Rehabilitation and Release

Rehabilitating and liberating captive animals is an important way to reinforce populations of an endangered species, such as the Andean Bear, thus preventing the extinction. Our goal is to strengthen the populations of bears in Northern Ecuador. Our reintroduction program is based on IUCN guidelines (1995).

We work closely with our partner project, the Santa Martha Animal Rescue Centre. Here we care for bears that have come to us after they have been confiscated by Police. Bears are sometimes kept as pets in Ecuador (often in appalling conditions) or in hostels as tourist attractions.

Bears that come to us in this way may be very young (most are only a few months old) or may have been kept in conditions so bad as to cause both physical and mental damage. In these cases we keep and care for the bear as long as required with the ultimate goal of releasing it back into the wild.

The bears must learn to eat all the foods they will encounter in the wild. We go to the forest to find these foods and introduce them to the bears. Most bears easily learn the skills they need to survive in the wild, such as climbing trees, making nests, and eating bromeliads, suro, and berries. Caretakers have minimal contact with bears in rehabilitation, so as not to encourage attachments to humans. This is the greatest challenge the animal must overcome to survive in the forest.

Once a bear is ready for release we contact cloud forest reserves in order to find a suitable home for our bear. We work directly with willing reserves and the Ecuadorian government in order to ensure that the bear has the best chance of survival in the wild and also to ensure that its release has no detrimental impacts on existing bear populations and local communities.

The bear is tranquillised and transported to the release sight. Here it will awake to a new life, surrounded by the peaceful cloud forests of the Andean mountains and with a chance to interact and mate with other bears in the area. We fit our released bears with a radio collar and monitor their progress after their release.