When it comes to the bear that hurts the most people, India's sloth bear is definitely on the list. This bear has a fierce personality, has committed cannibalism in India more than once, but has become a second-class key protected animal in China in 2021?
In June 2022, a sloth bear attacked a couple in India, and when the police arrived, the bear was still leisurely eating human bones, without the slightest vigilance when wild animals met humans, but issued a low roar of threat to the crowd.
The name of this bear sounds docile, the size is not very large among bears, in addition to repeatedly hurting people, it has also fought off Bengal tigers! Is the sloth bear really a cannibalistic horror bear? Why is it still a protected animal in China?
Obviously fierce temperament, why is it called a lazy bear?
When sloth bears were first discovered by human explorers, they did not behave at all like bears in the traditional sense, hanging upside down on high branches like sloths!
Later, European zoologists obtained fur samples of sloth bears from India, and after some observational analysis, they believed that many characteristics of sloth bears were different from other bears.
This is a sloth bear
The sloth bear lacks two upper incisors, the nose and lips are very prominent, it is flexible to rotate, and the feet are curved inward, and there is a "nail-like cocoon" on the bear's paw that is convenient for tearing its prey, and the overall shape looks a lot like a sloth.
Limited by the level of science and technology in the past, based on these obvious characteristics, scientists at that time roughly classified them as close relatives with sloths, and also had the name "lazy bear", and even now it is not certain whether to list the sloth bear as a separate "sloth bear" classification.
For comparison, this is a black bear
Sloth bears don't need hibernation?
Sloth bears also have a different habit than many bears, that is, they do not need to hibernate.
Sloth bears mainly live in tropical areas such as India, and the weather is hot in the area where they live, but even so, the sloth bear has this thick fur, which greatly improves its ability to withstand the cold, which indirectly proves that it does not need to hibernate.
Sloth bears --- "termite killers" in the forest
Sloth bears are omnivorous, mainly feeding on insects such as termites, but also eating plant fruits, roots, etc., and they will pick up carrion, etc., and sloth bears living in places with dense human activities will also feed on sugar cane and corn.
Thanks to the lazy bear's sharp claws and its title of "Hercules", it can easily deliver termites and other foods into its mouth. Usually they first lift the stone, use their paws to easily gouge the ant burrow, and then use their long mouths to suck termites into their mouths. When they suck ants, they blow away the dust on the ground first, and the rumbling sound made in the process is very loud.
There have been cannibalism incidents more than once
In India, there are often news reports of sloth bears attacking humans or sloth bears eating people. In June 2022, a sloth bear attacked a couple in India, and by the time people found it, it was four hours later, and neither of them was spared, and when the police arrived, the sloth bear was leisurely eating human bones.
It was very difficult to recover the bodies of two people from the mouths of such man-eating bears, so the local police, together with the forest department, including animal experts, did not recover the bodies of the two people until two hours after the sloth bear was given anesthetics.
Screenshot of the news report
In fact, sloth bears are one of the most aggressive bears, although they are only medium in size in the bear family, but once humans are pressed down in front of them, they will have no way to fight back, after all, male sloth bears can weigh more than 190 kilograms, and females can also weigh nearly 130 kilograms.
According to relevant data, sloth bears are the species that attacks humans the most, and in the five years from 1989 to 1994 alone, 48 people in India were killed by sloth bears and more than 680 were injured.
The biggest factor is the temper of lazy bears, their temper is very strange, very irritable when angry, very easy to attack the human face, almost attacked people, the face will be seriously damaged, some eyes, some mouth, and even more unrecognizable.
Can a sloth bear beat a tiger?
In nature, the most ferocious predator of sloth bears is tigers. However, there are also reports that some tigers not only did not catch the lazy bear, but were chased by the lazy bear and fled madly. Who can win this chase between tigers and sloth bears?
Sloth bears generally do not attack tigers directly, but when they are attacked by tigers, they will also hit tigers with their sharp claws and teeth.
And tigers, as a very intelligent feline, they are very cautious, most of the time they will not go directly to hunt down their prey, but will ambush on the side, wait for the time to ripe, and then make a move.
In India's nature reserves, there have been cases of sloth bears fighting back against tigers. A young Bengal tiger provoked a female sloth bear with a child, and the tiger not only failed to kill the sloth bear, but was also bitten by the sloth bear and injured all over his body.
Of course, we can't overestimate the sloth bear, in practice, there are many cases where the tiger ambushes the sloth bear and successfully kills, and the incident of the sloth bear successfully scaring off the tiger is a special case.
The mother beast with children is the least to provoke
What happened behind the Indian "pistachio", a dancing sloth bear?
In India, many sloth bears are tamed by humans, performing dances and other circuses for humans to make people happy, and folk legends say that sloth bears and their owners will play together, even sleep together, and get along with humans very well.
In fact, tamed sloth bears are actually poached by hunters, and under normal circumstances, they only take away newborn bear cubs, and the prerequisite for taking away bear cubs is to kill the mother bear. In order not to be exposed, poachers will also spend a lot of money as hush money to bribe rangers and others, which is very bad.
Caught bears are sold or severely trained. Behind the graceful dance of the sloth bear is countless beatings and starvation.
As long as the sloth bear is disobedient and does not follow the instructions of the trainer, the trainer will stimulate the most sensitive part of their body --- the nose, and hitting them with tools is only the most common punishment, and even take a red-hot iron needle to pass the nose through and use a thick rope to make the sloth bear feel pain by pulling the rope.
India's "Lazy Bear Dance"
Many circuses kill sloth bears by knocking out their canine teeth when they are young, likewise, their sharp claws are not spared, and they are also sterilized when they are young. There are countless abuses like this, and behind our laughter are their silent anger and tears.
Sloth bears repeatedly harm humans, why is China listed as a protected animal?
The habitat range of sloth bears is mainly in tropical forests, savannahs, shrublands and other areas of South Asian countries such as India, and India has the largest sloth bear population.
At first, mainland animal research experts believed that there were no sloth bears in China, but later experts found the activity trajectory of sloth bears in the Himalayas, and further research proved that although the number is small, there is indeed a sloth bear population living in China, so since 2021, the sloth bear has become a national second-class protected animal.
However, due to the destruction of the habitat of sloth bears due to frequent human activities, more and more sloth bears have nowhere to go, and the number of sloth bears in the wild is decreasing.
In addition, the large-scale capture of human beings is not only because humans capture lazy bears and domesticate them to dance and other skills to make humans happy, but also because the value of bear bile is very high, driven by interests, more and more hunters hunt. Over time, wild sloth bears become rarer.
"No sale, no killing", maybe we can't restore the habitat of sloth bears destroyed by humans, but we can put an end to animal cruelty by animal performance organizations such as circuses, maybe we can reduce the number of visits to circuses, and reduce the killing of sloth bears by people with ulterior motives.
Bibliography:
Lazy Bear - Baidu Encyclopedia
Indian couple killed by sloth bear attack, body eaten for 4 hours--- Jiupai News
As the "pistachio" of Indians, how scary are sloth bears? Even the tiger did not dare to provoke after the storm