Sloth bear

Seven-day-old bear cubs, rescued from a building site where they had been born

A mother with a cub on her back at the Daroji Sloth Bear Sanctuary, India

The breeding season for sloth bears varies according to location: in India, they mate in April, May, and June, and give birth in December and early January, while in Sri Lanka, it occurs all year. Sows gestate for 210 days, and typically give birth in caves or in shelters under boulders. Litters usually consist of one or two cubs, or rarely three.[28] Cubs are born blind, and open their eyes after four weeks.[32] Sloth bear cubs develop quickly compared to most other bear species: they start walking a month after birth, become independent at 24–36 months, and become sexually mature at the age of three years. Young cubs ride on their mother's back when she walks, runs, or climbs trees until they reach a third of her size. Individual riding positions are maintained by cubs through fighting. Intervals between litters can last two to three years.[28]

Sloth bears are expert hunters of termites and ants, which they locate by smell.[28] On arriving at a mound, they scrape at the structure with their claws till they reach the large combs at the bottom of the galleries, and disperse the soil with violent puffs. The termites are then sucked up through the muzzle, producing a sucking sound which can be heard 180 m away.[32] Their sense of smell is strong enough to detect grubs 3 ft below ground. Unlike other bears, they do not congregate in feeding groups.[28] Sloth bears may supplement their diets with fruit, plant matter, carrion, and very rarely other mammals. In March and April, they eat the fallen petals of mowha trees and are partial to mangoes, sugar cane, jackfruit, and the pods of the golden shower tree. Sloth bears are extremely fond of honey.[32] When feeding their cubs, sows are reported to regurgitate a mixture of half-digested jack fruit, wood apples, and pieces of honeycomb. This sticky substance hardens into a dark yellow, circular, bread-like mass which is fed to the cubs. This "bear's bread" is considered a delicacy by some of India's natives.[33] Rarely, Sloth bears can become addicted to sweets in hotel waste visiting rubbish bins even inside populated towns all year long.[34]

In Neyyar Wildlife Sanctuary, Kerala, seeds of six tree species eaten and excreted by sloth bears (Artocarpus hirsuta, A. integrifolia, Cassia fistula, Mangifera indica, Zizyphus oenoplina) did not see significantly different percentages of germination (appearance of cotyledon) when compared to germinated seeds that had not been passed through the gut of the bears.[35] However, seeds germinated much faster after being ingested by bears for three species, Artocarpus hirsuta, Cassia fistula, and Zizyphus oenoplina. This experiment suggests that sloth bears may play an important role in seed dispersal and germination, with effects varying by tree species.[35]

The large canine teeth of sloth bears, relative to both its overall body size and to the size of the canine teeth of other bear species, and the aggressive disposition of sloth bears, may be a defense in interactions with large, dangerous animals, such as the tiger, elephant, and rhinoceros, as well as prehistoric species such as Megantereon.[36]

Bengal tigers occasionally prey on sloth bears. Tigers usually give sloth bears a wide berth, though some specimens may become habitual bear killers,[37] and it is not uncommon to find sloth bear fur in tiger scats.[38] Tigers typically hunt sloth bears by waiting for them near termite mounds, then creeping behind them and seizing them by the back of their necks and forcing them to the ground with their weight.[39] One tiger was reported to simply break its victim's back with its paw, then wait for the paralysed bear to exhaust itself trying to escape before going in for the kill.[37] When confronted by tigers face to face, sloth bears charge at them, crying loudly. A young or already sated tiger usually retreats from an assertive sloth bear, as the bear's claws can inflict serious wounds, and most tigers end the hunt if the bears become aware of the tiger's presence before the pounce.[39] Sloth bears may scavenge on tiger kills.[40] As tigers are known to mimic the calls of sambar deer to attract them, sloth bears react fearfully even to the sounds made by deer themselves.[39] In 2011, a female bear with cubs was observed to stand her ground and prevail in a confrontation against two tigers (one female, one male) in rapid succession.[41]

Besides tigers there are few predators of sloth bears. Leopards can also be a threat, as they are able to follow sloth bears up trees.[15] Bear cubs are probably far more vulnerable and healthy adult bears may be avoided by leopards. One leopard killed a three-quarters grown female sloth bear in an apparently lengthy fight that culminated in the trees. Apparently, a sloth bear killed a leopard in a confrontation in Yala National Park, Sri Lanka but was itself badly injured in the fight and was subsequently put down by park rangers.[42][43] Sloth bears occasionally chase leopards from their kills.[28] Dhole packs may attack sloth bears.[44] When attacking them, dholes try to prevent the bear from retreating into caves.[45] Unlike tigers which prey on sloth bears of all size, there is little evidence that dholes are a threat to fully-grown sloth bears other than exceptionally rare cases.[25][46] In one case, a golden jackal (a species much smaller and less powerful than a sloth bear and not generally a pack hunter as is the dhole) was seen to aggressively displace an adult bear which passively loped away from the snapping canid, indicating the sloth bear does not regard other carnivores as competition.[15]

Sloth bears are sympatric with Asiatic black bears in northern India, and the two species, along with the sun bear, coexist in some of the national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. They are also found together in Assam, Manipur, and Mizoram, in the hills south of the Brahmaputra River, the only places occupied by all three bear species. The three species do not act aggressively toward each other. This may be because the three species generally differ in habit and dietary preferences.[15]

Asian elephants apparently do not tolerate sloth bears in their vicinity. The reason for this is unknown, as individual elephants known to maintain their composure near tigers have been reported to charge bears.[32] The Indian rhinoceros has a similar intolerance for sloth bears, and will charge at them.[28]

A fragile co-existence between bears and humans at Ratanmahal Sloth Bear Sanctuary, Dahod district, Gujarat, India

Sloth bears are one of the most aggressive extant bears and, due to large human populations often closely surrounding reserves that hold bears, aggressive encounters and attacks are relatively frequent, though in some places, attacks appear to be a reaction to encountering people accidentally.[34] Going on raw numbers, this is the species of bear that most regularly attacks humans. Only the Himalayan black bear subspecies of Asian black bear is nearly as dangerous.[51][52] Sloth bears likely view humans as potential predators, as their reactions to them (roaring, followed by retreat or charging) are similar to those evoked in the presence of tigers and leopards.[11] Their long claws, which are ideally adapted for digging at termite mounds, make adults less capable of climbing trees to escape danger, as are other bears such as Asian black bears. Therefore, sloth bears have seemingly evolved to deal with threats by behaving aggressively. For the same reason, brown bears can be similarly inclined, accounting for the relatively high incidence of seemingly nonpredatory aggression towards humans in these two bear species.[53]

According to Robert Armitage Sterndale, in his Mammalia of India (1884, p. 62):

[The sloth bear] is also more inclined to attack man unprovoked than almost any other animal, and casualties inflicted by it are unfortunately very common, the victim being often terribly disfigured even if not killed, as the bear strikes at the head and face. [William Thomas] Blanford was inclined to consider bears more dangerous than tigers...

Captain Williamson in his Oriental Field Sports wrote of how sloth bears rarely killed their human victims outright, but would suck and chew on their limbs till they were reduced to bloody pulps.[2] One specimen, known as the sloth bear of Mysore, was responsible for the deaths of 12 people and the mutilation of 24 others. It was shot by Kenneth Anderson.[54] Although sloth bears have attacked humans, they rarely become man-eaters. Dunbar-Brander's Wild Animals of Central India mentions a case in which a sow with two cubs began a six-week reign of terror in Chanda, a district of the Central Provinces, during which more than one of their victims had been eaten,[55] while the sloth bear of Mysore partially ate at least three of its victims.[54] R.G. Burton deduced from comparing statistics that sloth bears killed more people than Asian black bears,[55] and Theodore Roosevelt considered them to be more dangerous than American black bears.[56] Unlike some other bear species, which at times make mock charges at humans when surprised or frightened without making physical contact, sloth bears frequently appear to initiate a physical attack almost immediately. When people living near an aggressive population of sloth bears were armed with rifles, it was found that it was an ineffective form of defense, since the bear apparently charges and knocks the victim back (often knocking the rifle away) before the human has the chance to defend themself.[57][58] In Madhya Pradesh, sloth bear attacks accounted for the deaths of 48 people and the injuring of 686 others between 1989 and 1994, probably due in part to the density of population and competition for food sources.[59] A total of 137 attacks (resulting in 11 deaths) occurred between April 1998 and December 2000 in the North Bilaspur Forest Division of Chhattisgarh. The majority of attacks were perpetrated by single bears, and occurred in kitchen gardens, crop fields, and in adjoining forests during the monsoon season.[60] One Mr. Watts Jones wrote a first-hand account of how it feels to be attacked by a sloth bear, recalling when he failed to score a direct hit against a bear he had targeted:

I do not know exactly what happened next, neither does my hunter who was with me; but I believe, from the marks in the snow, that in his rush the bear knocked me over backwards in fact, knocked me three or four feet away. When next I remember anything, the bear's weight was on me, and he was biting my leg. He bit two or three times. I felt the flesh crush, but I felt no pain at all. It was rather like having a tooth out with gas. I felt no particular terror, though I thought the bear had got me; but in a hazy sort of way I wondered when he would kill me, and thought what a fool I was to get killed by a stupid beast like a bear. The shikari then very pluckily came up and fired a shot into the bear, and he left me. I felt the weight lift off me, and got up. I did not think I was much hurt. ... The main wound was a flap of flesh torn out of the inside of my left thigh and left hanging. It was fairly deep, and I could see all the muscles working underneath when I lifted it up to clean the wound."[61]

In 2016, according to a forest official, a female bear had killed three people, and hurt five others in Gujarat State's Banaskantha district, near Balaram Ambaji Wildlife Sanctuary, with some of the casualties being colleagues. At first, an attempt was made to trace and cage it, but this failed, costing the life of one official, and so a team of both officials and policemen shot the bear.[9]

In Karnataka's Bellary district, most of the attacks by sloth bears occurred outside forests, when they entered settlements and farmlands in search of food and water.[62]

In Mount Abu town in southern Rajasthan, sloth bears attacked people inside towns where they were seeking hotel waste in rubbish bins and encountered people by chance.[34] Though such attacks were concomitant with increasing tourism activity, quite remarkably, local residents have not retaliated against the sloth bears. The absence of retaliation in many locations of India appears related to cultural norms and the dominant religion Hinduism where nature and animals are worshipped as deities.

Illustration of British officers hunting a bear on horseback

One method of hunting sloth bears involved the use of beaters, in which case, a hunter waiting on a post could either shoot the approaching bear through the shoulder or on the white chest mark if it was moving directly to him. Sloth bears are very resistant to body shots, and can charge hunters if wounded, though someone of steady nerves could score a direct hit from within a few paces of a charging bear. Sloth bears were easy to track during the wet season, as their clear footprints could be followed straight to their lairs. The majority of sloth bears killed in forests were due to chance encounters with them during hunts for other game. In hilly or mountainous regions, two methods were used to hunt them there. One was to lie in wait above the bear's lair at dawn and wait for the bear to return from its nocturnal foraging. Another was to rouse them at daytime by firing flares into the cave to draw them out.[63] Sloth bears were also occasionally speared on horseback.[7] In Sri Lanka, the baculum of a sloth bear was once used as a charm against barrenness.[26]

A tame bear and its handler in Pushkar

Officers in British India often kept sloth bears as pets.[32] The wife of Kenneth Anderson kept an orphaned sloth bear cub from Mysore, which she named "Bruno". The bear was fed almost anything (including motor oil) and was very affectionate toward people. It was even taught numerous tricks, such as cradling a woodblock like a baby or pointing a bamboo stick like a gun.[64]

Dancing bears were historically a popular entertainment in India, dating back to the 13th century and the pre-Mughal era. The Kalandars, who practised the tradition of capturing sloth bears for entertainment purposes, were often employed in the courts of Mughal emperors to stage spectacles involving trained bears.[32] They were once common in the towns of Calcutta, where they often disturbed the horses of British officers.[32]

Despite a ban on the practice that was enacted in 1972, as many as 800 dancing bears were in the streets of India during the latter part of the 20th century, particularly on the highway between Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur. Sloth bear cubs, which were usually purchased at the age of six months from traders and poachers, were trained to dance and follow commands through coercive stimuli and starvation. Males were castrated at an early age, and their teeth were knocked out at the age of one year to prevent them from seriously injuring their handlers. The bears were typically fitted with a nose ring attached to a four-foot leash. Some were found to be blind from malnutrition.[65]

In 2009, following a seven-year campaign by a coalition of Indian and international animal welfare groups, the last Kalandar dancing bear was set free.[66] The effort to end the practice involved helping the bear handlers find jobs and education, which enabled them to reduce their reliance on dancing-bear income.[67]

• Brown, Gary (1993). The Great Bear Almanac. Lyons & Burford. ISBN 1558212108.
• Garshelis, D. L.; Joshi, A. R.; Smith, J. L. D. & Rice, C. G. (1999). "Sloth Bear Conservation Action Plan". In Servheen, C.; Herrero, S. & Peyton, B. (eds.). Bears: Status Survey and Conservation Action Plan. Gland, Switzerland: IUCN/SSC Bear Specialist Group. ISBN 2831704626.