AGRA: They entertain passers-by along Indian highways, moving in slow-motion parodies of Bollywood dance routines.

India outlawed sloth bear performances in 1972, but the animals still turn up along roadsides, forced to dance for money by owners who control them using a rope forced through their extremely sensitive snouts.

“You can shake hands,” said one bear owner to tourists outside a cafe, tugging the shaggy black-coated animal’s muzzle to make him wiggle clumsily to a hip-shaking Hindi song from a cassette player.

The lucky dancing bears end up at one of three sanctuaries run by Wildlife SOS, a group working to end the centuries-old practice of using animals to earn a living.

The bears, on India’s endangered animal list, are favoured by impoverished Kalandar Muslim tribesmen as performers because of their relatively small size — they grow to around five or six-feet tall.

The rescued bears spend the rest of their lives at the sanctuaries, the largest of which is the Agra Bear Rescue Facility near northern Agra city.

Thirty-three-year-old business graduate Kartick Satyanarayan, co-founder of Wildlife SOS, helped start the sanctuaries.

“I couldn’t bear to see the bears stripped of all of dignity and made into ridiculous performing animals,” said Satyanarayan, declaring he has been “crazy about animals since I was a kid.”

Wildlife SOS, funded by animal groups worldwide, has an anti-poaching team that tracks bear cub markets and conducts “seizures” of bears with the help of wildlife officials. It says it has so far rescued about 400 bears.

The animals “couldn’t survive in the wild,” Wildlife SOS spokeswoman Vasudha Mehta said on a walk through the thickly forested sanctuary as the animals tussled inside large pens, uttering throaty roars.

The bears must stay in the sanctuaries as “they’re taken away from their mothers at such an early age, they don’t know how to forage in the wild.” Each rescued bear is first quarantined for 90 days for treatment.

The Agra sanctuary boasts a gleaming operating theatre — better than facilities in many Indian hospitals — where veterinarians tend to their numerous ailments.

“The rope is removed under anaesthetic. Sometimes the snout is full of puss and is bleeding. It’s often swollen and infested with maggots because the rope has been there for so long,” said Mehta.

The tribesmen pierce the bears’ snouts using a hot iron needle, the group says. The tribesmen also remove the animals’ sharp teeth to make them safer to handle.

“The bears need lots of dental work as their teeth have sometimes only been broken, not fully removed, which causes all sorts of problems, like abscesses and infections,” said Mehta.

Afterwards, the bears are kept in a “socialisation pen” to teach them to get along with other bears as “they’ve only ever been with humans,” said Mehta.

Then they are moved to large free-roaming areas in the 160-acre sanctuary, which opened its doors in 2002.

Wildlife SOS, which has other sanctuaries in the southern city of Bangalore and in the central city of Bhopal, seeks to persuade the Kalandars to change profession by giving them Rs50,000 to start new trades such as setting up cold drinks stalls.

The group says it has helped about 300 Kalandar families give up their bears. The animals rarely survive more than 10 years as performers — a third of their natural lifespan.

“We have to give them something else to do or they can’t survive,” said Satyanarayan. “We had to work out a practical, holistic solution — in a developing country you can’t have any other kind.” The group estimates there are still 500 to 600 performing bears in India out of 1,200 when they started.

“We’ve been able to halve the number in a few years and I see this entire problem being resolved in four to five years,” Satyanarayan said.—AFP