh gosh, I'm gonna put you on the spot. No, it's all right. No, I'm just thinking because, because you've got American black bears and they've, they know 20, 000 calories a day. So I'm just thinking, I'm like, can't be that much, but it's probably.
[00:27:53] Speaker D: No, absolutely not. It's not, it's. It's nowhere near.
Yes, you're right, it's not near a proper hyperphasia amount because that's. It would just be so expensive.
[00:28:05] Speaker B: Well, I was about to say, what's the food bill for the Moonbear?
[00:28:11] Speaker D: It's high and getting higher with this Iran war. So.
Yeah, it's always a balance.
It always has to be a balance. And it's so hard of what we'd like to do and being financially responsible with donor money in terms of making sure that we can keep everything running rather than just spending it all on food.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I mean, I know, I know food takes up A good chunk of it.
[00:28:39] Speaker D: But gosh, yes. When we were ordering like 220 kg bags of dog kibble at a time, you know, it gets, it gets pretty expensive.
[00:28:54] Speaker B: Oh yeah, it's always, it's always dog food as well. Well, we found, I mean especially in Indonesia, I found like tofu and tempeh bears, pears will happily eat that if you, if you give it to them. And I was like, well, and gives them a bit of variety. So. And it helps sort of stretch the dog food out a little bit.
[00:29:10] Speaker D: Yeah, we actually do use tofu for beers who need protein while also needing to lose weight. So the reason we use dog kibble is because in Asia especially, I guess it's a low cost protein source that's palatable, that's easy to get, but it is high calorie. So one of the challenges of managing beers in large groups is that you need to ensure satiation. Right.
[00:29:41] Speaker C: So bears are, bears are, you know,
[00:29:43] Speaker D: everyone's like, bears are solitary species, they don't live in groups. I mean, sure, but they do come together in groups when there's an area of plentiful resource. They also have a really wide array of social communication and social behaviors.
So when we provide plentiful resources for our bears, they live very happily in these large groups. And actually it is really beneficial for a lot of our bears to have other bears to learn from because of the backgrounds they're coming from. They don't always know how to be a bear. So sometimes having another beer to teach them is, is really helpful. And then a lot of them form really, really strong bonds, especially females and especially during winter.
It's really fascinating and I don't know why.
Sometimes I wonder if it's something to do with, you know, not producing cubs. So having that companionship from a conspecific instead of a cub. I don't know, I have no idea. This is my, my guess but I've gone really off topic.
[00:30:56] Speaker B: It's all interesting.
Like. Well, you make me think because yeah, I've seen it like we've got three bears, three females that are just very, very close and they've got each other. And it's so funny though because when you put, we put the dog food out in like scatter, feed it in the enclosure for them to eat. One of the, bless her, she's, I think, you know, I think she was quite undernourished as a young co when unfortunately. And so she gets very possessive and you know, you can't go near her and obviously you try you try to kind of make sure that she understands that there's plenty of food and she doesn't have to worry and she doesn't have to resource guard. But unfortunately, it's quite ingrained. But that's the only time where she gets. The other two, though. The other two girls have sort of. They're very chill. They're just like, almost look at her and go like, oh, yeah, this is. Oh, she's. She's just. She's on one right now. We'll just leave her alone and then they're fine. It's like the other two seem to understand completely.
[00:31:50] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. Actually, you. You remind me of my. My point I was trying to get to. When I went, oh, yeah, off topic, which was because we have large groups and we provide plentiful resources, we have to be really careful about weight management.
So our beers are definitely probably a higher weight than you would see in a zoo bear that is not housed in a large group. But if they are too high in weight or if they have mobility issues that we're concerned about and we don't want excess weight on them, then we'll sub out most the majority of their dog food for tofu instead. And that really helps with weight loss. And then we kind of try to ensure satiation through the veggies instead. So, yeah, if you visit one of our sanctuaries and you see some fat beers. No judgment.
[00:32:47] Speaker B: No, no.
I'd just be happy being there, probably.
[00:32:52] Speaker D: So, yeah, it is bear heaven. Yeah, I think.
[00:32:56] Speaker B: Anyway, so just a little bit more on moon bears. I just wanted to ask what the sort of unique qualities of moon bears or, like, what's your favorite thing about them?
[00:33:08] Speaker D: Well, this is not my favorite thing about them. This is one thing that always worries me, is that they're not very well studied as a bear species.
There's not that much information out there, really.
But I think some of the things that I like best from the bears that I've worked with are their resilience, what they've been through, and what they come back to, like, is just amazing.
So we have a female moonbeer.
[00:33:37] Speaker C: Her name is Bun.
[00:33:38] Speaker D: It's after a princess story.
Princess fairy tale in Vietnamese. It's very sweet. She arrived and she was so aggressive.
She was kind of scary, and she was so stereotypic that she would injure herself and she had, like, bleeding wounds on her paws.
So we had what we call a welfare support plan for her, which covers sort of, you know, what we think might be happening and why, and tries to you know, brainstorm ideas to help and. And how we do that. So we use a combination of, you know, behavioral and medical interventions. And so, you know, we got her slowly to a point where she was much more happy with people. And then we did a health check after, like, a couple of years where she'd been with us and found she had elevated. I think it was liver enzymes. And so we thought, okay, well, it would be really good to train her for blood draws so we could monitor it. So I said, okay, I'm going to do this. And from the bear who was growling and swiping and charging at me when she arrived to the bear, who just was so chill, you know, putting her hand onto the blood draw plate, like, just letting me touch her and poke her with needles, whatever she was, it, like, it blows my mind.
Like, her and another bear, Sky.
Unfortunately, sky is no longer with us, but when sky arrives, we have a. A temporary area where we keep them initially.
And we have a hook that we used to hook things out of their temporary cages.
And she would steal this hook and bend it in half. And this is like a thick metal rod. And she was just like, hulk, smash this thing. And so obviously, you know, we work with her and we try to build rapport and earn her trust back to, you know, by the time she is in the beer house and sort of established and happy, she waits at the front of the den with her mouth open for you to throw food into it.
Yeah, I think the resilience of them as a species is really cool.
And also, one.
One thing I find about some of our beers is they're really into one of my favorite concepts, which is contra freeloading.
So for those of you who've never heard of contra freeloading, it's kind of the concept of when given the choice between having a resource just provided to you and having to work for it, an animal will choose to work for it. Right.
So with some of our beers, there's an apple sitting right next to them, but here's this puzzle feeder or this other sort of more difficult apple right here, and they're going to this other apple. So, like, I.
I have to be honest, and maybe it's, you know, volume. I don't see that as much as in the sunbears as I do with the moon beers.
It was a little easier, but they like the easy win first.
[00:37:00] Speaker B: Yeah, saying moon bears like a challenge more.
[00:37:05] Speaker D: I like it. Like a good puzzle,
[00:37:10] Speaker B: I suppose. Yeah, yeah. My dad likes a puzzle. I'm not a fan, but it's like, there you go. What does that say about me? It's such a nice moment when you see like a bear, like you were just sitting there, when they kind of realize they're in a safe space and they don't have to be defensive or aggressive or they realize that I'm okay now. Yeah, yeah. It's a magical moment.
[00:37:32] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:37:32] Speaker B: So are they known as being aggressive? Like, I guess. Are they like their wild counterparts? Are they known as being aggressive towards humans or.
Yes, yeah.
[00:37:40] Speaker D: Yes.
So there's a lot of issues in Japan at the moment. So they've. They've had a lot of really successful work in growing their wild populations, but now their wild populations are getting so big that they're coming down into the sort of villages and there's a lot of human attacks by Asiatic diabetes in Japan.
[00:38:02] Speaker B: Yeah, you just. You've got me thinking as well, because obviously, I know in Japan it's, yeah. Quite a bit of an issue. It's rural depopulation, I know, is one of the major factors, isn't it? Because a lot of the younger people are leaving villages and going to the cities. So then there's not as many people around. And so bears are starting to kind of come in because, well, there's no one around even.
[00:38:24] Speaker D: We had earlier this year, actually, a villager in the Da Nang province in central Vietnam was attacked by a moon bear. So that. That's the first time in my nine years that I've heard of that happening in Vietnam. So they will attack if.
If crossed. Yeah, yeah. So.
[00:38:46] Speaker C: And it's really.
[00:38:46] Speaker D: It's really funny because we. We look at these bears that we have and in a very unserious, joking way, we're like, oh, okay. If we got stuck in an enclosure with Grace would be fine because she's blind and pretty much deaf, so we could just kind of sneak around her. But if we got stuck in an enclosure with Sunny Ray, oh, game over. Because he's cheeky, he will reach out and he'll try and play with padlocks.
He's very smart and he's like, I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw them. So I definitely think these individual differences as well. And I know, you know, a lot of people think that moonbears look really sweet and cuddly and they totally do. And there is definitely beers I would love to give the cuddle to, but I do not trust. I wouldn't trust them.
[00:39:37] Speaker B: No, that's only. I was going to say, I mean, there's only. There's only a. I could count maybe a handful of bears I would trust enough to do something like that.
Yeah. And most of them were like, obviously I sort of raised as cubs. So a bit of a different relationship to it. But yeah, we've all played that game about like, right, if I was in an enclosure with this bear, what would happen?
[00:39:59] Speaker D: Yeah. And actually like, it's, but it's, you know, we have a lot of safety protocols and we have a lot of drills and you know, sometimes it happens.
[00:40:09] Speaker B: Does someone dress up in a bear suit?
[00:40:11] Speaker D: No, no. But we do, we do have CPR.
CPR Bear, he's Dr. Bear. He is human sized bear with a plastic. I'm not sure what it is inside so that we can practice CPCR on a real bear. And he has been used in drills and placed in various places so that our darting team can practice darting a bear who has escaped.
So thanks, Dr. Bear, for taking that one for the team.
[00:40:44] Speaker B: What a guy.
[00:40:45] Speaker D: Yeah. But yeah, it's part, like, it's part of our safety protocols as well.
God forbid it ever happened. But we all, new stuff, have to go through a training session of what to do if you found yourself in the same space as a beer.
[00:41:02] Speaker B: Well, you know, I'm sure it's similar issues where, you know, you have to make sure you go around enclosures and if, especially after there's some heavy rain or wind, you need to check if any trees have kind of fallen down, any sort of escape avenues. Yeah, it's.
[00:41:18] Speaker D: Yeah.
One of our more interesting stories was because we had a lot of drills about this because we had a parachutist land in the sanctuary next to a bear enclosure.
[00:41:31] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:41:32] Speaker D: Which firstly, we didn't know parachutists were operating in the area.
And then we were like, wait, what?
[00:41:40] Speaker B: Did they know where they were when they landed?
[00:41:43] Speaker D: I'm not sure that they did, but that's obviously all since been sorted out with the help of our national park. And it also got us thinking about another sort of safety innovation, which is safety cages. So we took some of our old quarantine cages and repurposed them as safety cages in bear enclosures.
So if you're not near an escape point, there's a safety cage that you can go into and be safe if the worst happens. So kind of pinch that idea from UK zoos.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: Actually, I don't know if it's a good idea. It doesn't matter where it came from.
Oh, no. So I guess, yeah, in the sort of nine years you've been there I'm sure there's been quite a few innovations and procedures introduced. I guess we'll focus on the care of the bears. Like what. What have you and your sort of team introduced for these? Like the bears that can't be released, obviously, so you need to have long term health care plans and.
Yeah, yeah.
[00:42:46] Speaker D: So I think my favorite ones are our cooperative care program, our physiotherapy program, and our internship programs.
So when I started nine years ago, Cooperative care program was just our beer training program, and it was really reactive.
So it was just training bears who wouldn't enter weigh cages or transport cages or doing target training for maybe some bears who needed a bit of extra confidence building.
And it was only specific people who could do it. So only their team managers could train and supervisors. So there was only five of us who could train.
And three of those people were expats and the other two were Vietnamese. And so then it's kind of like, why?
Why?
And so we started training our beating leaders and our assistant bear team leaders. So we started with something that they had known and seen, really. So we started with theory, and then we started them learning how to target train.
And then once they had target train, which taught them a lot about timing and what happens if your timing is off and that sort of thing, then they learned weighing, and then they learned how to load a beer for transportation.
And that was going really well. So we're like, okay, what else can we introduce? So then we had a bear who had a broken jaw and that had to have that wired.
And so we're like, well, let's train her for open mouth. So we trained her for open mouth. And then we trained a whole bunch of other bears for open mouth. And now we've got, I think, about 81 bears who know the open mouth behavior. And each month they have monthly dental checks. So a vet or a vet nurse will go out to the house, look in their mouths, see if they can see anything that's wrong, and spot things that we otherwise had never been able to spot, like bears who might have had ulcers or the main thing, broken teeth or, you know, a bear's been slapped by another bear and. Oh, and bleeding from the mouth. Ask them to open their mouth. Oh, yeah, no, it's just a little cut. They're fine. And so they were okay. And then Covid happened.
And so then one of the vets came to me and she said, I want to see if we can monitor blood pressure consciously in beers. Do you think we could train the Bears. And my Kiwi attitude was, yeah, let's give it a go.
Why not try?
So we started a blood pressure training program where we had. We published a paper earlier this year on it, actually, some bears who didn't have hypertension and somebody's who did. We trained all them up, and then we. During their health checks, under anesthesia, we did a whole lot of comparisons and, I don't know, a whole big program with the goal of that eventually we don't need to anesthetize to monitor if the hypertension medications are at the right dose. We can take the conscious blood pressure.
And then the other vet came to me and she was like, I think that it would be really helpful if we had a physiotherapy program for the bears because they have so many mobility issues.
And so I was like, okay, sure, let's do it, as I seem to always do.
And so we started a physiotherapy program. We found a specialist that we work with in Australia called Brooke Williams, who helped us set up the program.
And we did a bunch of studies and made sure that what we were doing was effective. And then we rolled it out to, like, a whole bunch of beers across the sanctuary. And it's just continued to evolve and evolve more and more. And we're also working with Matthew Shackleton from the UK now, who's doing a lot of CPD with our team around physio as well. And then we've started actually elephant physiotherapy with some of our rescue elephants. So, yeah, that program is really cool and quite large.
Every single year, every single bear goes through a physiotherapy den.
It's a den setup to see specific movements from the bears and score them.
So that year on year, we can see how they're scoring, if there's any changes, any declines, also just of how they're moving.
And then we have sort of that sort of monitoring.
[00:47:23] Speaker B: It's like I'm just imagining like a gauntlet kind of.
[00:47:27] Speaker D: There's tunnels.
So one of the things that we need to see a lot is backwards walking. And so we designed a tunnel on wheels that we wheel in. They go into the tunnel, and then they have to back out. There's resistance bands that they have to pull down on.
There's hanging things where they have to show if they can stand bipedally unaided. There's things they have to reach into a tube to pull out.
Yeah, there's all sorts.
Yeah, it's really cool.
And then.
Yeah, and Then the third things are internships and it's, it is animal related, but it's also people related because that's really important to me. We have Vietnamese veterinary and veterinary nurse interns. We're basically teaching BE and BE vet nurses and getting our sanctuaries into a position where vets have the technical skills to run the sanctuary themselves. So basically, essentially we're aiming to train ourselves out of a job.
So yeah, we've, we've graduated eight veterinary interns already and our first veterinary nurse intern would be graduating in about two months time. So it's pretty exciting.
[00:48:50] Speaker B: Oh, that's great. And so. Yeah, well, well, it's like it's getting local people to lead with international support, I suppose.
[00:48:57] Speaker D: Yeah, exactly. You know, like.
Yeah, as international.
You know, growing up in New Zealand, I was exposed to so many different opportunities that just don't exist here.
Even the things that I could learn and study aren't the same here. And so veterinary school in New Zealand compared to veterinary school in Vietnam is very, very different. What they come out having learned and being able to do so really, it's providing opportunities to the local people, which is something that's really important to us. So it's not just to the beer farmers, but providing career opportunities and career development opportunities not just to the vets, but also to our bear carriers and abilities to move up and teaching them different skills and things.
Yeah, it's really a really fun part of the job.
[00:49:48] Speaker B: No, that's great. Yeah, I really like that.
Yeah. I think I'd love to hear about a couple of bears journeys as well. I know you've already talked about a few individuals, but I guess if they've any other bears that you've kind of had a strong connection with or individuals, bears that have come from the bio farms that, you know, that can be psychologically, physically, quite traumatized and I guess, yeah, it can be a long process because. To kind of rehabilitate them and especially because, you know, bears work at their own pace, so you have to be quite patient sometimes. So. Yeah, yeah, I just wondered how.
It'd be really nice to hear some success stories there.
[00:50:28] Speaker C: Yeah. So I think one of our most famous success stories from Vietnam is a beer called Dawn.
I'm not sure if you've ever heard of her, that we had a lot of, a lot of public interest in here.
[00:50:44] Speaker B: She was, I think I've seen her name splashed on the website. So.
[00:50:47] Speaker C: Yeah, so dawn came in with basically learned helplessness. So learned helplessness is basically a condition where an animal's been exposed to something so terrible for so long and they've tried everything they can to get away from it that they just completely shut down. And so what we would see in dawn is that she would be in her quarantine cage and we figured out her triggers were anything metallic sounding. So gates opening, slides moving doors opening the cleaning hook, that sort of thing. And what she would do is she would curl into this tiny tight ball with her back to you at the back of her cage and just tremble. Nothing you could do would get her out of it, not one thing.
And so she was probably one of the worst spears I've ever seen.
Like in terms of psychological trauma. She also, some of her friends who were in on that rescue, you know, arrived at the same time of her were also quite traumatized. Not to that extent, but also we had welfare support plans for them.
But she's the first bear that we almost immediately started behavioral medication with because we could see how incredibly anxious she was and incredibly shut down and stressed. And we know that that affects the ability to learn.
So while with most beers when they come in, we know that they're going to be going through a period of change and stress and we generally just give them time to adapt and they do. So we knew that this was so much more deep seated that we should, we should start medication as soon as we could. So we started that alongside a welfare support plan where we did a range of different things. So obviously the first, most important thing is building rapport with her and getting her to hand feed and associate us with good treats.
Which wasn't. Wasn't so difficult.
Her trigger wasn't people.
She was nervous with people, but that wasn't her trigger. And then moving on to doing things like when she was.
We knew we were going to do an activity that would cause her stress. We would have someone who sat with her and just feed her or we would leave background noise on so it wasn't so quiet all the time. And there's something, you know, always some sound which helps kind of relieve the stress of those sudden noises.
[00:53:35] Speaker B: Like brown. Brown noise. That's what it is.
[00:53:38] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
And yeah, just a whole host of things. And it took a long. It took a long, well, I say a long time, but really for how bad she was, it was actually quite short. And so I did. We did a lot of work with her.
Just really slow small steps getting her used to different things and sort of we'd see the difference. So she'd go from curling into a ball to standing still with her back to you to starting to head sway, to head swaying, but stopping to eat something every now and then to then just focusing on you. And then that's sort of when we knew we could start doing more work with her, like getting her used to our transport in our weighing cages because those are really important pieces of equipment for ongoing care.
Eventually, you know, she had her health checked. She needed to have her gallbladder removed. And then once she was ready, we moved her to a bear house. And we just thought, oh man. Like when we moved her, she was very stressed and sort of reverted back to that really intense head swaying that we'd seen with the inability to distract her. And I kind of sat with her into lunch and she eventually left. But what it took was someone bought me some banana leaves and we put the banana leaves on the floor because she didn't want to touch the concrete because concrete's weird.
So, you know, after that we were like, oh gosh, it was really hard to get her to move across the dens for cleaning. And so, you know, we just weren't sure how things were going to go. But then we thought, okay, let's try an integration and see, you know, how this will go.
Really not expecting it to go well. Honestly. Oh my gosh.
[00:55:30] Speaker D: She loved it.
[00:55:32] Speaker C: She just, it was so, so playful and so happy and we were so shocked and like, really just like over the moon happy, kind of like heart exploding moment seeing her so happy. And, and then we, like, this was amazing. Then we thought, okay, the next step of rehabilitation. We as we let them out into the enclosure and so we thought, okay, what's not really feeling very confident about her going out. It's probably going to take us weeks, if not months.
Nope. First day she was the first one out.
[00:56:03] Speaker D: We were like, what's happened?
[00:56:05] Speaker C: You're amazing.
[00:56:06] Speaker B: That's all true personality started coming through or in a way.
[00:56:10] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.
[00:56:12] Speaker C: And so then, yeah, we managed to wean her off the medications and we had very sort of strict like criteria so she had to be able to still be comfortable doing XYZ things for us to continue decreasing the dose. And she did. And it was amazing. So, yeah, it was.
Honestly, I just, I, I just can't believe sometimes how she got over it. Like she was really, really special.
She is. Sorry, she's still alive.
[00:56:42] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, good.
[00:56:43] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:56:45] Speaker B: I mean, as well, I'm just thinking, I mean, obviously you won't know the backgrounds for the bears until you come into possession of them, but I guess like going out into that Enclosure, you know, it's I guess it's quite a naturalistic enclosure for foresty, like you know, earth floor. Like I don't know how long it had been between life in a cage to you know, touching grass, so to speak.
[00:57:07] Speaker C: Yeah.
And I think one of the common misconceptions is that the bears really love to go outside when we first let them and it's really exciting and they just sort of go straight out and it's just not like that at all. So. So even though like we try to bring the outside to them, like we bring them like grasshops and things, they start getting used to that.
They've been confined for so long that to step out into the wide world where everything is so big and there's rain and there's wind and there's trees and there's grass and it feels funny because their feet are still adjusting to life not on bars and, and you know, like it's, it's actually a really hard and can be quite time consuming process.
So another really big success story. And I know we're talking about moon bears, but this is a sun bear.
[00:57:59] Speaker B: Sorry, we love sunbears here. Don't worry.
[00:58:01] Speaker C: Her name is Cubby Leo and she was very, very traumatized and I didn't work a lot with her in the beginning but it took her from rescue one year to be comfortable going outside and now she's just the happiest little thing you'll ever see. She loves to lie. She's got this really weird pose where she just lies on, on her back and she just holds her hind feet with her forelimbs and rests her chin on her chest and it looks so uncomfortable but that is her favorite position. And she'll like, she won't come inside at night time sometimes because she's doesn't want to. She's so happy being outside where she belongs.
So you know.
[00:58:46] Speaker B: Wow. And I, I was gonna say, I mean I know it's, I've had some bears like you say it takes a little while for them to get used to going outside, but a year is still quite long. It's a long time. I think it really was lesser.
[00:58:58] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[00:58:59] Speaker B: You just mentioned about a bit about like misconceptions that people have. What are there other sort of common ones you find yourself addressing about either the facility or bears generally?
[00:59:10] Speaker C: I think we've actually talked about most of the ones that I do find which is about the social nature of the species. The, the fact that they must love going outside. I think one of the, the other ones that comes up a lot is if we ever post information about a bear in quarantine.
So the bears we have come from obviously physically and mentally traumatic backgrounds, and they come from small cages.
So when they come. And they actually come into another cage, our quarantine cage, it's a decent size. They can stand up, they can walk around, move around. We've even got some double cages that we use and stuff as well, but it's still a cage.
And people like, why did you rescue them if you're just going to put them in another cage? Well, it's actually part of the rehabilitation process because firstly, we need to rebuild trust with them because often they need some sort of medication or treatment. And when they're in a larger space, like a den, that's just too, like, it's too hard to do because they can move away too easily, so it doesn't have that same opportunity.
And also, we don't have space to put new beers and dens because, you know, our sanctuary, at least in Tamdao, is so full and even in Bachmar, like, it's a risk to the current population. So while they have to be in quarantine, they are in these cages. But what people don't realize is that, yes, they're still in a cage, but A, it's only for like 30 to 45 days, depending on quarantine length, and B, while they're in those cages, they're getting things that they never got for years and years. So they get three feeds a day. They get three or four enrichment sessions a day. They get browse leaves, bedding, they get showers, they, you know, training, they get treats. They get like, all of these different things that help them to start showing their natural behaviors. And then also while they're doing that, they're rebuilding muscle.
So there's not much point moving around in a cage when there's nothing to move for, which is what happens to them on the farms. And their muscles atrophy. And so if you put them into a. A space that's too big too quickly, then they can also injure themselves.
So the other thing we do is when we're feeding them and when we're giving them enrichment, we're encouraging them to start moving around so, you know, putting things on top of the cage in different spots around the cage so they're starting to actually move and use those muscles. So we had one bear rescue during my first year.
Her name is Sooty. And in the truck on the way back in the farm in the farm, they think she'd stood up in years.
Months. Months if not years because the layer of cobwebs above her was so, so thick. And she didn't stand up in the transport cage on the way back and she only started to stand up to sort of move into her quarantine cage. But we still didn't know how good her legs were until we sort of started building them up. And we know she could stand by pedal. So like great. Because you know, we not sure if this bear is paralyzed or what is going on with her legs. But yeah, so that's like another reason why. So that is sometimes hard for people to understand because they think we've rescued them, just put them in another cage. And it's like, you do get that, but there's really purposeful reasons behind why we do that.
[01:03:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's a process as well, isn't it? And yeah, and they're in a much better situation there than they were prior as well.
But it's only going to get better. It's exactly.
[01:03:18] Speaker C: And you know, it's temporary and then they go into the den and then, you know, depending on the situation, either they get their friends first or they go outside first. So you know that rehabilitation is a really complex multi stage process that we consider very carefully. So even when we're in quarantine we have an enrichment calendar, but it's staged in four stages because we don't, these bears haven't had access to anything before. So we need to really slowly and carefully introduce things to them. So first it's only natural materials and then second stage we might introduce some really basic, like a cardboard box that's open with some treats inside or a new material like a plastic pipe with something smeared on it. So new materials that they meet, we make sure they're not going to ingest them. And then, and then we put things in the pipes and you know, we, we move up stage by stage because we don't want them to get frustrated if they haven't figured out how to use this thing yet. So yeah, everything, everything we do is so very carefully thought out.
[01:04:30] Speaker B: No. Yeah. And it's also, I guess the bears kind of like you say, it's got to rebuild its, its muscles. It's learning to move a lot more. It's, I guess it's also restoring their confidence as well because they've, they've had nothing.
And going from like, you know, 0 to 100, it's not the way to do it. It's got to be slowly Slowly.
[01:04:49] Speaker C: Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
[01:04:52] Speaker B: Something else I kind of want to ask you about as well is obviously because caring for animals can be, you know, quite an all consuming thing and I'm sure there's like, there's always some difficult decisions you have to make in some cases. I'm just kind of wondering as well how you and your team, how do you look after yourself? I'm just kind of thinking of things like combating things like kind of like burnout or emotional fatigue because I imagine that that can definitely be something that overhangs.
[01:05:16] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
So we're really lucky animals. Asia provides us with an employee assistance program. So we have like counselors we can call completely anonymously, completely free, as long as we need them. So that's really helpful. And as managers, that's something that we always remind our teams about.
We're also really proactive in trying to communicate information.
So especially around euthanasia of like a chronic case, we have a process where we have like a quality of life form and assessment and then that's got all the options we have left to try to improve their quality of life. And then once those are exhausted, we have an end of life assessment and we see trigger points for euthanasia based as a team, so veterinary and behaviorally like, so we can sort of like remove that emotion and we're like, okay, well they've hit these trigger points, it's time to say goodbye.
So we try to be really proactive with the team and sharing their information.
So it's not a surprise, it's not unexpected.
Of course, obviously there's always the unexpected ones and that's really hard.
We also, because we have such a geriatric population who have like 70% of our bears have hypertension, like there's just so many, so many conditions that these bears get because of bio farming.
Each year, generally between January and April, we have our highest proportion of beer losses.
And so for example, this year we lost three beers last week and one this week.
And so that's really, really hard on the team. So proactively coming into that season where we've looked at the data, we've like looked, we look at the ages, we look at the causes, we look at when these things happen.
And we know that there's that period that coincides with dormancy, interestingly, where we will likely experience a higher level of loss.
We have a presentation that we give to staff to help prepare them, help them to realize that they are the good guys and that this is not their fault. This is the, this is the legacy of bio farming.
You know, making sure that they really understand why decisions are being made if they that sort of thing.
And then we have the opportunity for everyone to come and say goodbye and to be there with the bears as they pass.
We have a funeral service where we have one of our amazing supporters wrote a beautiful poem.
Every bear has their own grave and plaque.
So you know, they're seeing that we respect them as individuals and you know, not a commodity.
And then just as, as managers, I think I personally I find our line managers and in our Vietnam program to just be amazing at pastoral care of the staff, you know, checking in, making sure they're okay, recognizing when they're not giving them space to talk things through, you know, just being there for everyone.
Yeah, it's really nice, really, really, really nice community we have.
[01:08:58] Speaker B: Oh it's lovely. I'm glad to hear that.
Yeah. Because I know it can be hard.
[01:09:02] Speaker C: And then because we are living in a national park, those of us who don't have families here, you know that you can go to will often leave on the weekends and you know, go to Hanoi and have you know, separate friend groups and you know, be able to do activities and have access to different things because it is quite hard living and working in that environment sometimes.
[01:09:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:09:28] Speaker B: The situation now in Vietnam, you were saying, so there's still 150 bears on farms. They're not like obviously they, there's no bile being taken from them. It's just there they need to still be placed. Now that like, I guess you can sort of say the bare bio industry is being, you know, managed and taken care of. What are the other sort of remaining three threats to bears?
[01:09:48] Speaker C: Hunting is still definitely a threat. There's just not safe, not really safe forest spaces for them. So like even if we or free the bears or someone was to look at release, where would you do that? Because you know there's still a lot of hunting that goes on.
You know, we consulted with a case of a beer caught in a snare that then did manage to get itself out. But you know it's still, is still a danger. We're still getting cubs at times not from Vietnam because I don't think that there's. Well, there's definitely be populations left in Vietnam but they're very, very small.
I think the majority of our cubs, based on the areas that we get them from are coming over the border from China or Lao being smuggled over the border.
Hunting, poaching still definitely a threat.
Yeah.
[01:10:46] Speaker B: And do you have a release Program, particularly in Vietnam for bears.
[01:10:51] Speaker C: No, it's something that is part of our project agreement with our national park in Bacmar that we are looking into and we're doing research into bear populations and feasibility studies and things like that. So you know, never say never. But it's not the focus right now because there's still those, the focus is still getting those beers who currently are legally held.
So you know, that's still a lot of work to do.
But yeah, in the future, you know, we, we do have studies planned with some of our government partners and you know, let's see what happens to there.
[01:11:32] Speaker B: All right, so watch this space.
[01:11:33] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, no promises, but you know, let's see.
[01:11:37] Speaker B: I also wanted to ask a bit about. I know you, you touched on it earlier with elephant riding and it still surprises me sometimes when I've speak to, even the last couple of years, I'll speak to someone and they'll go, I really want to visit Vietnam and ride an elephant. And I'd just be like, okay, here we, here we go. I've got my, my little speech about why they shouldn't be doing that. And like the horrors that elephants go through. I know that Animals Asia. There's like a ethical elephant tour that you can do where you can visit. It's. Where is it? It's like a national park. You can go see elephants safely.
[01:12:09] Speaker C: And so we actually have two. So we have one in Yok Don national park. That's our main one, our first site.
So basically you get taken out into the forest, meet up with the mahouts and the elephants who were just free roaming and you basically just to get to watch an elephant, be an elephant. Which is I think just the most amazing thing because even though I think a lot of places end elephant riding and that's great, but then they go on to other elephant based tourism like bathing or feeding, which again that's not elephant friendly tourism. You know, that's not a normal thing for an elephant to be wanting to do.
So yeah, we, we just take people in, we tell them about the elephants, we, you know, introduce them, they meet the mahoots and they just get to spend time watching elephants do elephant things and whatever they want to do really.
One of my friends went on a tour and she was telling me about one of our females and she just all of a sudden walked away.
And so they were like, gosh, you know, where's she going? They followed her, you know, through the forest and she ended up at the training wall. So we have some training Walls built in, in the forest so that we can do things like foot care or, you know, check their teeth and things like that when we need to. And she just gone to the training wall because she was ready for a training session. Thank you very much.
So, yes, we have y done. And then we also have just opened one last year in Lac, which is about 100 kilometers away. And there's a lot of Vietnamese tourists that go to Lac for elephant riding. So now we've got two females there who were reunited, which is really nice. And they, they're doing the same thing there where you just go and walk along following an elephant, doing whatever the elephant wants to do.
[01:14:13] Speaker B: Oh, that's. I love it. It's high on my list of things to do now, so.
Well, I remember, like, one of my favorite memories of, again, it was just in. When we were in South Africa, I went to Kruger national park. And you go on the safari and you go to a watering hole and there's just 40 elephants just hanging out. And there was the dominant male, and I think he had a bit of a pretender come along and start waving. They were. There was a lot of trunk waving and then the, the dominant male backed the other one into the, into the water and put him in his place, I guess, and, and then moved along and I was just like, yeah, yeah, I just want to see, see elephants, like, you know, living naturally, doing their things. These are behaviors you, you wouldn't see otherwise. I loved it.
[01:14:57] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:14:57] Speaker C: It's amazing and it's so cool. I, I get the, I get shivers every time I go, yeah.
[01:15:04] Speaker B: Oh. Just for anyone that wants to travel responsibly or ethically, are there kind of some top do's and don'ts that you could share with us for Vietnam? Yeah.
[01:15:14] Speaker C: Don't.
Don't ride an elephant. Be my top one. Visit Yok Don National Park.
[01:15:22] Speaker A: Good plug.
[01:15:23] Speaker C: And go on our ethical elephant tourism tour.
Civic coffee is very big. Kopi Luak. It's also called Indonesian.
[01:15:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:15:34] Speaker C: It's also very big in Vietnam and also very, very cruel any place.
And there's a lot of this in Vietnam where you can take a photo with a macaque or you've got a maa dressed up or any sort of anything like that. Anything where you can pose with touch feed is, is not going to be ethical.
The, the experiences you want are ones where you learn and you watch and that's it.
Yeah.
[01:16:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree.
[01:16:10] Speaker D: Yeah.
[01:16:11] Speaker C: No tiger selfies.
No swimming with dolphins. Not that we have dolphins in Vietnam. I don't think. But yeah, there's just all of those kind of things.
There's not a lot of choice for the animals and then a lot of time there's none because they're chained or, you know, forced into it.
But there's just so many beautiful places you can go in Vietnam and see wild, wild animals.
You know, Son TRA peninsula in Da Nang has red shank, duk langers, and it's incredible, it's beautiful and it's really easy to get to. So, you know, anything you have to sort of really pay to do something with an animal, it's not really going to be ethical.
You can also, if you're in Vietnam, come and visit our beer sanctuary in Tam Dao. We have open days twice a month where you can register on the website and you'll get a guided tour around and you can get to see all our happy beers being happy beers.
So check out the Animals Asia website if that sounds interesting to you.
[01:17:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes that is it just animals
[01:17:24] Speaker A: asia.com.org.org yeah, of course.
[01:17:28] Speaker B: One of the things I wanted to ask is like what are your plans for the future or what you're looking most forward to this year?
[01:17:35] Speaker D: I think
[01:17:37] Speaker C: that this year is the year it's going to happen and we're going to end beer bar farming because the Vietnamese government is really committed to it.
And that's what I'm most looking forward to. I mean, the end of an industry reaching one of your founding goals, like chills, you can say they've achieved that. Like that's just. Yeah, that's what I'm the most looking forward to is that ending of the beer bar farming.
[01:18:07] Speaker B: Oh, great. And I mean, yeah, it's a bit decades, literally decades long mission.
[01:18:12] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:18:12] Speaker B: And, and of course I guess it's catching fire slightly because I know it's been in the news recently with South Korea is putting an end to bear bile farming as well. So it's.
Yeah, hopefully.
[01:18:23] Speaker C: Yeah, they, they, they're doing great. They've basically banned it. They're just looking for places for the bears to go now. So I've been actually working with some international groups who are looking at taking some of the South Korea beers and
[01:18:38] Speaker B: yeah, you don't think animals, Asia, Korea is there. It's on the horizon.
[01:18:43] Speaker C: Well, let's fix Vietnam first.
[01:18:45] Speaker B: Yeah, okay. Fair play. One thing at a time.
And I also wanted like, just want to hear what you, your thoughts like why are moon bears and why are some bears important, just, they're just a
[01:18:59] Speaker C: part of our ecosystem and they play an important role in things like seed dispersal and sort of maintenance of, you know, biodiversity and ecosystems in the forests.
So getting them back into the forests is a really important thing that we can do. But just as individuals, they're sentient beings.
They have feelings, they have emotions, they have desires, they have dislikes. And every single one of them is intrinsically important for their own self.
So as a species, yes, of course they're important. But as individuals, no matter what they've been through, no matter if they are a grumpy bear or a happy bear, we owe it to them to give them the absolute best life that we can and, and recognize them as intrinsically valuable in their own self.
[01:20:00] Speaker B: Yeah, every life has value. And I mean, like you say, they're valuable to themselves, they're valuable to other people, other animals.
[01:20:07] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[01:20:09] Speaker B: And we've already talked about. So that people can find out more and about Animals asia, work on animalsasia.org and offer support if they wish. And then I guess, what's the sort of main message you'd like listeners to take away?
[01:20:25] Speaker C: I think just remembering Animals Asia's, I guess, mission of ending animal cruelty, but through kindness and action.
Just remember those three words, kindness and action, so that when you are looking at animals and you're looking at how to help them, the kindness doesn't just have to happen with animals, it needs to happen towards the people as well.
[01:20:54] Speaker A: Thank you again, Sarah. I can't wait to see the end of bear bile farming as well and
[01:20:58] Speaker B: look forward to seeing the last of
[01:20:59] Speaker A: the bears in Vietnam rehomed safely to live their best lives.
Looking ahead, we're not quite done with
[01:21:05] Speaker B: Asiatic black bears yet.
[01:21:06] Speaker A: As next time I'm joined by Dr. Panjit Bazamatri of Wildlife Trust India. The Wildlife Trust of India runs the Centre for Bear Rehabilitation and Conservation. This is the first specialized rehabilitation centre
[01:21:19] Speaker B: for Asiatic black bears in India.
[01:21:22] Speaker A: So I'll see you then.
The Bear Den the American Bear association podcast was written and presented by me, Philip Stubley. The music was composed by Reacting Music.
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