Depending on who you ask, the Yangon Zoo is either a great place to spend an afternoon or a depressing collection of sad, mistreated animals.
We visited on a recent rainy day, so that probably didn’t lend itself to a sunny impression of the place. Neither did the behavior of some of the zoo’s bears, who looked like they weren’t enjoying their captivity (to be fair, does any animal?).
One Asian Black Bear seemed to be missing a limb. When we approached, it limped over on three legs and fell down again, as if the 10-second journey was too exhausting to continue.
But what really held our attention was something that happened at the sun bear enclosure, where we encountered this poor, deranged-looking creature with some sort of pink fleshy ball where the right eye should be.
As we approached the bear did something unusual, at least to the people gathered around.
He, or she, came as close as possible to the bars, stuck one foot in the mouth and started making weird warbling sounds.
None of us knew what was going on. This continued for about a minute.
We sent the footage to Matt Hunt, the chief executive of the non-profit organization Free the Bears.
Hunt said that the bear is doing what experts call “humming.”
“It’s a behaviour that has been seen in wild cubs and is generally thought to be a way of cubs bonding with their mothers, or indicating that they want to feed. When bear cubs are captured from the wild and hand-raised by humans they will often continue this humming, coupled with sucking on a body part, for some time – we have rescued bears almost 20 years old who will still do this after their afternoon meal,” he said, adding that it’s difficult to say whether the ‘humming’ is good or bad.
“Experts cannot decide if this should be viewed as a negative, stereotypical behavior that results from sub-optimal rearing conditions, or is simply a bonding behavior that comes from the bears associating humans with food. Although conditions for this bear look far from ideal in Yangon Zoo, I don’t think I’d describe it as a cry for help.”
We’ve reached out to the Htoo Foundation, which oversees the zoo, to ask to speak to officials in charge of the sun bears but have yet to receive a reply.
Photo and video / Coconuts Yangon
