FREE THE BEARS - The Mary Hutton Interview

Mary Hutton is an amazing animal activist and an amazing Australian. She is founder of Free The Bears Fund Inc. We caught up with her just after her latest trip to India. (29/10/2006) Here’s what she had to say.

Please Note - Not To Be Missed:

Mary Hutton told us about the screening on Network Ten at 3.30pm, a special by LJM Productions entitled "Dancing For A Dollar" all about Indian dancing bears on 30 December, 2006.

Read her interview with the Abolitionist and NAME-A-BEAR for $2000 to literally rescue one more bear off the streets of India. Read on and we’ll show you how to do it.

Abolitionist: You are just back from India so please tell us all the latest news.

Mary Hutton: The latest news is we do have a lot of work to do in India. I am just back from an eco tour group. I took 22 people, organised by World Expeditions over here in Perth. We have just had 14 days within India traveling through the countryside seeing lots of lovely places but seeing a lot of poverty as well. The highlight was seeing an actual tiger alive in the Ranthambore National Park and seeing all the saved bears at their sanctuary in Agra. They looked absolutely beautiful. They are so well looked after there. There were 2 young bears, probably 9 months old fully rehabilitated from their trauma and ordeal coming off the roads. We have saved over 250 bears to date. Unfortunately we lost a few due to rabies or TB or general ill health but the one’s we have in the sanctuary now are just beautiful.

The Kalandar gypsies are really coming on board with “The Kalandar Rehabilitation Program”. They are just queuing up to get rid of their bears. They want the money. They want to start another business because it is now definitely against the law to have a dancing bear on the roads of India. We traveled in the North and for the whole time we were in India we didn’t see one bear on the road. We are very, very happy about that situation. We do have about another 500 bears to go. We are investing in some land. We just paid some farmers to vacate the land and its enabled these farmers to relocate and grow their food. We hope to start developing this land in the New Year because we need this 45 acres to accommodate all of the bears that remain on the road. We have a big job ahead of us.

With Gita from Wildlife SOS we’ve gone through, State-by-State, how many bears were left on the road. In one State alone there’s 150 further up north from Agra. We have to expand our territory and we have to save as many bears as we possibly can.

Abolitionist: Are you fundraising to buy this new land Mary?

Mary Hutton: We definitely are. We are fundraising like crazy. We’ve got to develop the land to create a completely new sanctuary. Right opposite were we have the Agra Bear Rescue Facility you walk down, over the river and there’s the 145 acres. It’s so near yet it’s so far away from us now because we do have to find the money to build this new sanctuary. Not only that but the bears that we have in four holding areas as well, we have 25 bears waiting to come into the Agra facility. They have all been micro-chipped, looked after by the vets and the keepers but it’s now a question of getting the money to bring these bears in. We have just spent $92,000 rescuing another 48 bears in the last few weeks. We are doing absolutely as much as we can to relieve all this pain for these bears, as quickly as we can
Abolitionist: What is stopping the Kalandars from breeding more bears once they hand over what bears they have to you and Free The Bear Fund and Wildlife SOS, Mary?

Mary Hutton: One thing is they cannot go back into the program of having a dancing bear because they have to hand in their license and it’s against the law. When the approach is made we ask outright “Do you want to come into the Kalandar Rehabilitation Program”.

If they do say no we don’t then that bear will be confiscated so they have lost their chance to start another business with the seed money from us. Poaching still does go on but it’s very sporadic at the moment. Once we get all of the bears off the road we are hoping that poaching will then stop because then the Sloth bear species will naturally occur in the wild again. Once the Kalandars come into the program and we give them the money, monitoring is very, very strict.

Let me go into this in more detail because this is a common question from people who ask us how will giving the Kalandars money stop them going back to their trading in dancing bears. The monitoring is done in such a way that the Kalandar families do not go back into the trade. If they do they will be prosecuted. They will go to prison and they will be much worse off because they will be fined and because don’t have any money it will be a jail term.

Mary Hutton: It’s very upsetting. The bears are taken from the mother at 2 months old. The mother is often killed in the process of trying to protect her babies. That cub is traumatized by the fact that it has lost its mother. The cubs are then taken back to the Kalandar village and they are put under a basket to disorient them completely, deprived of light.

Some these cubs are in the dark, they are lonely, they don’t know what’s happened to them and they are left for 2 or 3 days without any food. So when they are finally taken out of the basket they are completely submissive. The Kalandars then get a very hot needle and pierce the nose right up through the muzzle to thread that first rope up through the muzzle up through the nostril. That is tied there and as the bear grows another hole is made as the rope is going to be too thin to control her in the growth process from being a baby cub to being a juvenile bear.

Sometimes the bears are placed on hot coals to keep telling them to “dance” and sometimes they use a wadi which is a stick so every time they see the stick they know the man is about to beat their little legs.

Once the bear is programmed and only needs to see the stick, he jumps up and down and that’s called “dancing”.

They are kept on a piece of rope probably no longer than 3 to 4 feet and they are kept on that rope for the rest of their lives. It’s trauma and stress throughout for these cubs and if they do survive the initial loss of their mother in the first few weeks, the mortality rate for a cub being 50%, it’s a very, very long painful life.

Abolitionist: Many people are aware of the bear bile issue and the dancing bear issue but not that many people are aware of the work you are doing in Cambodia against banning Cambodian Bear Paw Soup.

Mary Hutton: The Bear Paw Soup is considered a delicacy in Cambodia. Some bears are taken because the meat is tender. The cub again is taken from the wild, the mother most likely killed. The cubs are put in a cage. This is not a dish specific to Cambodian either. The Koreans, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Taiwanese all go and order their bowls of Bear Paw Soup. The paw is cut off and the stump is sealed in hot coals and on oil to stop the bleeding. That paw is served as a delicacy. It’s called “Braised Bear Paw Soup” served with onions and garlic and it can fetch around US$200-$300 dollars per serve.

This has been stopped to a huge extent by a big advertising awareness campaign that we worked with the group “Wild Aid” who are up there as well. 70% of this has now been stopped. There was one restaurant that didn’t comply. He was closed down by the Mayor and threatened with if he serves anything like this again, including any exotic pieces such as tigers, he would not be allowed to reopen. Due to this initiate it’s not very often now that you see a bowl of bear paw soup around on a menu.

If that one bear still survives having it’s paw cut off slowly each paw is taken by other people. Not so much now, because the trade is dying out, but that poor bear will go on until all four paws have gone. The bear then immersed in a boiling hot vat of water because people like to see the bear and ensure the meat is fresh before eating him.

We have made such a fuss about the Cambodian Paw Soup issue however we also know that bears are farmed in Vietnam and are trapped in other sorts of ways. I can tell you it is very distressing.

Abolitionist: In Asia what else are the bears used for apart from “dancing”, for their bear bile and for Bear Paw Soup?

Mary Hutton: In Pakistan there’s also the bear baiting issue. We have been assured by the Pakistani High Commission and the Wildlife Forestry Department that these events do not happen as much as they do but we have photographs happening and police have been paid off to turn a blind eye to watch it. The bear baiting in Pakistan does happen. It involves 2 pit bull dogs are fighting a bear that’s been de-clawed and de-toothed and tied up. There are bets on the fights on who wins and who doesn’t. That is worse than anything because it is just mutilation, slowly, slowly until that bear doesn’t have any fight left in it.

Abolitionist: Mary, you have been up close to the bears. What kind of personalities do they have?

Mary Hutton: They all have different personalities and they all have their own funny little ways about them. They can remember people, they can remember smells, they have their own little old friends at the sanctuaries, they have their own habits. Sometimes they don’t want to come out during the day, sometimes they just like to sit by the pool all day. Some just sit in the trees. They just adapt to the enclosure very nicely because they are peaceful and there’s a huge amount of room for them to wander around in. They do their own thing and we like them just to be themselves after all the trauma they have been put through.

Abolitionist: What kind of seed money are you looking at?

Mary Hutton: For every bear we take off the roads of India the seed money costs us $2000 or R48-50,000 depending on the rate of exchange. We pay this to the Kalandar then he goes away with the money. An advisory service is set up to see what he would like to do. They are buying sewing machines for the woman of the village, they are putting their children into schools as the money buys paper and schoolbooks and they are training the Kalandars to become auto rickshaw drivers which is a trade very much in demand in Agra because of the Taj Mahal. The Kalandar gypsies are also being trained for carpet weaving, jewellery making etc because they want to get out of this awful business of the “dancing” bears and they want to turn to something good. All donations to Free The Bears are tax deductible and 100% of that money goes straight to the bears because once we save a bear, we have to look after them.

If anyone wanted to donate $2000.00 they would be very, very welcome to name a bear because they have literally rescued one more bear off the streets of India. We have schools fundraising $2000.00 to Name-A-Bear, to name a bear after a teacher or their favourite person or a family member. We have people who have donated their own $2000.00 and they have named their own bear. We operate our organisation on a very thin administration. I run the office from my converted garage and we don’t pay any overheads for our office space. We have two woman running the office on a part-time basis. Tell people that the money they give is what the bears get and this is how we keep going.

Abolitionist: How can people reading this help you?

Mary Hutton: They can help by writing letters of protest to the governments concerned. They can help by raising funds. I have learnt that you can’t do much without money. In fact you can’t do anything without money. The first thing we do is work with the governments. They tell us, “You put your money where your mouth is by building an enclosure and we’ll back you up by confiscating bears”. This is what we do. We do not criticize governments or countries; we ask how can we help you help your endangered species? We have been welcomed into a lot of countries in South-East Asia including Thailand, Laos, India, Cambodia and now we are going into Vietnam to help with the bear bile farms.

If people want to help they can send donations to:

Free The Bears
P O Box 1393
Osborne Park DC
WA 6916

Email: info@freethebears.org.au

Or visit the website: www.freethebears.org.au