Sloth Bear

The sloth bear is a bear that gave up hunting to eat insects. Everything about it — the shaggy coat, the missing teeth, the tubular lips, the long curved claws — is built around getting termites and ants out of hard ground and dead wood, and it is the noisiest eater in the forest.

Overview

Sloth bears live across the Indian subcontinent, in dry and moist forest, thorn scrub, and grassland, usually at low elevation. They are mostly nocturnal, especially where they share the landscape with people, and they are largely solitary. Their range has shrunk and broken into pieces as India’s forests have been cleared and settled.

Built to eat insects

The sloth bear’s specialisation is unmistakable:

• Claws up to 8 cm long, curved and blunt, for ripping open concrete-hard termite mounds and tearing into rotting logs.
• A gap in the front teeth — the two upper central incisors are absent — creating a channel to suck insects through.
• Long, extremely mobile lips that the bear can purse into a tube and extend well past its nose.
• Closable nostrils and a palate shaped to help move air, so the bear can blow away loose soil and then draw insects in.

The result is a feeding style that sounds like a powerful vacuum cleaner: the bear digs, snorts, and then noisily inhales a stream of termites and ants, a sound audible from a hundred metres or more.

Insects are the year-round staple, but sloth bears also climb for honey — hence the local name “honey bear” — and gorge on fruit and flowers in season, particularly the sugary flowers of the mahua tree.

Behaviour and the danger to people

Sloth bears forage head-down, with limited eyesight and hearing, in habitat criss-crossed by footpaths and farms. A person who comes around a bush or a rock face and finds a sloth bear a few metres away has, from the bear’s point of view, appeared out of nowhere. The bear’s instinct is to charge — rearing up, roaring, and striking at the face with its claws.

These encounters make the sloth bear one of the most dangerous wild animals in India by number of attacks, ahead of tigers and leopards in some districts. The attacks are defensive panic, not predation, but the injuries are severe.

Reproduction and life cycle

A female gives birth to one to three cubs, usually two, in a ground den after a pregnancy of around six to seven months that includes delayed implantation. For up to nine months the cubs ride on her back, clinging to her fur, while she forages and fends off predators — a system unique among bears and a response to the many threats a small cub faces on the ground.

Threats and conservation

The sloth bear is Vulnerable and declining:

• Habitat loss and fragmentation as forest is converted to farmland and settlement, which also drives the deadly close encounters with people.
• Poaching for gallbladders (used in traditional medicine), claws, and teeth.
• The historical “dancing bear” trade, in which cubs were taken from the wild, their muzzles pierced, and the animals made to perform. A concerted effort by Indian NGOs and the government ended the practice in the 2000s, rescuing the last dancing bears into sanctuaries.