Activists thought they’d rescued India’s last dancing bear. Sadly, they were mistaken

Since then, forest department officials have seized five more bears across villages in Bihar and neighbouring Jharkhand state.

“[This] points to a resurgence [of people forcing bears to dance],” said Jose Louies, enforcement chief at the Wildlife Trust of India.

“It’s not just money that villagers pay to see the bear. Once you have a crowd, you can sell them bear hair, claws, or nails as lucky charms to make money,” he said.

India banned the practice of forcing bears to dance in 1972, but critics say enforcement is lacking. The Wildlife Trust of India, Wildlife SOS and many other environmental groups have worked for years with the nomadic Kalandar tribe – which traditionally relied on dancing bears for their livelihoods – to persuade them to stop the practice.

For four centuries, the Kalandar tribe has specialised in finding and killing mother bears in India’s forests to take cubs for “training”.

Advocacy and environmental groups have taught the tribe other skills such as driving, accountancy, carpet weaving, bicycle repair and welding, to introduce new sources of income for them that do not involve bears.

But some “Kalandars who fail to succeed in their new jobs might have been tempted to go back to their old ways”, Louies said.

He called it “operational memory”, meaning that the practice is likely to resurface as long as some of the tribesmen possess the knowledge of how to locate and hunt the bears.

Sloth bears, with their shaggy black fur and long noses, are forced to perform by having their noses and jaws pierced with a hot iron rod so that a coarse rope can be passed through the open wound and into the roof of their mouths.

Bear handlers tug on this rope, with the pain making the bear move in what looks like a dance.