"Then the only other creature who is allowed at the Pack Council - Baloo, the sleepy brown bear who teaches the wolf cubs the Law of the Jungle, old Baloo, who can come and go where he pleases because he eats only nuts and roots and honey - rose up on his hind quarters and grunted. 'The man's cub - the man's cub?' he said. 'I speak for the man's cub."
- Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book
There has been some (not especially strenuous) debate over what kind of bear was Baloo from Rudyard Kipling's classic story, The Jungle Book. India is home to three species of bear (four if you count the sun bear, which has/had only the tiniest of claw holes in the northeast) - the brown, Asian black, and sloth bears, and Baloo has been depicted as any or all of them. The text does say "brown bear" but that may have been descriptive only - at any rate, brown bears don't live in the Seoni region where the story takes place, only sloth bears. In the most recent live action/CGI movie, where the bear was voiced by Bill Murray, he was referred to as a sloth bear, but looked like a brown bear. In an earlier live action movie, which I saw as a kid when it came out in the 1990's, he was portrayed by an American black bear, a betrayal of geography which left elementary-school-me irrationally irate.
Apart from being in India, all we really have to go on for Baloo's identity is his diet, which does not mention the termites that are the chief delicacy of the sloth bear. Not that sloth bears won't also eat nuts and roots and honey. In fact, even though they are one of the most specialized of the bears in terms of their diet, bears - all bears - are renowned for their willingness to eat just about anything.
I've always loved making diets for bears in a zoo. I like any diet that lets me mix several ingredients, since it lets me pretend that I'm some sort of master chef. Making breakfast for the bears at the most recent zoo where I cared for them, I would start off by mixing two kinds of dry chow. Then, I'd add several fruits and vegetables to the mix, making sure not to repeat myself, either within the three feedings I offered each day or between consecutive days. It was always great when something special came into season so we had more variety to offer. I'd add a small amount of protein - maybe egg, maybe fish or chicken, once in a while a whole rabbit or guinea pig. I wished that their pool could have supported live fish, as I would have loved to stock it with trout or eels. Working with polar bears earlier, I was fascinated each time I scooped an entire tub of lard out of the plastic and plopped it into the bucket.
Then there was enrichment food - raisins, nuts, honey, peanut butter - which I could either scatter over a wide area of smear into high branches or inside hollow logs or on toys for the bears to extricate. Sometimes I'd offer insects, like mealworms or frozen crickets. Sometimes there was seasonal browse - they loved tender growing bamboo.
That's a great thing about bears - they love to eat, they are willing to work hard to salvage even the tiniest bit of food. It would be like me ripping apart my home in search of an M & M that I'm about 85% sure that I dropped somewhere. Foods that require processing - large fruits and vegetables that need to be ripped open (I've watched entranced as an Andean bear carefully peels a pineapple before eating the whole thing in seconds), gourds with food inside, carcasses to dismember - are a delight for them. Even bears that we think of as very specialized in terms of their diet love novel foods. Pandas, the "herbivorous" bears enjoy occasional meat and are even known to scavenge or eat small animals in the wild. At the other extreme, polar bears, the apex carnivores, love berries and other delicate fruity treats. I've even known some to enjoy carrots more than fish.
Bears spend much of their waking time in the wild feeding, and a zoo environment and management regime should try to reflect that as much as possible. They should be fed throughout the day at unpredictable times with varying quantities and types of food. Keepers and vets should always be on the look out for new options to add to the diet to spice it up. It's the best enrichment there is for bears. Feeding them can take five minutes of their day, or hours and hours of their day. A bear that has the second option will probably be a happier, healthier, and better adjusted bear.
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