Bear Baiting in Pakistan

A bear is tethered in the middle of a ring and fighting dogs are released at it. A single contest lasts around three minutes, and a bear is often forced through several in one day. Before it ever reaches the ring the animal has been disarmed: its canine teeth are pulled out and its claws are filed down, so it cannot defend itself effectively against the dogs. The events are organised predominantly by local gangsters who own the fighting dogs.

The bears are poached from the wild — mostly Asian black bears, the same species also caged for bile elsewhere in Asia, along with Himalayan brown bears. The Asian black bear is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List and on CITES Appendix I, so the trade that supplies baiting is illegal on both animal-welfare and wildlife grounds.

Bear baiting has been banned in Pakistan under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act since 1890. The problem has never been the absence of a law; it has been enforcement in rural areas where the events are organised. What has worked is sustained monitoring paired with somewhere for confiscated bears to go. When monitoring work began in 2003 there were roughly 300 bears in the baiting trade; recent estimates put it at around 70.

A rescued baiting bear cannot be released: with no canines and filed claws it cannot survive in the wild, so it needs lifetime sanctuary care. That capacity is what the decline was built on — Kund Park opened in 2000, and the Balkasar sanctuary was established in 2010 by the Bioresource Research Centre with the World Society for the Protection of Animals (now World Animal Protection), and holds dozens of former baiting bears. Supporting the organisations that run that sanctuary capacity and monitoring is the effective route. WARN aims to raise support for partner-led rescue in Pakistan — street dogs in Karachi, at Karachi street-dog appeal — but it does not fund bear-baiting work, and will not ask you to fund a programme it does not run.