Female Himalayan bear faces health risks at zoo

Calls come on heels of death of female African elephant in April this year due to “inappropriate” conditions

KARACHI:

Wildlife activists and experts have sounded the alarm over the life of Rano, a lone female Himalayan bear crammed in a small cage at Karachi Zoo.

The calls come on the heels of the death of a female African elephant in April this year due to “inappropriate” conditions at the same facility, prompting local and international organisations to push for immediate steps to save other animals from a similar fate.

Also known as the Himalayan red bear, the Himalayan brown bear is a subspecies of the brown bear found in the western Himalayas. It is the largest mammal in the region, with males reaching up to 2.2 metres (7.2 feet) in length, while females are a little smaller. The bear, whose natural habitat is the cold alpine meadows of Deosai National Park and other mountain regions of northern Pakistan, is a critically endangered species with only 150 to 200 left in the country, mainly because of human intrusion and the climate change.

Languishing in a barren cage, Rano was brought to the Karachi Zoo in 2017 along with an Asiatic black bear who died in 2020. Her cage has two small chambers and an open courtyard with a tiny pond in the middle. The weather-beaten bear’s coat has already started losing its colour due to the hot and humid weather of the city.

“She needs to be taken out of the Karachi Zoo as soon as possible because she does not belong to any zoo,” Mahera Omar, a wildlife activist from Karachi, told Anadolu.

Omar insisted that the bear should be moved to a wildlife sanctuary in northeastern Pakistan before this winter. The sanctuary, established by a wildlife biologist Fakhar-i-Abbas in 2010, has already agreed to take Rano back. “Rano has suffered enough,” said Omar, cofounder of the Pakistan Animal Welfare Society.

Rano is believed to have been poached from the wild as a cub and spent years in captivity in a private zoo before being brought to her current home in 2017 along with a male Asiatic black bear. The pair were made to live inside a Victorian-era cement pit that housed the zoo’s previous bear, Emma, who died in 2013.

Following the death of the black bear, it took a court order for authorities to shift Rano to her current cage.

However, Aamir Ismail Rizvi, deputy director of Karachi Zoo, claims that Rano is a Syrian bear and was brought to the facility “under an exchange programme from a private zoo” operating in the northern outskirts of Karachi. :It does not require cold conditions. It’s very much fine here,” Aamir told Anadolu.