Free the Bears!

So I may have been a little dubious of the ‘free the bears’ day, thinking it might be some weird tourist focussed “volunteering” with the bears kinda situation, and in a way it was, but in a way I liked, I guess.

We got picked up in the morning by some of the keepers (and their dog Rosie! so nice to play with a puppie) and one other aussie girl and drove out to the sanctuary. It is in 25000ish hectares of protected forest, which also has enclosures run by the government for lots of other animals, monkeys, birds, elephants, lions etc. The bear section is run by the ‘free the bears’ charity which was founded by an Australian woman called Mary who saw something about bear bile farming on TV and decided to do something about it, eventually leading to the organisation today which has a few sanctuary’s across south east asia for bears rescued from bile farms, resteraunts (bear paw soup), dancing bears and those from the exotic pet trade.

                                                   

Currently they can’t re-release the bears as poachers trapped the only bears that they tried to release and one of the bears died of it’s injuries.

The aim of the “volunteer” program seems to be mainly to educate the “volunteers” about what free the bears does and to let us do a few activities related to the bears (like preparing feed balls, and hiding scatterfeed in the bears enclosures for them. It was pretty fun! I liked climbing around the enclosure hiding food and then watching them find it… but I think mainly this post should be cute bear pics so…

                                              delicious bear snacks...

             Keda throwing our newly made snacks to the bears!

                          Bear checking out the snacks :)

                                                      

I also got into a fight with a monkey! we were near the cage of these massive pythons and a friendly monkey came over to say hi, turns out the monkey was a little over friendly and some of the other people ran off screaming... I thought that the monkey would back off, me being much larger and scarier then it but apparently not, so I hissed at feinted towards it and it hissed and feinted towards me until I realised I was trapped between the python cage and a big rock... and the monkey was still hissing and making to attack me (I realise I am probably about to get bitten by said monkey and briefly regret not having got a rabies shot) and then one of the friendly people starts pegging sticks at the monkey until it backs off. My pride took a bit of a knock at loosing a battle of will with a monkey!

 

 

 

 hiding food for the scatterfeed

 

 

The bears finding the food we hid :)

 

And yea, this happened...