It is the sound that gives it away.
In a neighbourhood in the Laos capital of Vientiane, nearby residents hear distressed cries coming from inside a house and call police.
Inside they find 16 endangered moon bear cubs, calling out in fear and hunger, in cages on a stark floor. The tiny creatures are potentially destined for a harrowing life at an illegal bear bile farm, after their mothers were most likely killed by poachers.
Meanwhile at a sanctuary high in the hills of Luang Prabang, at least eight-hours drive away, staff at the Perth-founded Free The Bears charity have been hearing whispers and seeing social media posts that indicate a large number of cubs are being traded.
They begin to ready themselves for a trip, in case they are called to bring the cubs back to join the 110-plus sun and moon bears on the property. They talk among themselves; one thinks he’s counted 13 cubs across various online groups, as others counsel that traders often inflate and misrepresent their quarry.
After being notified by the specialist environmental police, the seasoned rescuers drive the rough, winding roads into the city, stocking up on milk formula, bottles, kettles and other supplies. They set up at a guesthouse close to the police station and wait to be given the go-ahead.
But when the group is let into the house, they can’t quite believe what they see: 17 cubs, the smallest just 1.3kg, probably about two months old.
The seizure, in March, is believed to be the largest rescue of endangered bear cubs in history. It is certainly the biggest Free The Bears has done, by a huge margin; the previous record is five cubs rescued in a single day in 2019.
One cub is already dead, and the rescuers know that if they don’t act fast, the others could die too. They bundle the bears into carriers and take them to the police station, where they begin the process of feeding them all through the night.
Free The Bears chief executive Matt Hunt, a former Perth Zoo keeper, knows that even in the hands of experienced carers, it is going to be touch and go.
“These are tiny, tiny cubs, so it only takes 12 hours of poor care, and they’ll be dead,” he tells STM.
“When we were able to go in, on that original video you can hear all the screams of the babies — they were obviously starving . . . But once they came into our care and got a full belly of milk, they were incredibly calm and quiet.”
Free The Bears was registered as a charity in 1995 by Perth grandmother Mary Hutton, two years after she and her son Simon watched a TV program on moon bears trapped at a bear bile farm. She built the charity into a conservation group that has since rescued more than 1000 bears and established sanctuaries in three countries.
For Hunt, being at the helm during this historic rescue is bittersweet. Just hours after the cubs arrived, the team get a call about two more baby bears seized in a far-off province. When STM calls, they are expecting more to arrive within 48 hours.
Hunt is grateful, of course, that the bears are in caring hands, in a place where they will be looked after. But there is also a nagging fear — is a rescue of this magnitude an aberration, or a trend?
“It’s very concerning for us as a small organisation to have 18 cubs coming in, that can’t be re-released back to the wild,” he says.
“We’re probably looking at a minimum of $4000 per bear, per year to care for them. That’s about $2 million over their lifetimes. I try not to think about it, if I’m honest, because I wouldn’t sleep. We’ve got animals in our care that in their 30s now, so it’s a big commitment.
“Our entire thing is that we would never turn a bear in need away and we have been running nearly 30 years and have managed to hold on to that. But this is the biggest seizure of threatened bear cubs ever in the world — we have never seen anything like this. If it’s a one-off, then OK; if it turns out that this is the way the trade is going, that’s really worrying.”
Hunt had been a zoo keeper in the United Kingdom for a decade before he decided to see the world. When he landed in WA, he “talked my way into a job” caring for Perth Zoo’s sun bears, rescued by Free The Bears in 1998.
Hunt thought it would be nice to give the charity’s founder a quick bell to let her know how the animals were going. The call changed the course of his life.
“I got off the phone an hour and a half later having signed my life away,” he says with a laugh.
“It was like having my little Welsh grandma transferred to Australia; she was saying, ‘Are you earning good money at the zoo? Good. You’re going to save it all up — stop spending it all on beer and cigarettes — and then you’re going to go and volunteer in Cambodia on your way home’. And that’s basically what I did.”
Hunt never looked back, marking 18 years as the group’s chief executive last month. He’s hand-reared rambunctious cubs in his living room (he doesn’t recommend it, for the record), overseen expansion and helped to develop education, employment and conservation programs.
After stints in Vietnam and Cambodia, where Free The Bears also has sanctuaries, he’s lived in Laos for nearly eight years; “the longest I have been in one place”.
The main Luang Prabang Wildlife Sanctuary is “a little slice of heaven up in the hills”, accessible by a very rough mountain road that Hunt jokes gives an Indiana Jones vibe to any trip.
Free The Bears has operated in Laos since 2003, starting the Tat Kuang Si Bear Rescue Centre on a small block near the Kuang Si waterfall, given to them by the Laos Government. But because the waterfall is a major tourist attraction, the sanctuary had to remain small.
“We had room for 25 bears then, which was fine because it took us seven years of operating in Laos to rescue 18 bears,” Hunt says.
“We used to get one or two or three bears rescued a year. Since about 2015, that number has been going up, which is a good thing, because the Government’s doing a better job on wildlife law enforcement. But in August 2015, we hit 26 bears.”
Free The Bears secured a second, much bigger but undeveloped block — “it was a field of dreams, quite literally,” Hunt laughs — and started to build. Meanwhile, at the smaller sanctuary, the number of rescues continued to balloon, reaching 44 bears by the time the new facility was finished in late 2017.
Now the bigger property is home to more than more than 110 sun and moon bears, as well as other rescued wildlife, including macaques/monkeys, leopard cats, tortoises, birds, civets and even endangered red pandas.
Critically, in 2020, it also gained a cub nursery. As Hunt says, “you’re never ever going to be ready for 16 bear cubs coming in at once, but at least we were more ready now than we ever have been”.
After the cubs leave Vientiane, the convoy of vehicles slowly makes its way up to the sanctuary; an eight-hour drive on a good day, longer when you have to stop every three hours to feed ravenous bear cubs.
Once they arrive, the intense business of keeping the baby bears alive begins: the cubs are divided into groups of three or four based on size and then five teams begin making formula, cleaning bottles and feeding every three hours until midnight, then starting again at 5.30am. Bottles have to be kept sterile and separate so any disease would not decimate the vulnerable cubs.
“It’s full on . . . like a military operation,” Hunt says. “But the team were amazing. We were super lucky. I’ve got lovely friends at Perth zoo, who got in touch straightaway, asking if there was anything they could do. I managed to find one who was willing to basically throw a few sets of underwear and a T-shift in a bag and jump on a plane to come and lend a hand.”
That the cubs all survived feels like nothing short of a miracle.
“In the wild, you’d expect maybe a 50 per cent survival rate . . . and I’m touching a lot of wood here because they’re still small, but it’s quite amazing,” Hunt says. “I was thinking that if we could pull half of them through, that would be a job well done.”
Today, most of the bears weigh more than 10kg and all are on at least some solids.
“They’ve got these hilariously chunky little bellies on them now,” Hunt chuckles. “When they’re on the milk formula, they’re always quite lean and running around like lunatics all the time, so much energy. Now you see that even when the head wants to keep playing, their fat little bellies slow them down . . . They were so vulnerable when they arrived but you feel a bit like you can relax a little now and feel more confident.”
But as he looks at the cubs, safe and thriving in the sanctuary, Hunt knows that they are the lucky ones. In a post-COVID economic downturn in Laos, the number of people turning to hunting to make ends meet is growing.
“I was looking at footage of a bear bile farm the other day and the idea of those little guys having ended up there doesn’t bear thinking about,” he says.
“And whenever we get a rescue, we have to keep in mind, how many haven’t been found? The rule of thumb is that if you get one animal rescued, then chances are that 10 others have either died or gone undetected. That’s seriously worrying for us, that this level of hunting is happening in Laos.”
But part of the charity’s remit is to embed conservation into the community; in the area surrounding the Luang Prabang sanctuary, Free The Bears is the biggest employer and has contracts with 80 families to buy food. It also runs education programs in schools, nature clubs for local kids and livelihood programs for women in the villages.
“I feel like this is bringing together everything that we’ve learnt over the last 25 plus years, to try and show the Laos Government that, of course it’s about animal welfare and wildlife conservation, but it’s also about delivering good results for communities as well,” Hunt says.
“Probably the real reason I’ve stayed for 18 years is as much about the people. I think it’s really underappreciated how much of an impact we can have on people’s lives, whether that’s people working for us, or living nearby.”
But at the heart of everything Hunt and Free The Bears does are the animals.
“One of the things that either makes me lucky or keeps me sane — although some people would dispute the sanity part — is that if you’re having a bad day, you can go and sit down and watch the bears for ten minutes,” Hunt says.
“I always tell people that I don’t want any animals in our sanctuary; I would love to lock it up and say, OK, that’s it, we’re done. But at the end of the day, they do have good lives with us, and knowing what the future could have held for them, makes that very powerful.”
See freethebears.org.