Free the Bears

Background

Free the Bears has been working with the Cambodian Forestry Administration to provide a safe sanctuary for bears rescued from the illegal wildlife trade in Cambodia since 1997. Today the Cambodian Bear Sanctuary is the worlds’ biggest sanctuary for sun bears, home to rescued bears housed in world-class forest enclosures. Additionally numerous sun bears have been sent to join cooperative breeding programmes in Australasia and Europe, including Colchester Zoological Society’s own pair of sun bears; Srey Ya and Jo Jo.

Free the Bears has been working in Laos since 2003. Since then, more than 100 bears have been confiscated or have been donated. As a result of strengthened law enforcement efforts, bears have been rescued and relocated to a sanctuary at Luang Prabang. This facility contains a quarantine area, numerous bear houses plus adjoining forest enclosures, including pre-release enclosures to begin the process of trialling the processes required to successfully rehabilitate rescued bears in order to return them to the wild.

Achievements and Objectives

Free the Bears (FTB) is working to protect, preserve and enrich the lives of bears throughout the world by offering a safe sanctuary for bears rescued from the illegal wildlife trade.

2025 Update:

The donation of £7,500 with be used for two main objectives.

£6,000 will be used to increase the capacity of the Luang Prabang Wildlife Sanctuary for housing rescued sun bears in the new Bear House 12.

Bear House 12 is already taking shape to house the 3 male and six female sun bears. The plan is to house all sun bears in one area, maximising opportunities for social integrations and maintaining flexibility to adjust group compositions as animals mature.

Plans have been drawn up for an entirely new area with the following features;

1. A main 6-den bear house (BH12) featuring more spacious dens (27m3) allowing sun bears to rest at height, plus in-built enrichment stores and research/training den to support operant conditioning programmes and conservation-focused research projects in areas such as metabolism, reproductive physiology and dental health.

2. A satellite house (BH12A) featuring two further dens to allow for distancing when required (eg. sexually mature males) with capacity to also house additional arboreal species such as gibbons or binturong.

3. Three forest enclosures covering a total area of approximately 6,000m2, linked through raceways to allow maximum flexibility while avoiding shared fencelines to reduce aggression/frustration between conspecifics.

4. A large green roof, promoting sustainable construction practises, improving thermoregulation within the bear house and allowing for uninterrupted viewing of the bears within the enclosures for behavioural studies.

£1,500 to improve capacity for the use of rescued sun bears in ex situ conservation-focused research through operant conditioning and specialist facility design.

Planned activities include voluntary blood draws and the use of blood-pressure monitoring cuffs to help better understand causes of hypertension, closer examination of visual indicators of oestrus in females, and trained teeth-cleaning to reduce incidences of periodontal disease.

Bear House 12 will be the first facility to incorporate a dedicated internal space for such training sessions, allowing the team to conduct this work in a secure space with fewer distractions for both bears and trainers. This space will also be utilised as a high-reward enrichment area, encouraging the bears to voluntarily engage in training sessions and opening up the possibility of allowing prolonged access for activities that require a longer duration.

The plan is to design and create a dedicated new Operant Conditioning and Research facility to run concurrently with the creation of Bear House 12, although mobile elements such as the training cage may be added following completion of the main building.