Hyderabad: A five-six-year-old sloth bear managed to get out of its enclosure at the Hyderabad zoo on Monday. Residents of houses next to the zoo panicked seeing the bear walking on the zoo’s compound wall.
The female bear Janaki was not bred in captivity and was brought to the zoo after being rescued outside a forest area in Warangal three years ago.
The sloth bear was housed in a cage at the zoo’s summer house where public access is restricted. This is the same place where last year Kadamba, a Bengal tiger, had leaped over it’s short cage.
The bear’s cage had iron grills on three sides covered with a mesh while the roof is a metal mesh covered with asbestos. Dr Mohammad Abdul Hakeem, veterinarian at the zoo said, “Wild animals have a natural instinct of trying to escape from confinement like any human would try to do.
Disturbed by heat, bear tries to make an escape
This bear was not bred in captivity. Moreover, as the temperatures are high, the bear must have felt uncomfortable in the cage and felt like getting out of it.”
As per the zoo’s curator V.V.L. Subhadra Devi, the bear managed to reach the roof and used its claws to pull a part of the mesh from the corner, creating a small gap through which it pushed away the asbestos sheet on top and wriggled out.
After climbing out, the bear got on to the wall behind its cage, from where it walked ahead and climbed the main compound wall of the zoo adjacent to which the residential area is located.
The curator said that the concertina coil on the zoo’s compound wall prevented the bear from walking further and from going to the other side of the wall.
The curator found that the animal had been trying to pull apart the mesh during nights since a fortnight and the security person had brought this to the notice of the animal keeper in charge of the summer house. However, this information was not communicated to zoo officers by the animal keeper who had recently died due to an illness.
A zoo official, who was present on Monday night said, “We got information around 9:45 pm after which three veterinary staff and 30 other staffers rushed to the spot. However, after being outside the cage for a while and seeing no way out, the bear came back to its cage to get inside.
But it could not manage. We fired tranquilliser darts. It took three darts to hit the moving bear. Once tranquillised, we captured it in a net. It suffered minor injuries trying to get back inside the cage, but is safe and under medical supervision.”
