Life improves for pair of abused bears.
A photo from Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary executive director Audrey Tournay’s archives shows one of two abused bears that arrived thin and missing fur after an early life of abuse.
Submitted photo
I have been told that one indication of advancing age is the tendency to look backwards – just a bit. So, I was searching through some old papers this morning and found the following. You who have visited the sanctuary will have met Mama Bear. This is how I wrote about her on June 5, 1996:
Two bears, a black one and a brown one, looking as old and moth-eaten as though they had been stored in a truck in the attic for a hundred years. Their background? We know very little. Were they born in a wilderness den somewhere, the mother killed and the two kidnapped and sold? Or were they born in a concrete enclosure, taken away from their mother and then sold?
We do know that they lived in a dark barn on the outskirts of Detroit. They were used as bait to teach dogs how to hunt bears; chained while the dogs attacked them. They are both declawed and defanged. They were fed hay, corncobs and junk food.
They were rescued by a policeman. We were notified when they had cleared customs up at Sault Ste. Marie. All day long we thought about them as they crossed the number 17 to Sudbury, to Parry Sound…Then, around 4 p.m. we stood in the barn doorway and watched the road. We heard the motor and then the U-Hall topped the hill, came carefully down the curves into the valley, was hidden for a moment by the trees and the house and then up the laneway.
The bears were here, they were home. At a fearful angle, because of the hillside terrain, the truck backed up to the gates of the enclosure. The bear crates were heavy, the brown bear weighed about 200 pounds, the black bear about 300 pounds. Anyway, the men had a difficult time positioning the crates, one at a time, so the bears would move down the improvised ramp and into the enclosure. Finally, hesitantly, the bears came down the ramp, into the enclosure, the gates were closed and we could clearly see the bears.
We could see and feel the hot anger at the humans who had reduced such magnificent animals to the condition of almost naked, dull-coated, dull-eyed creatures. We had a strong commitment to make those dull coats shine, the eyes shine with life.
Just then, they began to eat kibble, eggs, apples, lettuce, tomatoes, nectarines, chicken and drinking long and deep gulps of clear, cool, water. Their names were Red and Black.
Now they stood with their noses pressed against the chain link fence, snuffing in the fragrance of the wild valley. Hearing the wind and the singing birds.
“Soon,” we promised. “You will have a big enclosure. You will live there and never, never, be abused again.” A promise, but a limited one, because of the de-clawing and de-fanging, we could not give them the gift of freedom.
I’ll try and find more of their records. Meanwhile, huge and fat and relatively friendly, Mama Bear is still living at the sanctuary and you may meet her.
(Audrey Tournay is the executive director of Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary and a regular contributor to the Beacon Star.)