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Bear paints for more like him.....Riddhi Doshi
Wildlife S.0.S finds a unique way to spread its message against animal atrocities Talking about this rare initiative, Kartick Satyanarayan from Wildlife S.O.S says, “The aim of the painting and the auction is to create an awareness to rescue dancing bears.” The founders, Satyanarayan and Geeta Seshamani, believe India’s dancing bears, a tradition that uses fear and pain to make animals move about to music, had their beginning during the Mogul era. The organisation’s research on the same started in 1995 and led them to the people who still use the bears for such entertainment. Kalanders are people who have been in India doing bear dancing for the past 300 years. While their ways may seem to be anachronistic, these Kalanders are now tied economically to the plight of the bears, informs the NGO’s website. Kartick says, “We also realised the Kalander people were quite poor themselves and are stuck in this strange time warp; their own community was not helping them. And hence the only way to proceed was to help both the bears and the Kalanders.” The NGO found that bears were being taken from the wild on a regular basis. “These bears were living under such stressful conditions that they couldn’t even reproduce! Around 100-150 cubs were being poached from the wild, sometimes this would involve the killing of the mother bears to procure the same,” informs Kartick. The NGO is now working towards helping the Kalanders get better jobs. They have also freed a few bears by offering the family some amount of money. Besides the painting by Ramkali, there was another work done by an elephant put up for auction. The painting by the elephant was aimed at spreading awareness about the atrocities the animals have to face while involved in commercial activities like loading heavy wood etc. |
