Save the bear while on a trip

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It’s about giving the bare facts about bears. Foreign tourists who visit India through travel agency Le Passage to India (LPTI) get to carry back a cute toy bear with them. And along with the toy bear, they get to read literature on how a bear is made to dance in India.

Did you know that when you clap on seeing that shaggy bear doing a jig to the tunes of a madari (a person who earns a living out of making bears dance), there’s a painful story behind it? These are usually bears whose teeth are knocked out, claws clipped and who have a hot iron needle passed through their delicate muzzle. And, the wound in the muzzle is not allowed to heal, so when the rough rope that passes through it is pulled, the bear leaps up in pain. That’s how you see the bear “dancing”. This is the information that Wildlife SOS (established in 1998 to help wildlife in distress and to curb crimes against them) is trying to spread among people and it has tied up with LPTI to do the disbursal (of the toy bear and the literature).

So far LPTI has disbursed about 3,000 packets (containing the toy bear and literature on how these animals are tortured). There’s more to this. The toys are made by Wildlife SOS, the cost for which is borne by LPTI (about Rs 60 per toy). An additional Rs 60 is also topped up by LPTI. Added together, a sum of roughly Rs 120 is given by LPTI to Wildlife SOS for every foreign tourist that visits India through the agency. As Arjun Sharma, managing director LPTI says: “We have initiated support for Wildlife SOS’s Bear Rescue Project in Agra only recently on an experimental basis. Our initiative is currently focused on in bound tourists and we will extend this to Indian tourists later this year.”