KARACHI: A five-year-old female black bear was rescued by the wildlife department in a raid in Tando Allahyar on Friday morning. This was the second seizure of the same species within a month.
Earlier, a black bear was rescued from Sukkur. A case has been registered against the suspect.
“Our team rescued a bear while it was being transported in a rickshaw passing through the Bokera Sharif bypass in Tando Allahyar. A nomad identified as Abdul Razaque Kaheri has been arrested,” said Abdul Qayyum Channa, an inspector of the wildlife department and member of the raid party.
The bear currently being kept in the wildlife department office would be shifted to the bear rehabilitation sanctuary in Chakwal, Punjab, he added.
Sharing more details about the seizure, Wajid Sheikh, the deputy wildlife conservator, Hyderabad division, said that the Asiatic black bear species was found in the Northern Areas and smuggled to different parts of the country, including Sindh.
“This bear was caught from Swat when it was a cub. It was kept for a few months in Punjab before being shifted to Sindh,” he said, adding that bear species were protected across Pakistan.
Highlighting human cruelty against the animal, Mr Sheikh, who has rescued 10 bears during his service at the wildlife department, said that poachers used to pull out their nails, break their teeth and pierced a metal ring across their nose at a very young age so that they could not attack their handlers.
“Very harsh and painful methods are used to tame them. For instance, cubs are usually forced to sit on a burning pan to punish them with a view to instil fear and make them to obey orders of their handlers,” he explained, adding that the rescued bear would be sent to the sanctuary in Chakwal so he could get the right food and environment for rehabilitation and breeding.
According to him, bear-baiting, which was officially banned in the country in 1990s, was once a popular sport in villages, but there has been a significant decline in its practice particularly in Sindh over the years.
“Some groups of nomads, however, use them as street performers and we are trying our best to discourage this practice,” he said.
On punishment to the offender, he said that a charge sheet would be presented against the accused in the court and it would entirely be up to the judge to take a decision.
It is pertinent to mention here that the wildlife department has rescued two bears after a gap of three years. Earlier, three bears were rescued in 2015 from Sukkur.
Threats to bears
Speaking about bear species in Pakistan and the kind of threats they face, Mohammad Wasim, manager conservation at the World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-P), who has been involved in a bear conservation project, said Asiatic (or Himalayan) black bears and Himalayan brown bears were found in Pakistan while a subspecies of Asiatic black bear was endemic to Balochistan region.
The habitat of the black bear, he said, included Kaghan and Naran valleys, Kohistan, parts of Gilgit Baltistan, Swat and Chitral.
About threats to bear population, he said they were hunted to be used for entertainment purposes. Besides, there were places where these animals were in direct conflict with humans.
“It’s almost impossible to capture an adult bear. So, poachers look for cubs, but they can’t take them away from their mothers without killing the latter,” he said, adding that poachers who had been in the business for generations were well connected with local communities which informed them where they could find their catch.
Referring to a 2015 incident in which seven black bears were killed by local people in Kaghan Valley and its surrounding areas after a bear inflicted injuries to a woman and her son, he said that WWF-P had developed a bear-human conflict management plan to reduce such incidents.
Published in Dawn, May 25th, 2019