I have started on a new book with the working title of From Polar Bears to Porcupines. I'm far from certain of a finishing date, but here is one of the chapters that may end up there, no doubt altered by editors and writers group colleagues, but it is at least a start. I'm calling it A Bear Cub and a Dog.
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One could almost
set one’s calendar to predict that every spring there would be a call from the
provincial Department of Tourism and Renewable Resources (DTRR) about some
orphan black bear cubs being found somewhere up north. The year 1980 was no
exception but the timing was a lot earlier than usual and we got no call.
Black bears breed in mid-summer and usually deliver their cubs in late January or early February,
when the cubs are quite tiny and almost unable to walk. They stay in the den
for some time, nursing as needed and gradually growing stronger until they are
ready to go exploring with mum. They stay with her until they are about a year
and a half old.
This mother bear
cannot have known what the terrible noise she could hear actually was.
No doubt the growling diesel engine would
be a sound she knew, but probably did not associate with danger. What she
cannot have known was that this particular diesel was a huge earth mover
clearing an area around where she had denned up to prepare it for a mining
camp.
Next thing she
had been crushed to death by tonnes of a mix of earth, rock and trees.
The earth mover’s
driver must have been right on the ball because he was quickly out of his cab
to see what he had wrought. There were two tiny cubs nestled against her chest.
Both were alive and would almost certainly have been mewling. I never met the
man, but I can certainly imagine his horror at the scene.
It was mid
January 26 and bitterly cold, with daytime highs hovering around the minus 20
Celcius mark, while at night it dipped below minus 30. For an adult bear,
spending much of her time in the den where she could develop a real cozy fug—that
warm, smoky, stuffy atmosphere so favoured by the British— this would be no
sort of challenge, and she could easily keep a cub warm and snuggled up as it
lay between her front legs or on her chest where it could easily get some
nourishing milk from one of her two teats, which like a human’s are level with
the armpits.
These orphan cubs,
which would have looked so tiny and helpless against their mother’s breasts
probably weighed no more than a couple of pounds (as he would have gauged it in
those pre-conversion days) with their eyes still closed and their umbilical
cords hardly dry, would have no chance of living for a full day.
He must have
acted right away, no doubt on the radio installed in his cab (no cell phones in
1980). With admirable speed someone on the crew bundled the cubs up in a warm
blanket and headed to Saskatoon, some 400 km away.
I was out walking
my morning rounds, thoroughly cloaked in winter boots, insulated trouser layer,
parka and warm mitts all topped with a hood and toque when I heard the zoo
truck behind me. Brent the foreman was driving and invited me to hop in. As I
peeled off the headgear he explained that two tiny cubs had arrived and would I
please come and look at them.
It was obvious
that we had a challenge on our hands. The smallest cub was moribund, hardly
responding and making no noise. It died within a couple of hours. The larger
cub, a male, still had its eyes closed and a 10 cm length of dried umbilical
cord was attached to it belly. It weighed just under a kilogram, so the driver
had been right on, even without benefit of a scale. Perhaps he was from the
north and an experienced fisherman, which would have been no surprise given
that Saskatchewan has over 100,000 lakes, most full of fish.
If my reference books
were correct this meant that the cub might have than doubled its birth weight
and could have been as much as two weeks old, a very early arrival indeed.
We had had to
bottle raise bear cubs several times in past years, but they had been further
along on their development and weighed two or three kilograms by the time they
reached us. Two years before this little guy arrived I had even helped out with
the bottle raising and had taken two little cubs home.
 |
In the basement with Karen,
Charles and our new tenants.
In the
late 1970s sideburns were “in”.
|
Charles lifts a heavy burden as his
dad feeds one of the cubs.
 |
| A new playmate for Puss-in-Boots, or is that the other way round? |
There
our family, including our new kitten that we named Puss-in-Boots, got into the
act right away, although we did restrict them to the basement, or rumpus room
as it was called in those days. The term fitted well once the kitten and the
cubs got going.
My
wife Jo had returned to her medical career after two years of being a
stay-at-home mum to raise our children, Karen, eight, and Charles nearly three.
Jo’s work hours as a junior member of staff were pretty crazy, on duty every
other night, but she had to get back into the system.
 |
| Celia cuddles the cubs |
Celia
had joined the family from England to help out with the children and she took
to the task of feeding the cubs with enthusiasm. It is not every au pair girl from the English midlands
who gets to feed bear cubs from a bottle every few hours! Of course the kids had
joined in, Karen having no trouble, but Charles a tad too little to actually
hold both bottle and bear.
Even
before I came to Canada the zoo staff had had experience raising bear cubs and
so they got into the act right away. An evaporated milk product was diluted
with some water and fed in small amounts every three hours. Every time, right
after the feed, a damp cloth was used to help him eliminate and all seemed
well. The new cub showed a real tenacity and was obviously going to survive if
nothing went wrong. Celia had gone back to England and with the kids in school
and kindergarten we could not take this little guy home.
It was soon
obvious that, in terms of being able to function, especially sleep, was a major
challenge for the keepers, most especially for Sharon who had more or less
adopted the cub but began to look distinctly jaded over the next few days. On
top was the little matter of overtime, the care of many other creatures that
needed her attention, work hours and so on.
Then I had a light
bulb moment: I knew from something that Jo had told me when we were first
married that white elephant calves were greatly revered, even worshipped, in
some oriental and Indian cultures. Such a calf would be raised by a team of
human wet nurses. My imagination and knowledge of the milk intake required by a
150 kg elephant calf, as opposed to a 3 or 4 kilo human baby could only create
a line-up round the room with a gorgeous rainbow-coloured array of sari-clad mothers,
like butterflies in a tropical garden doing a tag-team act.
One of the most
remarkable examples of this particular form of cross fostering used to occur in
Siam (now Thailand). In his 1931 book Siamese
State Ceremonies: Their History and Function: With Supplementary Notes HoraceGeoffrey Quaritch Wales documented the god-like position held by the king and
described in great detail the reverence afforded to any white elephant and the
rewards given to any person who found one and brought it to his majesty.
… I may add that it was
formerly the custom to provide young White Elephants
with a large number of human wet-nurses. I
have in my possession a photograph, taken about a dozen years ago, of a
Siamese woman suckling a young elephant, probably a white one.
There are other
similar accounts from Burma.
Shelby
Tucker in the book
Among Insurgents:Walking Through Burma records the reverence afforded white elephants and
stated that the Burmese ladies competed for the privilege of being a wet nurse.
Other human / animal
wet nurse stories come to mind. There are plenty of
records of such a practice. For instance, as reported by
Samuel Radbill in 1976,
travelers
in Guyana observed native women breastfeeding a variety of animals, including
monkeys, opossums, pacas, agoutis, peccaries and deer. I have seen pictures of women nursing monkey and pig youngsters.
When it comes to
bears, I was told during my first visit to Pond Inlet on the northern tip of
Baffin Island to work on a polar bear project that women sometimes wet-nurse
abandoned polar bear cubs. I have written about this to the folks at the Nunavut
Arctic College in they have left no stone unturned in contacting a host of other
helpful people from many northern communities. A flood of emails arrived, but
no one has any record of such an activity, although almost all knew of polar
bear cubs that had been bottle raised.
Either I misunderstood my informant or it may have been a leg-pull. On
the other hand it might be true but forgotten due to the action of the sands of
time, as bear cubs have been nursed by women of the Ainu people of far northern
Japan and by the Itelmens of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.
There are other
unusual wet nurse and cross-fostering stories. These days it is simple to mine
the archives of Google, which will open up all kinds of accounts of such
activity. The story of the founding of Rome by the brothers Romulus and Remus,
nursed by a she-wolf, is a classic. Dogs seem to be commonly used, and there
are accounts of them nursing piglets, and both tiger and bear cubs (not at the
same time). Many species, including human babies, have been nursed by goats,
which seem to be a sort of “universal donor” at least for animals with hooves.
For the little
bear cub at the zoo it was just a case of trying to find a suitable lactating
female (not a human) to be the milk donor.
In those
pre-laptop, pre-Google days of 1981, but having some knowledge of this practice,
I said to Brent “Let me call Dr. Olfert at the animal resource centre at the
university and see if we can get some help.”
We were in luck. Dr. Olfert told me that a Terrier-cross bitch
had just whelped and that we could borrow her for the unusual task of raising a
bear cub.
The zoo van was
quickly on its way to the campus, and an hour later the little family was
safely settled in the barn, with plenty of straw bedding. I was unsure if the
bitch would accept the newcomer to her cute litter of four mainly white pups,
with the only black on them being around their heads and ears.
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| The milk bar is open |
Although I have later learned that dogs
will often accept such newcomers without the aid of drugs I decided to sedate
her and try to fool her into thinking that nothing unusual had happened when
she woke. I gave her an injection that knocked her out and then took a cue tip
and smeared some of her faeces over the little cub to try and fool her into
thinking that he was one of hers that needed a clean-up. When I put the cub at
her belly he at once latched on and began to suck as if there was no tomorrow.
When she awoke the bitch at once began to check
on her litter, and it was obvious that she considered the cub to be just one of
the gang. He took no notice of the attention, but of course he had quickly
fallen asleep after his feed. He soon perked up and within a week was mixing with
the pups, rolling, play-growling and so on, although in a slightly different
language and generally having a good time.
All went well
for about four weeks, but on my daily check-ups I began to notice that her
udder looked sore and on closer examination I thought that the needle-sharp
claws of her foster child might be causing the problem. She seemed to be uncomfortable
as soon as he began to feed and I needed to do something before she rejected
him outright.
I doubt that an
almost five-week-old bear cub has ever had his toenails clipped before, but
that is what we did. While Sharon held the little guy I used a set of human
clippers to do the job. He struggled a bit, but the process went smoothly,
unlike some dog clipping wrestling matches I engaged in during my general
practice days in Kenya. We then wrapped
the ends of his feet in sticky tape to try and further protect the udder and
put him back with his buddies.
This worked for only
two more days and then she simply turned off the taps. One day the pups and the
cub were nursing: the next she would have nothing to do with them. I suspect
that the cub’s tiny needle-sharp teeth may also have led to this dismissal.
We had weighed
the cub every three days and he had made great progress, now stretching the
spring to over two kilograms. I considered that he need more milk for a while
and so we went back to the same evaporated milk as before, but at a lesser
dilution, and only three times a day.
He did lose
weight for three days, but then the scale began to stretch every day. Within a
month he was up to five kilos. The pretty little bitch went home with all but
one of her charges. We hung on to him for about another month as he and the cub
had formed a bond and seemed to spend their days roughhousing, eating or
sleeping curled up together.
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| Play time for the odd couple |
Within a coupe
of weeks he was losing interest in the milk as he had found a much more
enticing diet in the bowl full of milk, fruit and ground meat on offer. The buddies stayed indoors for another six
weeks, the cub leaving the pup in the dust both literally when they played and
weight–wise. On April 15, two and half months after he arrived, he weighed
fifteen kilos, almost as much as the bitch had weighed when she adopted him.
By now the
weather had warmed up and we had two more cubs in the outside run (with a good
shelter attached). They had arrived from a logging camp where their unfortunate
mother had taken to terrorizing the staff as she raided the kitchen area in
early March, a much more “normal” time and so the now not-so-little guy joined
them. It took him only five days to become “top dog’. First to the food-bowl,
and as he weighed a few kilos more than his pen mates, generally bossing them
around.
There is a true
but sad ending to this and other bear events at the Forestry Farm zoo during
the time I served as the veterinarian there. Each year, as soon as the children
went back to school in early September, the now half-gown cubs were disposed
of. Many went to a hunt ranch in the USA, but when that operation no longer
wanted them they were simply shot. My protestations fell on deaf ears.
Perhaps I was
being unrealistic. First of all, the pen was quite unsuitable for anything
larger than a six-month old bear. Second they had been brought in on
compassionate grounds, and to excite the children. Now there were no small
visitors.
Even today, in
early 2014, zoos struggle with the successes of their breeding programs. A world-wide
Facebook campaign about the culling of a giraffe at the Copenhagen zoo that
garnered 30,000 signatures within a few days highlighted the problem of surplus
animals. What is one going to do with creatures that cannot be kept, either for
economic reasons, or because they are no longer able to contribute to the
genetic pool that so many responsible zoo managers work with? Keeping a giraffe
in captivity is an expensive business. Many dollars a day are required on food
supplies alone. On top are keeper’s wages, barn heating, veterinary work, and
so on and so on.
In a Time.com online article of Feb10 2014,
titled Marius The Giraffe Is Not The OnlyAnimal Zoos Have Culled Recently Lisa Abend opens with this
statement: “The killings of animals including zebras and pygmy hippos
are necessary for conservation, zookeepers say, leading to mandatory
euthanization in an effort to ensure there's room for other species, especially
ones that need special protection.”
The article is
accompanied by the remarkable picture of a big male lion tearing at the carcass
of a reticulated giraffe. Abend adds more species to her list and these come
from European zoos. They include “Zebra, antelopes, bison, pygmy hippos, and tiny Red River
hog piglets.” Leopard cubs and other pig species are
also listed.
At the Forestry
Farm, in these much more enlightened times, the only bears in the collection
are a pair of orphaned and fully human-habituated grizzlies, and they live in a
brand new enclosure that provides as much space as is feasible. They are fed a
balanced diet and would probably have no clue how to survive in the wild. They
would also be a real hazard if released as they would terrify and possibly
attack any person who might have the misfortune to encounter them.
One consequence of those many wrecks,
especially ones in the days of the sailing ships was the establishment of a
thriving population of horses. As we had arrived at midday there was no chance
to get to work right away so I took the chance for a late afternoon walk over
the dunes beyond the buildings. I soon saw the descendants of those unfortunate
beasts. Whatever the horses had looked like when they left Europe they were now
ponies. They were all much of a size and
almost uniform in colour, from dark to light brown. 
I saw them in procession along the
beach and closer up, as they had no fear of man. In late February their heavy
winter coats made them look scruffy, but smart was not what they needed to be.
Warm and windproof was the order of the day as the winter gales swept in from
the open Atlantic.
