It’s Not Easy Running a Retirement Home for Old Dancing Bears

Although the management and staff at the park are achieving ever greater success in their efforts to develop the bears’ instincts and restore them to nature, unfortunately it has to be said that the residents of the local town, Belitsa, are not quite mature enough to have a Dancing Bears Park in their neighborhood.

Why do I say that?

Because when park manager Dimitar Ivanov tells them the beautiful story of how the lives of the bears and lions have been saved, the citizens of Belitsa respond with comments that miss the point.

They ask, for example, “How much is an air ticket to South Africa for a lion?”

Or “What’s the monthly cost of keeping a bear?” Or “How much does their food cost?”

There’s no acceptable answer to these questions. If the park staff don’t reply, the people start to invent sums of several million leva and pass them off as true. But even if they’re told the correct sum, things are no better.

For example, the monthly cost of food for one bear is 400 euros (US$425).

The monthly cost of maintaining the entire park is 20,000 euros (US$21,000). 

These figures are not a secret, but the citizens of Belitsa use them to criticize the park. Whenever there’s talk of park finances, they start to compare how many of them could live on the same amount, how much firewood they could buy for the winter, how many pairs of shoes they could buy for their children, and how many free school meals could be supplied—despite some 25 years of economic transformation, many children in the Bulgarian provinces still suffer from malnourishment.

When they hear that a bear’s food costs 400 euros a month, their hair stands on end. Very few families in Belitsa have that much money, and dozens of them have lots of children.

And when the citizens add up all those large sums, they come to the unpleasant conclusion that far more care is taken of the bears than of them. While the animals are being taught resourcefulness, conflict solving, and hibernation, while pools are being built for them and playgrounds adapted to their needs, the people of Belitsa are being left to fend for themselves. Although they’ve been learning freedom for longer than the bears, they don’t have a team of experts to help them with the transformation.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t born a bear,” the former mayor of Belitsa, Hasan Ilan, once said bitterly, as he compared the park’s budget with the town’s.

The staff at the park do their best not to take this sort of comment to heart. They know perfectly well that they’re not the people to whom they should be addressed. It’s not their fault that Four Paws is successfully raising funds for the bears and other animals, and not for the residents of the Bulgarian provinces who’ve been cast adrift in the process of transformation. The people of Belitsa should go and complain to their government, and expect it to improve their fate, and forget about the bears.

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Despite all these misunderstandings, the staff at the park regard being on good terms with the people of Belitsa and the local area as one of their priorities. They do everything they can to encourage them to visit the park, and they invest in good relations. They put up notices in the town with pictures of the liberated bears. The local council uses the animals to promote the town on the Internet. The park staff have even thought of inviting the children from the schools in Belitsa to come and receive an annual Easter egg.

The first year they made very careful preparations. There were competitions, a clown, a small snack, and puppeteers at the playground. The party was a huge success. So the park staff were very resentful when it turned out that the only response from the parents of the invited children was to ramble on about what would happen if one of the bears escaped and started attacking people and eating them. “Nobody had a good word to say—no one mentioned what a great party it was, how nice it had been or how happy the children were,” complains one of the staff. “But they all kept asking: ‘Are you sure you’re able to control those bears?’ We’d reply that, yes, we are—after all, we have a live electric fence and it’s very high. But then they ask: ‘All right, but what if a bear digs a tunnel?’ To which we say: ‘We’ve got cameras. If one of them starts getting up to something, we’ll notice at once.’ And then one guy asks: ‘But what if one of them tries to escape across the tree tops?’ Words fail me!”

Luckily, several years went by, none of the bears escaped, and on top of that several people from Belitsa started working at the park. The local people have become accustomed to the retired dancing bears, and it began to look as if relations between them could only get better. 

Unfortunately, soon after, the citizens of Belitsa found out that every few months Dr. Marc Sven Loose, a dentist, comes from Germany to see the bears. And once again people began to sound off, saying how could a special dentist be brought in for the bears, when in actual Belitsa 90 percent of the citizens had no money for treatment, and either went about with holes in their teeth or with no teeth at all. “Few people can afford a filling,” admits Liliana Samardzhyeva, the local dentist, who receives patients at a small cottage with a red roof. “Usually, they just have their teeth pulled. If someone comes along and I say it’ll cost 35 leva to fill the tooth and 20 to extract it, the choice is almost always the same—we’ll extract it. Though most people can’t even afford that. Then what do I do? I do the extraction on credit. Once they have the money, they can come and pay it.”

“People shouldn’t look at it like that,” says Dimitar Ivanov, the park manager. “Nobody knocked their teeth out on purpose. But these bears were deliberately tortured. To begin with, many of them are incapable of chewing anything, and if we don’t help them, they’ll die of hunger or they’ll be seriously sick. It’s a really sad sight to see a rescued bear trying his hardest to chew nuts, first with the left then with the right side of his jaw—he obviously wants to, but he can’t manage it at all.”

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But the biggest fuss at the level of “park vs. town” occurred at the very start. The manager at the time was eager for as many of the local people as possible to come and see their new neighbors.

Special vehicles were provided for anyone who was interested to travel to the park and take a look at the bears. But since everything in the park is accessible, the visitors were taken to every part of it—including the observation tower, the small café, the gift shop, and finally the bears’ larder.

It happened to be spring, and as the bears’ diet is adapted to whatever they would be eating at each season in the wild, there were several boxes of strawberries in the larder. “And that was the trigger,” one of the staff tells me. “There were no questions at all about what we actually do or how many bears we’d managed to rescue. Or how important it is for the town of Belitsa, which thanks to us is becoming world famous, as well as for the bears, whom we have saved from barbaric practices. Oh no. There was only one topic of conversation: these bears chow down on strawberries.

“‘Our children don’t eat strawberries, because we can’t afford them,’ the people said. ‘But they’re throwing strawberries to bears by the boxful.’

“Nobody bothered to calculate that if there were five boxes standing there, that only meant a pound of strawberries per bear. Nor did anybody notice that the bears have to eat strawberries, because if we’re going to create a semblance of freedom for them, we have to do it through their diet too. When I talk to people, I wonder if they have any understanding of the concept behind our park, the point of the major change we’re making here. One guy once asked me: ‘Tell me, why is your park called the Dancing Bears Park, when they don’t dance at all?’ Words fail me when I hear that sort of thing!”

–Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

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From Dancing Bears by Witold Szablowski, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, courtesy Penguin Books. Copyright 2018, Witold Szablowski.