from Chapter 9: Rehabilitating Bärle: From Circus Bear to Polar Bear

I crouched down and peered through the barred end of the crate. At the opposite end sat a small female polar bear with her back to me. Expecting no response, I quietly called her name: “Bärlein,” which means “little bear” in German. She turned around and came over, looking me right in the eyes; we were nose to nose. I was completely surprised by her casual response and by what I saw: she was an adult bear — nineteen years old, we estimated — with adult features, but her eyes reflected the innocence of a cub. I had never encountered this before. Adult bears have adult eyes, which reflect experience and knowledge.

We were in the middle of the FedEx warehouse at the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, and the hangar-amplified noise of banging machinery, motorized equipment, and confusion of people doing their jobs was psychotropic — at least to me, and not in a good way. Bärle didn’t seem bothered by it at all. But then, she had spent her entire adult life in what amounted to a crate in a circus environment, surrounded by incessant noise and sadly habituated to being treated like cargo. Odd as it may seem, her crate was the only place where she was safe, where no one could physically hurt her.

Bärle’s rescue had begun six years earlier, in March 1996, when Ken Gigliotti, a professional photographer for the Winnipeg Free Press in Manitoba, a province that happens to be home to thousands of wild polar bears, was vacationing in Cozumel, Mexico, and saw seven polar bears being beaten with prods and forced to perform ridiculously demeaning tricks, like balancing on a giant ball, during a show at the now infamous Suarez Brothers Circus. Gigliotti went about questioning circus staff about the origins of the bears and was told that three of the suffering polar bears were allegedly from Manitoba. When his photographs and findings were published in the newspapers, there was a global public outcry. In August 2002, the provincial government of Manitoba passed the Polar Bear Protection Act. But this was too late for the polar bears in the Suarez Brothers Circus, who were already far from home, being beaten daily by human predators, and being tortured by tropical heat and inhumane living conditions.

An extraordinary team of unlikely players was eventually able to expropriate the bears in a series of unlikely events. The Suarez Brothers Circus, which had ignored accusations of animal mistreatment, made a tactical error when it moved the show to Puerto Rico, a self-governing American territory where the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulations for animal husbandry apply. The inner group of movers and shakers were the Detroit, Maryland, North Carolina, and Point Defiance zoos, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) Bear Taxon Advisory Group, FedEx, Polar Bears International (PBI), the United States Congress, the usda, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Office of Law Enforcement. On November 19, 2002, six of the polar bears were FedExed to their new zoo home destinations (the seventh bear had been moved to the Baltimore Zoo eight months before). It was a cold and humid night in Wayne County, Michigan — perfect weather to receive a polar bear. The drop in temperature from the hundred degrees Fahrenheit that had tortured Bärle for years to the forty degree chilly night air could have accounted for a great deal of her comfort level. This was the first of many positive changes to come.

We transported Bärle to the hospital quarantine at the zoo, where she was to stay for the requisite thirty-day observation-and- treatment period. Although all of us agreed that the existing quarantine rooms were insufficient by current standards, which is why the zoo built a new animal hospital with all the bells and whistles, we also agreed that the current facility was a huge improvement for Bärle. We estimated that her circus cage had been about four feet wide and eight feet long. She had had nothing for bedding, had eaten dog food and bread, and had often gone without a constant supply of clean drinking water.

We pulled up to the hospital doors, moved Bärle’s crate onto a heavy-duty gurney, and wheeled her into quarantine. Then we secured the crate to the enclosure doorway with chains and locks. Until now, Bärle had busied herself with keeping her balance as her crate was jostled around. She gave the impression of being the most patient bear I had ever worked with. Most often, bears are extremely annoyed and stressed by being confined to a crate, and they pace, head-swing, bounce to try to break the crate, slam bars, spit, growl, woof, and huff protests in your face. There had to be more to Bärle’s response than patience; time would tell as we began to peel off the layers of trauma from life in the circus.

There were three consecutive rooms, with an adjoining hall at the back, in her new temporary home. In total, she was about to occupy eighty square yards of space. This was fifteen times the amount of space that she was used to.

Ultimately, Bärle would go to live at the Detroit Zoo’s new Arctic Ring of Life facility. There, she would join a group of seven other adult polar bears sharing over two acres of indoor and outdoor space, which included a 13-foot-deep, 170,000-gallon saltwater pool, a 30,000-gallon freshwater pool, and a small indoor freshwater pool meant for play and bathing. This was at least 1,875 times more space than she had been used to. We ran the risk of overwhelming her with too much change all at once. Living in the quarantine for a few weeks would act as a good transition. The only times that Bärle had had more than four square yards of space in the circus was when she was performing or training to perform.

As we secured the crate to the gateway into the first quarantine room, I tried to take Bärle’s mind off the events by giving her a few grapes. She cautiously took one with her lips and, staring into my eyes, promptly dropped it. I gave her another, which she gently took and ate. We had no idea whether she had ever eaten grapes before, but they were a big success. She continued to take grapes, staring into my eyes — in my opinion, trying to understand whether I was friend or foe — and ate them as fast as I could get them through the mesh.

Finally, the crate was safely secured. The poignant moment of complete freedom from the gruelling years of torturous circus life had arrived; we opened the enclosure and crate gates with great anticipation. Nothing happened; Bärle didn’t move. She sat in the crate, quietly staring. The objective was for her to cross over to her new enclosure. We were all quiet — I’m sure I stopped breathing. I think we all did, not wanting to scare her more than this move and the last seventeen years already had.

It was very, very quiet; I could hear the traffic outside. Finally, slowly, she took a small step out of the crate, then another and another. Each of us, entirely focused on Bärle, whispered words of encouragement: “Good girl, Bärle, good girl.” She cleared the crate. She was in. Her ordeal was over. We closed the gates behind her and on her circus life forever. I breathed normally again. From this point on, the rehabilitation began.

Bärle took small, cautious steps from the front room to the back hall. Her back legs seemed unsteady, possibly from the move or from years of physical abuse. We took nothing for granted and made a note to monitor the situation. She feigned interest in a few grapes on the floor; glancing sideways down the long hall ahead of her, she locked in on the three-foot-high pile of fluffed straw so fresh you could smell it. Like a slow missile, Bärle headed right for it. She sniffed it, mouthed it, and touched it with her paw. Has she ever had so much clean straw all to herself before? I wondered. Cautiously, she stepped into it with one paw, then the other. Picking up speed, she crouched down on her belly, pushed her front legs behind her, and mowed through the pile on her chest, pushing with her upright back legs. She flopped sideways into the pile and rolled onto her back, feet in the air, rubbing, gyrating, a smile on her face, saliva running from her nose and mouth. She seemed to be experiencing pure pleasure. The dance of joy lasted several minutes. In a crescendo, she crashed on her left side, curled into a C shape, crammed her right paw into the straw under her head, closed her eyes, and immediately fell asleep. It was midnight. She was exhausted, and so were we. We turned on the fans that brought the cold night air inside, turned off the lights, and went home. Bärle woke up two days later.

The greatest evil bestowed on this little bear in the circus was that her senses had been overloaded and deprived all at the same time. The witch’s brew of noises (tunes playing on top of each other, people and machinery vocalizing) and smells (pizza, popcorn, deep-fried hotdogs), and the bumper-car activity of people were meaningless to a bear and had to be tuned out for survival. Imagine living in a huge mall, in a perpetual Christmas-shopping aura, for seventeen years! Turning inward to mind her own bear business was a problem too, because there was absolutely nothing to do — zero relevant stimulus for a bear — nothing to investigate, no bedding for nest building, no bears to properly interact with, nothing. Like a cub, she was innocent of her own abilities.

Much of Bärle’s knowledge of other bears was brutal. The male polar bears, who were twice her size, were desperately aggressive toward the females.6 These males, also whipped and prodded by their trainer, were no doubt too afraid of their human predator to go after him, so, in a sort of bear Stockholm syndrome, they unleashed their anger on the — much smaller — female bears, which included Bärle and another female, named Alaska, who was later rehabilitated at the Maryland Zoo. Although Bärle was constantly surrounded by humans and other bears, she was utterly alone.

One of the most humbling things about working with bears is coming to understand just how remarkably forgiving some of them can be. Making contact with Bärle was one of those moments. After she had slept for forty-eight hours, I began the quest to develop a relationship, which I hoped to ultimately parlay into a trusting friendship. Responding to humans in her past had been precarious, causing her pain at worst or yielding nothing useful at the very least. I didn’t know what to expect. She had her back to me. I gently called her name: “Bärle.” Nothing. I wondered if she had lost her hearing. Again I called her name. Again she ignored me. A third time, I called her name. She turned an ear in my direction; I gave her praise, tossed her grapes, and continued. I called her name again. Bärle looked at me. I tossed her masses of grapes and gushed with warm praise. Within two days — after seventeen years of abuse — I called her name, and Bärle turned toward me. I was a controlled explosion of joy — I didn’t want to scare her — heaping praise on top of kudos with bunches of grapes. I called Bärle’s name, and she came over! It was unnerving: she crawled over on her elbows and knees. Bärle had spent the first few days lying down; she rarely stood or walked. Was there a medical reason? It occurred to me that, for years, she had never had to get up and walk to get anywhere, because the cage she lived in was only four square yards. It made more sense to crawl over to the edge than it did to get up. In the quarantine area, the distance from her nest over to where I stood at the fence was over ten feet. It could not have been comfortable to crawl that distance on a cement floor. Within a few days, Bärle gave up crawling for walking.

One morning during the first week, she seemed to be favoring her front left paw when she walked over to greet me. I placed my palm flat against the mesh of the fence, hoping that she would match my behavior, which some bears often do, so that I could see her paw pad. Seeing my raised hand, Bärle seemed to want to comply with something. She looked up and saw a tiny metal shelf, no bigger than her paw, used as a feeding shelf for small primates. She dutifully tried, in vain, to get up onto it. I felt sick. Obviously, a raised hand was the circus signal for her to get up onto something. Immediately I removed my hand. I felt ashamed. I had just asked Bärle to do a trick, exactly the association I didn’t want her to make in her new home.

In the circus, Bärle had spent the majority of her “free” time pacing — walking three steps forward and then backing up three steps, swinging her head side to side in synchrony with her gait. The best way to make pacing stop is to not have it begin at all. Our objective was to do our best to make Bärle’s new life free from reminders of the old. Since her circus training had been done entirely through negative reinforcement, we decided not to ask her to do any training for veterinary procedures until she chose to be part of the training with the other bears. That would not be for some time; Bärle had more basic things to learn first.

Just like the cub Miggy, Bärle had not tried new foods since her arrival but just ate omnivore chow sparingly — with the exception of grapes, which she ate by the pound. It was time to introduce her to the many new options, just as her mother would have done for her as a cub in the wilds of northern Manitoba, where she was thought to be from.

Bärle and I had a series of food preparation and eating sessions. I gave her some peanuts, which she ate, nut and shell. It didn’t really matter to me how she ate them, but I knew that the other polar bears ate the nuts only. I proudly demonstrated the mouth peanut-shelling skills that I had been perfecting with Miggy. In short order, Bärle was cracking, isolating, and eating the nut and spitting out the shell. Actually, the spitting process took some time. At first, she just sort of pushed the rejected shell out of her mouth and let it sit on her lip, where it eventually dried up then fell off. With practice and my demonstration, she learned to spit shells with vigor.

We ate other fruits and vegetables together; some she liked and continued to eat, and others she didn’t. We both agreed that raw eggplant wasn’t really worth the effort. It was vital that Bärle learn how to eat raw fish, however. Whole, raw herring, capelin, and trout were diet staples for the other polar bears whom she was soon to meet. I had put small fish piles in her enclosure; she had ignored them. I poked a herring halfway through the mesh, hoping that she would take it. She sat and stared at me. When I wiggled it, she smiled, amused. I threw it in front of her, hoping she would at least sniff it. She looked at the fish as it flopped down in front of her, then she looked back at me. I had a feeling that she was waiting for the fish-eating demonstration. I just couldn’t do it. I’d likely vomit, which would be counterproductive if she followed my sage foraging advice.

Perhaps if I brought her some live fish, their movement might trigger an innate bite-and-eat response. So I put eight live trout into the water in her stock tank, showing them to her as they were poured from the bucket into the tank, slipping and flopping. She was watching me, but not once did she look at the trout, not even when I gave her access to the stock tank with the fish busily swimming around. I left her with the live fish for several days, hoping that she would eat them, but each morning I counted eight fish.

Fortunately — depending on whether you have a fish, bear, or human perspective — one trout flopped onto the floor and desperately leapt into the air, creating a spectacle of activity that caught Bärle’s attention. She lay down on her belly with her nose only inches away from the fish. Her eyes grew intently focused, her smile so broad it created folds like laugh lines. When the fish stopped moving, she gently touched him with her nose and reactivated his desperate death throes. She sat up and attempted to pick him up between her front paws, but the fish slipped out and flopped to the floor. Still smiling, Bärle tried again, this time successfully. She lip-checked the fish, and he wiggled. Then she tongue-checked him and delicately stripped off a piece of his skin, and mercifully — from my perspective — ate him. After that she ate her dead fish except for the head, which she always spit out with vigor.

Food was not the only thing that Bärle didn’t interact with when she first arrived. Every morning, I found her enrichment items and toys untouched. Her enclosure was almost as neat and clean as it had been when I left the night before, partly because she spent a great deal of time sleeping in her straw and partly, I believe, because she wasn’t used to doing anything in her down time at the circus.

This changed in a flash. By the end of two weeks, her morning enclosure was a pleasant mess of straw, feces, destroyed cardboard boxes, toys, and puzzle feeders that had been upended and experimentally thrown into the stock-tank water. She was experiencing the daylights out of everything by sniffing, touching, tossing, tasting, and destroying. As a result, an enclosure that had been large and complex enough for a timid, inexperienced bear had suddenly become too small for a now active, learning bear. We had to increase the size and, of greater importance, the complexity of her living space in a hurry. We now ran the risk that she would resume her old pacing and head-swinging behavior to fill her day.

Bärle could finish her quarantine period in isolation in the maternity wing at the Arctic Ring of Life, which gave her only slightly more space but was all new to her. She would also gain a five-foot-deep freshwater pool in one room, a straw-filled maternity den, and the sights, sounds, and smells of the other polar bears living in the compound. Bärle was anesthetized and moved. The veterinary crew made good use of this knockdown by taking blood and skin samples, cleaning her teeth, weighing her, and giving her a second checkup; the first had been in Puerto Rico before her flight. When Bärle woke, she was in the maternity wing, and for the first time since she left the circus, she could smell polar bears.