By Vince Cleary

There is nothing like having a bond with a wild animal.” That’s how Laurence Eve Van Atten ’02 describes her lifelong interest in animal welfare. As a child, her empathy was nurtured by spending “a lot of time in the woods” with her naturalist mother, a fifth-grade teacher in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. It eventually led Van Atten to a degree in wildlife conservation at UMass Amherst, a head keeper position at the Franklin Park Zoo, and an advanced degree in animal welfare in 2006. Now it fuels her pursuit of peace for India’s dancing bears.

The cruel practice of training bears to “dance” on their hind legs dates back to the 16th century, when sloth bears entertained Mughal emperors and Rajput kings. Over the centuries, the practice became more widespread in India. In the face of abject poverty, many Qalandar gypsies, both Muslims and Hindus, until recently eked out a living by teaching bears to perform for tourists along India’s highways.

Sloth bears (also called “honey bears” for their love of the nectar) have long, black fur, weigh about 300 pounds, and stand a little over five feet when full grown. Those slated for the dancing circuit are kidnapped as cubs, their teeth and claws are removed, and often they’re intentionally blinded. Worst of all, a hot poker is used to bore a hole through the roofs of their mouths to their snouts, then threaded with a rope so handlers can manage them more easily.

“Parliament outlawed dancing bears in 1972, although officials had nowhere to bring the confiscated bears,” says Van Atten. “Zoos would not accept them because of their deformities. With their teeth and nails removed, they couldn’t be returned to the wild, as they would be unable to eat properly, dig, climb, or defend themselves.”

Economic and political factors made it difficult to enforce the law until recently, when the International Animal Rescue (IAR) organization stepped in with a plan to build facilities for the orphaned animals and to retrain bear handlers.

Van Atten bonded with some of the rescued bears while she earned a graduate degree in Applied Animal Behaviour and Animal Welfare from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. For her master’s dissertation she took a three-month internship at IAR’s bear rescue facility in Agra, India (a city better known as the home of the Taj Mahal). Van Atten devised programs to facilitate the bears’ acquisition of lost traits.

Though without sight, teeth, and claws, the animals still possess senses of smell, hearing, touch, and taste. Laurence developed several challenges to simulate how sloth bears obtain their food in the wild: she buried nuts in bales of hay; bored holes in logs and placed honey there; and erected “wobble trees,” containers of fruit placed atop high poles. The bears quickly mastered all three tests. Van Atten hopes to publish her results in a scientific journal.
Meanwhile, Van Atten’s volunteer work has become her vocation. She has opened the first IAR office in this country, out of her home in Shrewsbury. The UK-based organization operates around the world but is still relatively unknown in the U.S. As development coordinator, Van Atten spreads awareness of IAR, raises money, and vies for grants.
Among its many other animal-rescue programs, IAR is behind the Agra bear sanctuary—home to nearly 400 bears—and two others soon to be built. But IAR goes farther toward bringing an end to the dancing-bear trade. Its holistic approach involves teaching bear owners new skills by which to make a living.

“We don’t just take away the bear with a slap on the wrist,” says Van Atten. “We provide Qalandars with money to start a business and ask them to sign a contract stating that their children will go to school. We donate things like sewing machines so that the people can be retrained in another skill and don’t have to rely on a dancing bear.” Van Atten says IAR hopes that within three to five years, the remaining dancing bears, all 600 of them, will be placed in sanctuaries in India.