The Hong Kong-based Animals Asia Foundation (AAF) has scored its first success at a nearly completed bear sanctuary in Tam Dao, near Hanoi, Vietnam.
Three bear cubs, rescued from a smuggler’s secret compartment under a passenger bus from Laos, have become the sanctuary’s first animal residents. The mischievious trio, named Olly, Mara and Mausi, soon settled into a sectioned-off area beside the sanctuary’s office.
AAF Vietnam director Tuan Bendixsen said the cubs were confiscated by Vietnam customs at a border crossing in Dien Bien Province after a tip-off that the bus carried illegal wildlife. The contraband cubs were handed to the Dien Bien Forest Protection Department (FPD), which lacks an animal-holding facility. The provincial government told the FPD to supply the cubs to a restaurant-hotel complex where they’d be caged for display to tourists. “Luckily, we learned about them and negotiated their release into our care,” Bendixsen said.
Veterinary nurse Candice Bloom said the cubs were severely malnourished. “They’d been kept in tiny chicken-cages and fed only watery rice sweetened with condensed milk and honey. They were filthy and needed nutritious formula milk.”
Bloom pegged the cubs, then just over two kilos each, at three months old. Now they have five daily feedings of milk formula similar to a mother-bear’s milk. Twice a day, they eat fruit. They’re gaining weight and strength.
The rescue team started to work overtime on a suitable enclosure. Ultimately, the plans call for a quarantine area, surgical facilities, dens, semi-natural outside enclosures and rehabilitation areas.
AAF founder Jill Robinson believes the cubs arrived at an ideal time. Her schedule to rescue 200 Moon Bears from Vietnamese bile farms has been disrupted by tardy construction. “This is frustrating and heartbreaking, but these little fellows help to bridge the gap, giving our staff and supporters a wonderful boost,” Robinson said. “They’ll be safe with us for the rest of their lives. I hate to consider what might have happened if the smuggler had succeeded. Probably the cubs were destined for torture on a bile farm.”
Olly, Mara and Mausi have been incredibly lucky, giving this true-life Asian story of The Three Bears a fairy-tale ending.
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