There's something about Mary

A blog by Mary Hutton and Matt Hunt from Free the Bears.

I think that if somebody had told me 17 years ago I would be spending my retirement years working harder than I ever did in my life before Free the Bears, I would never have believed them! Fortunately what I have discovered with each passing year and every bear that we are able to help I am energized and more determined than ever to keep on helping these animals which are unable to defend themselves from the horrors that mankind inflicts upon them in so many ways. The early years of the Fund were perhaps the hardest as I really was running things on my own and the task before me seemed so huge, but with every day that went by we gained more signatures on the petitions, more words of encouragement by sympathetic supporters and more people came forward to offer their time to help the bears. We now have support groups in almost every state in Australia and have recently been granted charitable status in the UK, all of this being done by volunteers who believe that we have a duty to help these bears and ensure that they are given a second chance at life after being torn away from the forests and their mothers by mankind’s greed.

I grew up in England and moved to Australia more than 40 years ago so when I first heard about the Sun bears in Cambodia which were being slaughtered for bear paw soup it really could have been on the moon, I honestly did not know where Cambodia was! However, after visiting the country and seeing how poor most people are, you quickly realize that it is important to try and put yourself in the other persons shoes and imagine what you’d do if you were trying to feed a family on less than one dollar a day. So much of the trade in bears and their exploitation is driven by wealthy individuals but it’s the poor man living on the edge of the forest who is sent out to do the hunting. Many of these communities don’t even have schools and so they don’t understand the need to protect the forests and their wildlife. Education is so important and that’s why we always ensure that the sanctuaries we support are opened up to visitors, enabling people to come and see the bears living happily and not on the end of a chain or in tiny cages.

In India we were able to end the “dancing” bear trade in less than seven years with the cooperation of our partners Wildlife SOS and the Indian government. The Kalandar gypsies had relied on dancing the bears for generations and so we couldn’t help the bears without thinking what would happen to the Kalandar families afterwards, if they had no alternative means of income then they would simply revert to hunting more bears and training them to dance. By providing seed money for the Kalandars in exchange for their bears and licenses we were able to provide a win-win situation for both the bears and their owners. And the results, we had waiting lists of Kalandars who had heard about our program and no longer wanted to live life on the streets, forever afraid of being caught by the police and so dragging their bear from one town to another. Similarly in Cambodia we have sponsored a mobile education bus that visits all of the schools and communities on the edge of forests where the bears live. During the day-time the kids are given lessons on wildlife and the need to protect the environment and then in the evenings the whole village gathers around for a big open-air cinema with karaoke and films on wildlife; I remember dancing with a group of Cambodian schoolchildren in a rice-field at the foot of the Elephant Mountains and knowing that as long as these children grew up understanding the need to protect their wildlife then we would win the battle.

Over the years I’ve seen such terrible things being done to these bears but once they are safe in our sanctuaries they quickly bounce back and learn to trust people again. I think that if the bears can learn to forgive and to show us love again then that’s something that we should try to emulate, its only by understanding the different cultures that we are working in that we can create solutions which will lead to a world in which bears are no longer exploited and tortured anymore. For more information on how you can help us to help the bears, please visit our website at www.freethebears.org