Setting Free The Bears
Dancing bears don't learn to dance. They're tortured into it. When they are cubs, their "trainers" smash their teeth with hammers to destroy their main defense. Their lips or noses are pierced with a metal loop linked to a chain leash. And their owners then cast them onto burning coal or sheets of hot metal while playing drums or tambourines in the background. Soon the painful Pavlovian method has the brown bears rearing on their hind legs, hopping from one foot to the other, even on flameless ground. Sounds harrowing? For years, the Greeks — hosts to one of Europe's largest populations of protected brown bears — seemed unfazed. But in 1992, Yannis Boutaris, the country's best-known winemaker, stepped in. "People thought I was mad," he recalls. "'What are you going to do?' they would say. 'Drop your grapes to save the bears?'" To a great extent, he has.
White-haired, urbane and a vivid visionary, the bespectacled Boutaris set up Arcturos, a two-hectare sanctuary for dancing bears confiscated (from their mainly Roma owners) after the practice was banned in Greece. Now, a decade later, the once-tiny nonprofit organisation has mushroomed into a cross-border project that tracks bear movements with electronic collars clasped on some of the estimated 150 endangered bears that roam Greece's frontiers with Albania and Macedonia.
So far, 13 bears have found a home in his fenced sanctuary, at Nymfaio, in northern Greece. Arcturos has launched a similar program for wolves, blocked a state highway that would have interfered with bear habitats, and is planning an ambitious project to convince consumers to switch to environment-friendly energy sources. "We've been pioneers," says Boutaris, 60, "not because we've done something unique, but because we altered people's attitudes about the environment here." Better yet, he adds, "we did so without hysterics." We'll dance to that.
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