Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - History's Deadliest Sloth Bear: The Sloth Bear of Mysore

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

Wes tells the story of how in 1957, an unusually aggressive sloth bear is thought to have caused the death of at least 12 people and the mauling of several others. Jeff wonders about how often sloth bears bonk their heads. Mike gets angry about The Jungle Book. Watch here: https://youtu.be/gw7tJ8F2K84 ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes, sleep number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now everything's on sale during our Memorial Day event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses for a limited time. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a sleep number store or go to sleepnumber.com. Sleep number, to a good life sleep. Hey everyone, it's Wes. Two quick things before we start this episode. First, this is the first of two episodes that we're doing in collaboration with Backpacker magazine to support their annual Bear Month. We're really excited about this partnership. They do a lot of fun content for Bear Month, a lot of good safety messaging. I wrote an article for them about Night of the Grizzlies. So check out Backpacker. Go to their Instagram. Go to their website. There's some really good bear content for you guys there. Second, in this episode, you're going to kind of hear a stumble over talking about doing. some donations for Wildlife SOS.

An incredible nonprofit that I've worked with that's done some amazing work with Sloth Bears. So here's how that's going to look. On our Instagram, Tooth and Clob podcast, in our bio, we're going to have a little donation link that will be money that will go directly toward Wildlife SOS. So if you feel like donating, go to our Instagram. You can donate there.

And we are going to match donations up to $2,000. So any amount after a week, we are going to match. And hopefully we get up to that. $2,000 goal. They do some incredible work. I've worked with them closely. I know that money is really used to its maximum potential. So check it out on our Instagram, Tooth and Claw Podcast. Okay, that's it. I hope you guys enjoy the episode. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Tooth and Claw podcast. We have our Bear Biologist, Wes Larson with us. How we doing, Wes? Hey, yo. I'm doing good. How are you guys? Doing good. And then we have Mike Smith, who is our tech guy.

And he loves Superman. Anything, everything about Superman, Superman's his favorite. He's obsessed with Superman. And I'm Jeff Larson. Okay. Now you said it all for me. Yeah, I guess I don't really need to have any input on that one. Man of Steel.

Are you into Superman? Not particularly, no. Okay. You love Superman. Why are you saying that? I'm jealous of Superman. I like Lois is who I like. Yeah.

You even like him so much you don't even think Clark Kenson. Dork. You're like, no, Clark Kent's even cool because you like everything about Superman. Yeah, I like his glasses, a thick bottle, Coke bottle glasses. I think he's a, what is he, a reporter? I don't even know what Superman is. I can't keep this facade up. I'm sorry, Jeff. I don't, I literally know nothing about him. Zord? Is that part of Superman? Is there a Zord involved somewhere? There's a general Zorg or Zord or something. That's who Michael Shannon played in that one movie. Never saw it.

There's too many superheroes, too many superhero movies out there. You boycotting them? Yeah, no, but I'm tired of them. I got all excited for the new Marvel one because people were saying it was great, and I just kind of thought it was a pretty mid movie. I didn't think it was that great. Mid, whoa. Yeah.

Damn it. You think it would have been better with Superman. I'm not a huge Superman fan either. I feel like Superman's too strong. It's like not that fun. I just kind of am ready. to be done with superheroes for a bit. And then maybe bring them back in like five years, you know?

Okay. Interesting take. So we are doing the first of two episodes that are special episodes because we are teaming up with Backpacker magazine and outside. And we're supporting them for their Bear Month, which is really fun. You know, sharks only get a week. Bears get a whole month over a backpacker. So they've got a lot of different.

bear related stuff coming out all month on Backpacker. I wrote an article for them about Night of the Grizzlies. We're doing these two episodes in support of Bear Month, and I think they're doing a little article about tooth and claw maybe, too. So it's going to be a fun little partnership. Yeah. That's cool. Do you tell them to let them know we're beefy boys?

Make sure it says they're beefy. Maybe you get like a centerpiece spread, just like being all thick on the centerfold. I'm really happy we're doing it with them, though, because they do a really good job with their information about bears. It's not because Shark Week sometimes gets a little bit too focused on how scary sharks can be. And Bear Month with Backpacker, it's very balanced. It's good information.

They do some great safety messaging. I just think they're really a great resource for people that want to learn more about bears, especially people that recreate a lot outside. So check it out. All right. I'll read it. Well, I doubt they thought we would do a sloth bear for one of our Bear Month episodes, but that's what we're going to do. It's been a long time coming.

We've been talking about doing sloth bears for a while. They're one of the bear species I've worked with. I can't wish. And they're probably the most dangerous bear in the world. What? No. No. Not with that name.

I know. It's a bad name. We're going to talk about that, too. But they probably are. As far as numbers go, at least, they definitely attack the most people. And I kind of think they're probably the most aggressive bear, too. So we'll get into that in a bit. Those things?

Those things. We've seen one in the wild. Jeff, you've seen two. Sure. Yeah, you've seen double the wild, completely wild sloth bears that I have. They never once even got close to attacking me. Yeah, fair. From personal, if you're going off personal experience, you're wrong.

They're the least dangerous bear in the world. I would describe it as being unaggressive, in fact. Yeah. All right. Well, they do attack a lot of people, and because of that, there were a lot of options when it came to talking about attacks from these bears. But since it's our first episode that's completely dedicated to them, I wanted to talk about the most famous sloth bear in history, which is the sloth bear of Mysore. If you look up a list of the biggest, like the most deadly man-eaters in history, often you'll find the sloth bear of Mysore on that list. This is one of those animals in India that kind of went on a rampage, and of course there's like these great white hunters that have written stories about them, and that's what we're going to talk about today.

It's a fun episode. All right, so in 1957, in the southern Indian state of Mysore, people were living in fear. But they weren't living in fear from the typical culprit that you would think in India. It wasn't tigers with a taste for humans or a leopard that was breaking into homes to kill human prey in the dead of the night. night, it was a sloth bear. And that sloth bear was on a rampage. By the time word of this bear had reached Big Game Hunter Kenneth Anderson, at least 12 people had been killed by the bear, and at least 24 had been injured. Geez. People in the area knew that sloth bears could be dangerous, but this particular bear was acting especially aggressively and attacking people at any provocation.

There were stories that people would see it at a distance, and it would actually come charging at a distance to come attack these people. It was so pissed off. Wow. Yeah. It's impressive. Yeah. You get in moods like that sometimes, Mike. Just that mad. I see you guys from like two miles away and just come running. It is interesting though. Like humans, you really don't see too many distance attacks from anything. Like even like fight videos like they're always in close proximity. If someone's like running from a far two blocks away like you know. there's something wrong with them. Yeah. Yep.

And there very well could have been something wrong with despair. I like those stories that you read about online where some guy challenges a guy from like two towns over to a fight and they drive to meet each other. That's kind of a long distance fight. It's like you didn't calm down at all like during that whole process. 18 mile drive just still getting heated. Well, I remember in high school when that would happen when you'd hear there was going to be like a fight after school.

And there was just like an electricity in the air all day when you knew there was going to be a good fight. So anyway, I love a good fight. When word reached Kenneth Anderson, this hunter, he had heard some of the prevailing theories about the bear. The most common was that this bear was just crazy or somehow afflicted, like maybe it had rapies.

Some people also said that this bear had had her cubs stolen and was getting revenge. So kind of like a John Wick bear. Or others had said that the bear. More like the Liam Neeson, like a taken bear. Yeah, that's true. Oh, nice, yeah. Yeah. Good call.

Would John Wicka would have, like, killed one of the cubs or something. I see very few similarities between John Wick and this bear, to be honest, Wes. All right. You're right. I got owned by you there. Other people said that the bear had taken a human girl as a mate and had taken this girl to her cave, but when the village came and saved this girl, the bear started attacking people in retribution. You got a reference for that, Mike?

I wasn't listening. I was still thinking about how bad I just owned with. This last theory for me seems like one that could have been easily disproven. Like, did you ever go pull a girl out of its cave? But I couldn't find anything about that. Yeah, and why would it be so mad? Yeah. You know, I loved that girl, and they took her from it.

Oh, they took, so it took the girl. It took the girl's a mate. hit it voluntarily and the people took the girl back? It like stole the girl and was keeping her in its cave and not letting her leave. And the villagers came and rescued her. And then the bear started attacking because I wanted its girl back. I like that theory because it's just like the villagers saying what would make them the most mad. And they're just like it, anthropomorphizing it to the bear.

Yeah. All right. So Anderson went over the. details he received, he learned that the bear had attacked the face in the head of most of the victims, and he describes those attacks in his memoir, Man-Eaters and Jungle Killers. I'm going to read just a quick thing from him. He said, like all bears, he invariably attacked the face of the victim, which he commenced to tear apart with this tremendously long and powerful claws. In addition, abiding viciously with deliberate intent to ensure the success of his handiwork,

Quite half the injured had lost one or both eyes. Some had lost their noses, while others had their cheeks bitten through. Those who had been killed had died with their faces almost torn from their heads. Local rumors had it the bear had also taken to eating as victims, the last three of whom had been partially devoured. Go for the eyes. It's low, but it's effective. I will say, at this point I've read a lot of these different accounts of man-eaters from different hunters. You know, we had like the lines of Sava, we had the leopard of Rudrapayag.

We've done a few of these stories. Anderson seems to know his quarry the best compared to a lot of these people. Like him even saying that this bear attacked the face like all bears do, it's true. And we've learned that like they often go for the head. And I do think he had a pretty good knowledge about sloth bear behavior and bear behavior in general. Yeah, I was going to ask if that, there's a strange way to preface it by saying, like, most or like all bears. Yeah, he actually loved bears, and we'll get it to that in a second.

But he knew enough about sloth bears to know that the fact that this bear had been feeding on people with strange behavior. He was told that this bear had begun its reign of terror in the Nagvara hills near the large town of Arsakiri, which is about 105 miles northwest of Bangalore, which is one of the bigger cities in southern India. In these hills, this bear had attacked its first victims, and then it had become increasingly more and more confident and it started spending more time in agricultural fields at dawn and dusk and more and more of these attacks were occurring. So Anderson would hear about this bear on and off

for about a year, but he mostly ignored the stories. He felt as though they're probably being exaggerated and he actually really loved bears. So he didn't want to kill one. He's just kind of like, no, I like bears. I'm not going to go hunt this bear. I like that. Yeah. But then something finally happened. That's how I feel, you know. Yeah. Like even when you're like, you know what, it's probably smart that killed that bear. I'm kind of like, I want to kill it. Yeah. If I was in charge.

People are constantly riding you and saying, Jeff, come kill this bear for us. And you're absolutely not. I wouldn't do it. You're our gun guy too. So who else is going to do it? Yeah. What do you use your gun on, Jeff? He just stares at it sometimes.

Because it's not a good, like, self-defense weapon. And I don't use. And I don't have it like out. That's a good. I guess it's just like. Just in case. Yeah. Just for like my mental, you know.

That's. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully that keeps your mental state strong because that's a dangerous thing to be relying on for your mental health. All right. Finally something happened though that did make Anderson get involved. He had a friend in Mysore, an elderly Muslim man named Alam Bucks.

Alam was a caretaker to a shrine for a Muslim. for a Muslim saint along a forest roadway in Mysore and he basically lived with his family near the shrine and took care of it. And each night he would go out and light a lamp over the shrine that would burn all night. So essentially just picture like a really rural forest road and there's this one shrine on the road

and there's a house next to that shrine and this guy lives there with his family and his job is just to take care of this shrine. That's what he does like 24-7. Yeah. So one night Anderson was on that road during a tiger hunt and the rear wheel of his Studebaker flew off,

and his brake drum hit the ground. It's the middle of the night. He's all alone, but he was lucky that this wheel had fallen off almost directly opposite of the shrine, and Alam Bucks came out to inspect the commotion, and then he spent hours helping Anderson jack up the vehicle and replace the wheel,

and he even gave him a bowl of hot tea to kind of send him on his way. That's nice. Yeah. It's a long time to change the tires. though. Yeah, it wasn't a tire, though. It was like the entire wheel came off, I think. So it was a little bit more than, I guess that's just a tire.

But yeah, you're right. What, when exactly was this all happening again? Sorry, I must have. This is in the 50s. Okay. Yeah. Maybe the jacks were like pretty hard to get the car. They didn't have it.

Yeah. So when I read the whole story, they like just had to keep sticking rocks under and then lifting the car a little bit more and then putting another rock. Yeah, that'd take a while. Yeah, it took a while. And it was a whole undertaking, and this guy really went out of his way to help him. And he's elderly too. I think Triple T once in WWE, he lifted a car up like that, like the two sides.

He pushed a car up onto the side of its two wheels. That would have been useful to have maybe someone like him. Sure. I don't know if Alan Bucks is doing much of professional wrestling. Would have saved a lot of time. Yeah. Yeah. Triple H, right?

Triple H. Yeah. I don't know what triple T is. Mr. T. Booker T. Yeah. Booker T. Yeah.

Whatever. There's probably a triple T too. Anyway, it was the start of a nice thing. I think that's actually my HVAC. Like, come over and fix my toilets for me sometime. They're triple T. Shout out triple T. Thanks.

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Get this new must-have concealer at Sephora or at Sephora.com today. So this was the start of nice friendship, and Anderson would actually stop at the shrine whenever he was in the area to visit with his friend Alam Bucks. He liked that honey tea. Yeah, he loved that tea. He lives in Bangalore, and he was like a hunter, so he would pass through there a lot. All right, not far from the shrine, there were a lot of fields where farmers grew ground nuts.

And in the middle of those fields, about 400 yards from the shrine, was a hill of boulders that was perfect dending habitat for a sloth bear. And sure enough, this marauding bear took up residence in those boulders near the shrine. He would come out in the dawn and dust to surfed for nuts and ants and ants. and termites, but this kept the bear mostly in these fields and away from the shrine. So even though they knew this bear was around, it was spending almost all of its time in these agricultural fields and then in its den, but then something changed. The fig tree surrounding the shrine started to bear and drop fruit, and suddenly this bear is now daily visiting this area right around the shrine.

And one day, disaster struck. So Alam Bucks' son, who is 22, lived with his father. his mother and his sister in that little house by the shrine. One night after eating a nice dinner with his parents, this young man decided to go outside around 10 p.m. And no one really knows why he was going outside or what he was doing, but as he walked under these fig trees in the dark, he almost immediately surprised this bear

who was busy eating the fallen fruit under the tree. This encounter was so quick and unexpected that he really had no time to even react, and he was immediately knocked to the ground by the bear, which had charged the second it saw the shape of a person. He fell to the ground screaming and in a flash the bear tore into his throat with oversized canine teeth, ripping a large gash that blood poured out of. The man tried in vain to fight against the bear.

He quickly lost a lot of blood. He tried to scream for help, but he wasn't able to, maybe because the bear had essentially ripped his throat out. And it continued to bite this 22-year-old in the struggle. His teeth went through the nose and the eye of this man and the claws tore across his chest, his shoulders, and his back. So he got pretty worked pretty quickly. His throat got ripped out.

His nose got ripped off. His eye got punctured. This is all in a matter of seconds. Triple T. That's kind of his wrestling move. Yeah. Just poking out eyes and ripping out, biting through uglars. That's interesting because, well, I guess it's maybe not interesting.

It is interesting. Don't get me wrong, West. You're telling a very interesting. interesting story here. But I guess the fact that it's like got all this food around it, it's probably more just of like a defensive move. 100% Yeah And we're going to get to that But 100%

Yeah As quickly as it started It was over The bear ran away Plunged into the darkness And the sun managed to crawl His way back to the house And stumbled into this really small abode

His blood is pouring out All over his body And onto the floor where he collapsed The family did their best To put pressure on the wounds With some rags they had in the house But his jugular vein Had been punctured

And he bled out on the floor And died Yeah So Alam Bucks. Not good. His name is Alam Bucks, just so everyone knows. It's kind of a weird name, but I'm going to keep saying it. He sent Anderson a tear-stained postcard with the details of the attack.

Anderson, who lived in Bangalore, left three hours after receiving this postcard. So he got it. He read it, and he was like, okay, I'm going. It's personal now, now that he's got someone that helped him out, he's got to go get revenge. He's got to John Wick. John Wick. You brought me back around, Wes. All right.

He was armed with his 405 Winchester rifle, a flashlight, and a single change of clothes. He figured it would only take him a couple hours to find and kill this bear. Boy, was he wrong, guys. It would take him a lot longer than that. You see, Mike, that's why I have a gun. If someone, like, wrote you a message, you wouldn't be three hours from being able to grab your gun and go. True. I bet I could get a gun.

in three hours. I don't know. I've never tried, actually. Just go to the gas station. America, right? Yeah. Well, Anderson was Johnny on the spot with his gun, his flashlight, and one change of close. So he arrived to Allum's house in that evening, and after catching up with his friend and kind of seeing just how grief-stricken the whole family was, they came up with the plan and it was a pretty simple one. They figured the bear would be out at night again. It'd probably be in those same fig trees, and that Anderson could simply simply,

walk out and shoot it. So about 8 p.m. that night, he got his rifle, his flashlight. He walked out into the dark and along the road, and he was kind of just swinging the rifle and the flashlight back and forth both sides of the road as he walked. Sketchy.

Do you think this is where that band got their name from, simple plan from this story? I do. Yeah, I think this is exactly what it came from. I've always wanted to... I'm just a kid. It's a sketchy plan. Like that seems scary.

Yeah. To like be out in the dark with just a flashlight. He's pretty brave. The whole time I read his book about, he does some pretty crazy stuff and the whole time he never was like, I was very scared. He just seems very calm about all of this. It's a dark night. He walks several miles in both directions from the shrine, but never sees the bear. He goes to these fields with the ground nuts and he sees lots of jackals and rabbits and wild pigs, but no bear.

It's also tiger. country too, right? It is. Yeah, I think it's not like prime tiger country, though. I think, I don't think he's too worried about tigers. It's possible. Yeah, and definitely leopard country too. So he goes to this hill of boulders, and he shines his flashlight all over, still doesn't

see anything. And as he's doing this, he almost steps on a Russell's viper, which actually strikes out at him and just barely misses his foot. And for him, that's enough to kind of break the spell. and convince him he wasn't being smart and he decides to go back to the shrine and kind of regroup and he goes out a total of four times that night but never even sees a single fresh bear track oh phantom bear yeah so the next day him and olem bucks hike up the rocks in the middle of the day and they go to the cave where alam knew sometimes the bear would sleep off the heat of the day

often sloth bears will just pick kind of these day dens that are in rocks and they'll go into the den when it's really hot or when they just kind of want to rest and ollum bucks had seen this bear come back and forth from these rocks so we knew it had a den in there they're they're fluffy i'm sure we'll get into biology but they always strike me as an extra warm bear so it makes sense to me like they over heat easily yeah yeah we will talk about that a little bit but they got too much hair so he found this case Anderson listen for snoring noises because bears often make some kind of snoring noises when they're sleeping He didn't hear any and then he chucked some rocks into this cave to try and wake this bear Which again is like much braver than probably I would be willing That's also like when you prefer to sleep if you try to kill it Yeah, maybe he's yeah

Yeah, that's not a way just fire some shots down in there But you might hit its girl that it's kidnapped too Oh, good point Anyway, nothing happens. There's no bear. They're both a bit discouraged. They're hot. They're tired.

And Anderson tells all on bucks that he had to go back home to Bangalore, but that he would come back if the bear showed up again. And it would be a month before there were new victims. Okay. So let's talk a bit about sloth bears. We have a lot to talk about because we haven't ever really brought up this animal. They're an animal that's very near and dear to my heart. And biologically, I think they're one of the more fascinating bears.

First thing we should probably talk about is why are these bears named sloth bears? They aren't slow. They aren't particularly arboreal. So they do go in trees, but they're not like always in trees like some bears are. And they really don't look much like sloths to most people. But George Shaw might disagree with most people. He was a European biologist that was working in India in the late 1700s. And in 1791, he described the bears that he had seen in India.

gave them the name sloth bear. He chose that name because of their long claws, kind of like a sloth, has long claws, and missing front teeth kind of gave them the appearance of a sloth to him. Plus he had seen bears and trees during his travels. So he just kind of thought, oh, it's like a sloth. Makes me wonder if he only knew of like two animals, you know. Yeah. Bears and sloths.

Or like he had just seen a sloth. Yeah. The day before. Yeah, which would be crazy, because he would be crazy. he's in India and sloths are like new world animals had a pet sloth or something like they're doing a lot of animal trading yeah yeah he had sloths on the mind for sure he must have yeah it's a bad name we're going to come up with some alternative names for them later but for me i don't think it's a great name in hindy they call them belu which is the word for bear it doesn't necessarily mean sloth bear

but it's used in parts of india where the only bears are sloth bears so it's kind of become the name for sloth bears, Baloo. There are some other local names for them. Beer Mendi, Pani Karudi, Rinch, Baluka, Wala, and Karadi are all some local names for this bear. Wala.

That's good. Their scientific name has actually changed quite a bit throughout time, but the current scientific name is Meleris or Sinus, which pretty much means honey bear. And like all bears, they really do love the honey. Yeah. They love honey

A long time ago This is a little quick aside Jeff was like hanging out with this girl who's Korean And we had driven to Arizona And Jeff had like fallen asleep in the backseat And she was sitting shotgun with me And we were having a very Okay, you were quiet in the back seat

I wasn't talking yeah Me and her she was very cute Like she was I just loved Miyangyi And we were having this kind of awkward conversation And it had gotten quiet And then just out of the blue she goes, do bears really love the honey? And it was just like really cute.

And I think about it all the time. Yeah. And I was like, I did a lot of groundwork behind. Or like before that question. Yeah, he's the right thing to ask. Talking about bears and honey like every time we were together. Oh, that's great. All right.

Anyway, these bears are found in India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka. but the vast majority of sloth bears live in India. They're the third smallest bear in the world on average, but there really isn't a ton of difference between them and like spectacle bears or Andean bears and Asiatic black bears. They're all kind of in the same size category. The one that we saw in India, the three of us,

was a pretty large sloth bear. Like that was a big bear. I would guess it's on the underside. That is nothing. Average weights for these bears really vary between, populations, but in India they average about 207 pounds or about 94 kilograms for males, and about 185 pounds or 83 kilograms for females. So there is some sexual dimorphism at play, but not anything too drastic when we're talking about size. Yeah, I've seen bigger bears. Oh, you've seen

bigger, dude. Yeah. All right, they're typically black with really shaggy long fur that we just talked about. It's particularly long around their head and shoulders, which kind of gives them a bit of a mane, and then they also have a long patch of fur on their mid to lower back, which we'll talk about that purpose in a bit. They have a white or cream-colored U or kind of Y-shaped pattern on their chest, and that's thought to be a warning system for potential predators, and when you see a tiger or something approach a sloth bear, they often get up on their hind legs and show their chest, and that big white you is on full display it's kind of like uh look how big i am mike what's up kind of like superman showing his ass off does he do that is superman like check this out yeah usually

superman's going around on all fours but when he's threatened he stands up and shows his ass off see i didn't even know that you know so much about it you guys brought up earlier that they have really long, thick fur for an animal that lives in a really hot part of the world? I don't totally understand it, but apparently the way that their fur is actually helps to cool them off. It's like that thing in Latin America where the hottest days of the year, they give you like hot soup. Sure.

I don't think that's exactly. That's the thing they do. They do. On really hot days, they give you like hot food and they say it, cool. cools you down. Maybe Sloth Bears. It's like, oh, actually having all this hair makes me cooler. Yeah. I don't know, dude. It's, I bet you'd like it if someone shaved you. Yeah. And they don't, the main thing, though, too, is give them like one of those poodle haircuts where you shave their whole body, but leave their head. Feels so nice, I bet. Oh, they would love that. The main reason, though,

that they don't overheat as much as you would expect is they don't have an undercoat like a lot of other bears do. So, like polar bears, for example, have a very thick. undercoat and then they have those long guard hairs that come out and that's what keeps them very warm and sloth bears don't have that but it's actually really important that they have that long hair because as they're feeding on their favorite food if they weren't covered in that fur they'd probably get bit a lot and they don't because of that so bit by what we're going to talk about that when we get there in just one second humans probably they have a long You said this place was steps from the water.

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Actual prices may vary, it's time offer. They have long muzzles and really floppy lips. One of the proposed names for sloth bears was actually lip bear because their lips are so big. They did, one of the scientific names was like Labius, Ersus Labius or something. That's what I think we should start. They're also missing their incisor teeth. So these little teeth here, they are missing them. They have the canines, but not the incisors. And that gives them an advantage for eating their preferred food. which is ants and termites. So sloth bears are mermacophagus.

Can you guys tell me some other animals that are mermacophagus? Ooh, maybe manatees? Mermaids? No. Anteaters, panglins, ardvarks are all mermacophagus animals. What mermacophagus means is they're eating primarily termites and ants for their food source. Oh. So when you see a sloth bear in the wild, what you often see them do,

doing. Ant eat ants? Aunt eaters do eat ants, yes. When we saw the sloth bear. Yeah, I think those two are related, their name and what they eat. That's a coincidence. When we saw our sloth bear, do you guys remember what it was doing? It was just like looking at the ground wandering around.

Yeah, and that's not usually what you see other bears doing. Like other bears will be grazing, but then as they're walking around, they're picking their head up, they're testing the air, they're kind of constantly checking for sense. Whereas a sloth bear has its nose right on the ground because it's looking for termites and ants almost all the time. And they can actually detect insects up to three feet underground with their sense of smell. And then they use those big, powerful four-inch claws to tear through often rock-hard colonies of termites and ants. Nice. Rock-hearted. Once they disturb them and they get all those ants kind of and termites like disturbed.

Disturbed. I can't do it. They like kind of do a huffing thing to clear some of the dust away. And then they, without those front teeth and those big lips, they can form kind of almost like a vacuum seal over termites and ants. And they just suck them up. Oh, cool. Their teeth are often in really bad shape because when they're sucking up termites and ants, they're also sucking up a lot of dust and rocks.

That's just kind of, you know, that's the price of doing this. Part for the course. Yeah. They can actually too actively open and close their nostrils, which prevents termites and ants from getting sucked up into their nose. So pretty cool. A lot of really cool adaptations and evolution for just eating that one food source mostly. If there was one trait I could take from a wild animal,

it would be that. Closing your nostrils. Yeah. Yeah. Try it. I'd rather be able to do that than like fly or breathe underwater, I think. Yeah. What would you use that for?

I wouldn't. If something smells bad, I wouldn't even have to pinch my nose. What you would just breathe out, you can breathe out your mouth right now when it's stuff. I know, but you don't want anything getting up there causing boogers to happen. Sure. If you were like jumping off something high, you don't have to pinch your nose. You can just close it. It's a watertight opinion.

Oh, yes. Swimming for sure. Yep. All right. Like all bears, they are very opportunistic, though, and they will eat a wide variety of foods, including fruits, honey, nuts, plants, carrion, or sometimes even fresh meat. Some of their favorite. They'd probably love honey nut Cheerios, dude. They would.

Honey and nuts, dude. Two in one convenient ring-shaped snack. You think it'd be good for their heart? Cholesterol levels, yeah. That's what they always say in the commercials. Some of their favorite non-insect foods are mangoes, jackfruit, corn, sugar cane, melons, and pods of the golden shower tree. That sounds awesome. We've all been to that tree.

Yeah. Visit that one a little more often. All right. They do not hibernate, but they will often find caves. to sleep in, they're crepuscular, which means active dawn or dusk, but they can be quite active during the day, and then sometimes they switch to a very nocturnal activity pattern when they're living closer to humans. Female sloth bears gestate for a total of around 210 days, but like other bear species, they do have delayed implantation, so that fertilized egg is not going to implant in her

uterus until her body knows that she's healthy enough to have a cub. When that happens, she'll enter a maternal den, which will give birth and stay in the den for about three to six weeks. Those cubs are born altricial, which means they're completely dependent on their mom, they're blind, but they develop faster than a lot of other bear species, and they're typically walking within a month of being born. When they leave the den, they'll ride on that patch of fur that we talked about, so both male and female sloth bears do tend to have that patch of fur, but it's for holding babies, and the babies will climb up there, and they ride on their mom's It's really cute.

It's very cute. And it's thought to be a tactic for protecting cubs as well as transporting them to different termite and ant colonies. Because when you think about it, if she has to constantly be checking out new ant and termites, it's like a really effective way just to move her cubs back and forth. Yeah. Yeah. Why do the males have it?

I don't know. And, you know, I should probably double check, but I'm pretty sure they both have it. And I think it's just... Yeah, you made a point of saying... I did. I think they do. Check now. I really do think they do.

I will check later. And if I got that wrong, I will do. Don't carry the babies around, right? Yeah, I just don't. I think both of them have it. Wait, I'm just going to check real quick. It just like pulls up Wes's paper he wrote on soft bears. You should know this.

See, this says no, but I honestly think they do. Uh-oh. Oh, shoot. Yeah, I think they do. I honestly, because I remember working at the center that I worked at and you couldn't tell them apart because of a saddle like that. So that was just the AI result that said that, which I wish I could turn off.

I'm pretty sure they both have it. I'm going to look into it though. I'm going to double check on that. Everyone just put a little pin in there, but I'm pretty sure they both have that saddle. When like the first three responses were just ads. Yeah. I hate the AI responses.

All right. But you guys know me. I'm not a big AI fan. Okay, sometimes females will eat and regurgitate a mixture of half-digested jackfruit, wood apples, and pieces of honeycomb. It's a sticky substance that hardens into a dark, yellow, circular bread-like mass, which is then fed to the cubs. And this bear's bread is considered a delicacy by some of the native people of India.

Wow. I would love to try it. Sounds delicious. Really? Yeah. Some jackfruit, honey, and apples mixed together that a bear was vegetarian. Like, yeah, that's the part. You wouldn't want to try it at least?

I'd love to try it. I'm not as excited about it as you. The regurgitated part is like, I'd be a little, I don't think I like this. Well, isn't all honey just regurgitated bee vomit? Yeah, pretty much. We all love vomit. I like vomit, just fine. I'm being honest, if it's that kind.

Honey vomit? Yeah. All right, cubs leave their mom between two and three years of age. Tigers present a very real threat for sloth bears. One study on a population of Bengal tigers found that about 2% of tiger droppings within that population had sloth bear in them. So they aren't a major food source for tigers, but they do sometimes opportunistically kill and eat sloth bears. We're going to get more into that here in a second. We're going to talk about attacks first.

This is probably the most dangerous bear species in the world when it comes to the sheer number of attacks. There isn't great reporting for the species as a whole, but one study looked at attacks just in one Indian state, Madhya Pradesh, between the years of 1989 and 1994, so a total of six years, and they found 687 mallings and 488 deaths. Whoa.

So just for those six years in one Indian state, there's an average of 115 mallings and eight deaths per year, which is much, much higher than you would see with any other bear. So why are they? these attack numbers so high, a big part is definitely that there are a ton of people in India, they're rapidly spreading into prime sloth bear habitat, but even when you adjust for population size, encroachment, and whatnot, the attack numbers are still really high. So the other main reason for so many attacks is just that this is a very, very defensive animal, and they need to be

so defensive to survive. So I co-authored a paper last year with Thomas Sharp of Wildlife SOS and Dave Garcellus of the International Bears Specialist Group, and we looked at interactions between Bengal Tigers and Sloth Bears. And the idea behind this paper was that sloth bears have co-evolved with large feline predators during a lot of their evolution. It's like saber-tooth cats, tigers. There was a jaguar species, actually. Yeah, leopards now.

They've co-evolved with all these different big cats, and that has led to a very strong defensive reaction when they're approaching. by a predator. This combo of them constantly having their heads on the ground looking for food, and then them not being really great. Tree climbers means they have to sometimes just scare a tiger off with a very explosive defense that convinces the tiger that they're not worth the trouble. So the tiger can kill a sloth bear, like they're capable,

but for a tiger, is it worth it if like you go to kill that sloth bear and then you realize you're kind of going to get your ass kicked while you're killing it, you know? Is it worth it? Yeah. And that's kind of the purpose behind this big defensive display. It's a good strategy. It is. It's really effective.

Like in humans, even like a really good fighter, I feel like if someone just is like full on crazy, like strip their clothes, get naked, throw dirt in the air. Yeah. Like that fighter is going to be like, I don't know if this is worth it anymore, you know? Yeah. Well, and it's true. Like, we talk about grizzly bears a lot.

The thing about Grizzlies is they constantly are testing the air again and like listening and smelling. And so they often hear us or smell us coming along before we see them. And it gives them plenty of time to get out of there. But with an animal where its head is always on the ground, some of the videos I looked at from my paper. The tiger like, yeah, the tiger like pretty much bumps into them before they even know it's there. And they don't have then the space to get away anymore. So they have to switch to this offense of like, I'm. I'm big and dangerous.

To bring up our personal experience when we were watching the sloth bear is like, we were there because there was a tiger mom with three cubs or two cubs. And they were like right next to each other. They were like within. I was crossing my fingers. Yeah. At like some points I think they were within like 100, 200 yards of each other. For sure.

So then like the bear had no idea. Yeah. Like the bear was just sniffing the ground just like walking around. had no idea that there was a tiger close. Yeah, they run into each other a lot, and especially in India where, like, water sources are frequented by a lot of different animals. Sometimes these interactions happen in waterholes, and every once in a while the tiger does decide to kill a sloth bear.

But sloth bears can do a lot of damage with their claws and with their oversized canines. They have really long canine teeth. And unfortunately, for humans, they often use the same strategy on us. When a sloth bear feels threatened by a human, they often launch a defensive attack, and the outcome can be really devastating for humans. Basically, every sloth bear attack is defensive. As far as I know, there have been no recorded attacks that were thought to be initiated as predatory attacks. There have been ones where they have attacked people and then fed on them after they've killed them, but they don't think that those were started as predatory attacks. They're all defensive.

Wow. So in the story, Alam's son, he wasn't, there was no signs of the bear feeding on that body. It took off. Yeah, as soon as it neutralized him, it was out of it. And that one, he startled it. It was just like reaction, like, let's neutralize this threat. That's what I've evolved to react to threats, you know?

Exactly. Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them, that's bulls bend. And marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard, Confessions. I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand. When leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

Cut the bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign, terms and conditions apply. It'd be interesting if one went into the Shire because they would be bunk in their head more than Gandalf. I bet.

It'd be interesting, yeah. I don't think they're tall enough, though. But like the walls and stuff, they'd be bonk in their, they'd be sniffing the ground bonk in their heads. I think you're right. What sound would they make when they bonk their head? You don't think they'd bonged their head if they were in that house. Are you talking to me?

Yeah. I guess I haven't thought about it. But yeah, I guess they would. It feels like they bonged their head on trees all the time. I don't know. Why do you think that? Because they're always sniffing the ground. Yeah, they might.

Yeah, they're not looking up. You're probably right. All day. Okay. Yeah. Just a theory. All right. So.

I think from the figs perspective, almost every bear, sloth bear attack is predatory. Like if you were to talk to a fig, they'd be like, yeah, all of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These guys are very predatory. Yeah. Or a termite.

I think I'll write a paper on sloth bear headbongs. Yeah, it's easy. I did it. So I'm going to link the details to our paper in the show notes. It's open access. Anyone can read it. I do think it's an interesting paper when it comes to like two really interesting animals interacting with each other. That's a lot of biology.

It's a new bear species. It's an animal I've done a fair amount of work with outside of this paper. Even I did some work with them. I definitely wanted to talk about them. I may even do a short bonus episode that goes over my research with Sloth Bears and release it for our subscribers. But for now, we're going to leave the biology and go back to our story. Now it feels like you have to do that. Yeah, maybe I will.

We'll see. I don't have to do anything, dude. It just feels like a big tease if you don't. You should just read your paper and record it. Just throw that up. Yeah. All right. When Anderson heard that the bear was attacking people again,

It was in a forested area about 20 miles away from Alam Bucks's shrine. Again, this is about a month later. This is in the small jungle town of Sakrapatna. The bear had mauled two men in the area that were cutting wood, and it had killed one of these men, and then one of the forestry officials had written to Anderson to ask for his help. He thought it was very possible this was the same bear, and he remembered his promise to his friend.

So he said that he wanted to help, but he wrote back and said, get as much information as possible about the whereabouts of this bear, it's daily habits, and then I'll be there soon. And about 10 days later, he got word of where the bear was thought to have a cave, and he was told that in the meantime, a forest guard had been mauled by the animal. So he left. He thought, you know, I got to go kill this bear.

It's still attacking people. So he left for this Sakrapatna place. And the day after he arrived, the bear struck again. There's a man who was with his brother, and his brother was grazing cattle in the forest near the hill where the bear was living, when suddenly this man heard screams coming from his brother in this deep forest mixed with the growls of a bear. The brother was too afraid to go and confront the bear that he knew was mauling his brother, but he ran to the bungalow where he knew Anderson was staying to tell him about this attack.

It was 4.30 p.m. and Anderson got his rifle, his flashlight, three or four helpers, and they started off into the jungle to find this guy. The only problem was that this brother had really undersold how far the attack site was, and Anderson thinks they walked for about six miles through the jungle before getting close to this area where the man had been attacked. And at this point, when they get close, they're surrounded by dense jungle, these big bamboo groves. By the time they got there, it's getting dark,

and the men that had accompanied Anderson weren't about to chase a bear into this dense brush in the dark, and they just said, we're going home and you should go home too. So everyone leaves, aside from this guy's brother, the guy that had been attacked his brother and Anderson. And the brother is getting pretty spooked out too. And so he just stands where he is and he's like, listen, we're close to where this happened, but I'm not going any further. I'll stay here and wait, but I'm not going to, like, go into this jungle with you. Which, Jeff. Didn't quite have that revenge.

He didn't have that need for revenge for his brother. No, I would do it. I'd go kill this bear if it had attacked you. I'd tell you not to you. Okay. Mike, would you do it for your brothers? No, sir. Would you get someone close to it?

My old man. So they could do it. My brothers wouldn't lose to that bear. They would win. They would have beat the bear. I wouldn't need revenge. Basically, this guy, though, he just kind of waved his arm in the direction of where the attack was, and he said it was over there.

So Anderson picks up his rifle and his flashlight, and he walks in that direction. and into this thick brush. He's yelling for this a victim, this attack victim, whose name was Thima, and he's not getting a response. The jungle's getting thicker and thicker. He's about to turn around, and he calls out one more time,

and just barely hears a tiny moan in the valley below him. Wow. So he works his way down into this valley. It's really steep. It's the girl the bear has in his den. He's still yelling this man's name, and the moans and cries are gradually getting stronger and stronger. until he finally found Thima.

And I want to read this part straight from his memoir about what this guy looked like when he found him. Forcing my way through the thickets, I struggled down the decline, slipping on rocks and loose stones, catching myself every now and then on the thorns. After a couple hundred yards of such progress, I called again.

After some time I heard a moaning answer, somewhere to my right. I proceeded in this fashion, following the cry until I eventually found Thimma, lying at the foot of a tree in a puddle of his own blood. His face was a mass of raw flesh and broken bones. The only way of distinguishing that he was breathing was by the bubbles of air that forced themselves through the clotting blood. In addition, the bear had raked across him the stomach with his claws, tearing open the outer flesh so the

loop of intestine protruded. He was hardly conscious when I found him, and I soon realized that what I had taken to be a moaning reply to my calls were just the groans he was making every now and then in his delirium. Oh, like, he wasn't trying to respond. He was just making. Yeah. Just moaning for the love of moaning, dude. Have you ever had it?

Where, like, the only noise you could make was just a moan? Like, when you get punched in the stomach and you just go, like, I feel like I've done that before. What is the morning? That's kind of how it is. That's the only noise you can make. Mone. Yeah.

Yeah, I guess, like, if you really have to be. there's one rope swing where a branch grabbed or like I tried to swing on the rope swing and a branch like hooked the rope so it like flung me more than like swinging it's normal yeah there's a high rope swing it's like 30 feet so it just like flung me and I had no control over my body and I belly flopped when I came out of the water it's just like a oh Like that's like the only way I could get air out and I got like made fun of by the people in the boat for like the rest of the high school for they're doing that That's pretty funny All right so pretty much this guy from his description his face is just hamburger

He couldn't even really tell it was a face But then he could see these bubbles coming out where he was trying to breathe and then the bear had also ripped his intestines out So just like one loop of his intestine was sticking out. Just like when my belly flopped. Yeah, it's pretty much the exact same thing. I'm glad you brought that up. Anderson knew that Thima was going to die if he didn't do something right then and there. The night was quickly approaching.

So he lifted him on his back, which isn't easy in the thick jungle. Yeah. Apparently, Thima was kind of a beefy boy, too. He was pretty heavy. It'd be easier if he had all that hair, latch him on there. Yeah. But he used his rifle as a walking stick. He climbed slowly up the hill with the mangled Thima on his back.

He was almost to the top of the ridge when he stepped poorly on some rocks. His left foot slipped and caught between two boulders and searing pain ripped through his body. Oh, no. Yeah. He and Thimma fell to the ground. He's going to be like a hundred twenty-seven hours guy, start drinking his own pee and stuff. He's got Thima to eat if he needs to. That's a good point.

He sprained his ankle and he's on. unable to walk. Ouch. Ten outchies. Yeah. We've all been there. It's terrible. It's crazy to me that that part of the story is like the most squeamish I got.

Yeah, I know. We've all done that enough. I just, uh, I hate when someone does it on like the NBA or something and they keep replaying it. Like, I can't watch it. So he yelled for about an hour for the brother, but he never got a response. And he realized he was going to have to spend the night here with Thima, who was dying. He stayed up the whole night listening to Thimma's groans and gurgles get fainter and fainter until he died around 5 a.m.

He wasn't able to support himself on his foot, so he tried crawling through these thorny bushes, but it was so thick that he didn't make it very far before he gave up. He knew he would just have to wait for rescue, and around noon, a large group of people led by Thema's brother showed up and rescued him and recovered Thema's body. Anderson was taken to the hospital. His recovery would take weeks, and he decided, at that point who's going to kill this bear at any cost. Now it's like, you messed with me. Now it's personal. Yeah. All right.

So in the couple weeks that it took him to recover, the bear mulled two more people. I'd go shoot that rock personally. That's the thing I'd be most angry at. Anderson learned that had been seen regularly in a field with some Boreum trees. and when he was able to walk, he went to this field in the evening and he picked a large tree and he just decided to sit at the base of this tree with his back to the stump and just wait for this bear. Sure enough, around 11 p.m., he heard the noise of the bear as it woofed and grunted and shuffled toward him. Took about an hour for this bear to finally come close enough to Anderson,

and when it did, he shined his flashlight on the bear and it immediately stood up in this light, showed that large white-shaped U pattern to Anderson. He fired and planted a bullet right in the middle of that U, killing the bear instantly. And in his book, he says, And that was the end of that really bad bear. That's a good way to end that story. So was this really a bad bear?

Or was it actually a number of different bears that just happened to be mauling a slightly larger number of people than average that year? I personally think it was probably two or more bears that were responsible for these mallings because the first ones took place like 20 miles from the second group that we were talking about and they described that first spot as being really good for a bear. Like there was all these different food sources, there was a little lake, there was denning habitat. There's really no good reason for that bear to move 20 miles away.

And they actually have one of the smaller home ranges of different bears. species. So one of my colleagues, Thomas Sharp, wrote a paper on the sloth bear Mysore. And he kind of thinks the same thing, that it was probably multiple bears involved in these attacks. But it's impossible to say. And it could have been one. In the 50s, they did have that mindset a lot, too, of just like an animal being evil and like. Yep. And I don't, I don't blame Anderson for sticking to that narrative because it makes for a better story. And it's kind of a bigger win when you kill the animal because you can kind of say it's over you know like this reign of terror is over I did it yeah no more bear attacks in India they're done so yeah it there is a lot of

kind of debate over whether or not this was multiple bears I think it probably was but um it's still a really interesting story regardless yeah for sure it's possible there's one yes it is possible for sure. Maybe it's kind of like the noble lie. Old Plato always used to talk about the noble lie, about how it's probably better for that society over there to think that it was just a single bear, now the problem was gone, and now they're all living comfortably again. Yeah. At the time, I would agree with you. He was a wise old man. Yeah. Enjoy more ways to save at Ralph's, like low prices in every aisle. And when you download the Ralph's app, you can clip and save more with digital coupons every week. Plus, you can earn fuel.

points to save up to $1 per gallon at the pump. At Ralph's, you can enjoy more ways to save and more rewards every time you shop. So it's always easy to save big every day with savings and rewards. Ralph's SoCal for over 150 years. Savings may vary by state. Fuel restrictions apply. Seasite for details. All right. You guys have any questions about the sloth bear of Mysore or sloth bears in general before we go to our categories? I always think of Plato being just like out of the womb, bald with a big white beard. Like he was never a young man, right? Plato?

Yeah. Maybe like a sloth bear in one of those like mirror houses at the fair. It would bonk its head. It would be bonkett. Dude. Especially like because they can stand up. They're going to be hitting their head all the time.

Wes. They'd probably be charging those mirrors a lot too. This didn't come up like a single time in that paper you wrote. No, there was nothing about mirror houses or the Shire or Plato. I bet you there's... Do they have pretty thick skulls? Yeah, I mean,

they're like other bears, they have a pretty robust skull. Yeah. Interesting. You should do a paper, Jeff. You should write a paper on sloth bears bonking their heads. All right. So, if there's no real questions, we're going to move on to categories. Our favorite sloth bear is our first one. Favorite sloth bear

from pop culture. There's not many. So or just favorite sloth bear in general it can be the one you saw in India It can be whatever you want So we're pretty sure Winnie is a black bear right? Is that what we decided? Winnie was based off of a black bear in a show Oh, okay so even though he's a honey bear more or less West just left I know now we're directional here

You know I'll take one I'll take one that I'll leave the obvious one and I'll take from the movie RRR, I just really like how they gather up all the jungle animals in India and then release them on like the English nobles. And I was glad they got a bear in there. So I'll go with the sloth bear they got an RRR. I had forgotten about that. That was great.

That's a fun movie. I really enjoyed that. The scene where they like save the boy. On the bridge. just like a 15 minute monologue of like best, montage of like them becoming best friends is

just amazing. It's like three and a half hours long too and it's just good throughout the entire runtime. It always never slows down. Mike, do you have a favorite sloth bear? Paddington? Is he a sloth bear?

Dude, what's a spectacle? He's an Andean bear. So I can really think of one. The only thing is sloth bear's balloon. That's the only one I could think of. I guess that one. I'm going to pick this little one that I have this little metal statue of a sloth bear that I bought my first time I was in India. And I bought it from this guy who had a really kind of shady looking little shop.

And it was below all this other stuff. And it had kind of a menacing feel to it. And this was like right before COVID started. And so I kind of blame me buying this sloth bear for starting COVID. I think that might have been what did it. You're patient zero. Yeah. I just, well, I think it wasn't supposed to be bought, and that was my punishment for buying it.

I see. So sorry, guys. Yeah. All right. Okay. So next we are going to do another poorly named animal. I asked you guys to come up with another example of an animal that just really isn't named very well. Yeah.

I have one, I think I'm going to get some push back on because it's a good name. Yeah. just don't think it works for the animal. Wallabies. Okay. I think because like every time I hear wallabies, I think of a rodent. I don't think of like a mini kangaroo. Yeah.

And like I think kangaroo is the perfect name for kangaroos. And I think wallabies needs to have like a name closer to kangaroo. What about that name? Kangarites. I think of like something small. Kangarinis? It could be like a big rodent. I don't know.

It just sounds like a rodent to me. Like something, it doesn't sound like a mini kangaroo. Okay. I can't get it out of my brain. So maybe it's just a personal thing. But like to me, it needs to sound more like kangaroo. Okay. Yeah.

All right. You guys don't feel that way at all. No, wallaby doesn't make me think of something small, but I don't know. Well, I didn't say small. You didn't? I thought you said it makes a rodent. I think of a rodent. Rodents can be big.

Sure. Right? Capi bar is the biggest rodent. Huge. Yeah. I think of licorice when I think a wallaby. That's like a weird association I've got in my brain. So I'm kind of on your side on this one, Jeff, I guess.

I think I really like the way it sounds. I just don't think of wallabies when I hear wallaby. I think of like a, yeah, like a pica type of animal. Something small. You think there's... I mean... Bigger than an ant. If someone says rodent, you think of a small animal.

You don't think of like a big animal. You think of something small. Yeah. All right. Okay. Good job. I mean, this was open-ed-ed-old. You got us thinking.

Yeah. Okay. Like a wallaroo? Walleroo. Ooh, I do like that. Walleroo. Yeah. All right.

Get on at Australia. Mike, do you have an answer? Yeah, I'm going to go with Guinea Pig. That's always been a curious one to me. I don't really understand. I'm sure there's some taxonomical reason why that makes sense, but it just doesn't to me. Because in my mind, pigs are pigs and guinea pigs aren't.

Aren't pigs. Does that make sense? I don't know. They're like little fuzzy rodents. I don't know. It just doesn't strike me as a pig at all. They're not pigs. Yeah.

They don't really look very pigish either. No. I picked whale shark. Yeah, I had that as a bad tip. It's because it. I feel like I've done a lot of trips to see whale sharks with friends, and my friends just cannot get it straight. It's confusing.

And they'll constantly be like, those whales, those whales. And I'll be like, oh, they're sharks. And they're like, I know they're sharks. And it's like, well, then don't call them whales, you know. So it's kind of, I don't know. And I know I can be a little bit of a stickler about that kind of thing. But I just wish they weren't called whale sharks because it is confusing for people. I like the idea of like having something that just.

grabs them as big before shark, just whale is confusing. Yeah. And I get it. A shark. Yeah. Gig a shark would be a good one. Jumbo. Jumbo.

There's got to be a better one. The name makes sense because they're gentle. They're massive. But it is confusing for a lot of people. And they're not whales. They're shark. You could do like spotted shark. Yeah.

Giant spotted shark. Sure. Oh, there you go. Constellation shark. So you can get that movie. stars to Jeff? Yeah. All right.

I like that. Concordions are big. They're huge. Wait, my backup. Galaxy shark. King cobra is a confusing one to me because they're not cobras. Yeah. Oh, is that true?

Yeah. And I've just always thought they're cobras because they're not true. They're not true cobras, but you can still call them a cobra. What the freaking heck? Yeah. You can call them cobras? Why? Yeah, you can call them cobras.

Like, because there's like two. groups. There's true cobras which are like nausea species, N-A-J-A. And then there's snakes like King Cobra's that aren't true Cobra's, but they still have the characteristics of what we know as a cobra. So it's not wrong to call it a Cobra. So they're like on the fringe of a cobra. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think anyone's losing sleep over people calling them. All right. Yeah. And I'm fine with it. Okay. What would you guys name a sloth bear if you were responsible for naming them? Hair bear. That's like that.

Came to mind. Hair bear. Okay. I thought maimed bear would be maybe an appropriate name. Oh yeah. Shaggy bear is good. I think the one I want them to be named. The one that we saw, it kind of waddled out into the middle of the little dirt road we were on,

kind of like a sumo wrestler. So I thought it was sumo bear would be a fun. I like that. I would probably name them ant bear or termite bear because I think that's kind of, It's what they eat. It's descriptive. I like the name honey bear for them, but I would probably name them the ant bear. Hmm.

Ant bear. I'd think they'd be like the smallest bear then. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. You know? What about Gandalf bear? Because it's bonking.

All right. What's his name? Mithrandale. Can't remember all of us and his real name. Mithrandeer. Yeah, Mithrandeer. Okay. We're going to do what would Mike and Jeff do?

Let's say your best friend's son is attacked by, or you pick any part of the story that you want and do what would Mike and Jeff do. I would immediately start drinking my pee after I rolled my ankle. That's for sure. That's as much as I've got, though. Well, is his name Anderson?

Yeah, Kenneth Anderson. I wouldn't have gone back after that first trip. I would have stayed out there until jobs done, you know? Jobs not done, quitter. Job's not done. lots of lives at stake here that bear's gonna get someone else you know there's ripe figs

to eat exactly what's his face Corbett lived in Rudraprayog for like four years while he's trying to kill that leopard this guy's job is a hunter right yeah yeah it's a good point you did a bad job it's a good point it's like what you need to go back for

your job is literally a hunter what's that guy's name this is your job that died fema thimma's blood is on his hands rolling a grenade into that cave would have been a good idea. All right. Listen, maybe the girls in there, maybe, but, you know, it's for the greater good kind of thing, you know.

All right, let's do what you actually should do. A big part of this is prevention. So if you are in India and you're not, you know, protected by a car or whatever, you're out in the brush, making a fair amount of noise as you're moving around is really important because this is an animal that you could. surprise and if you surprise them at close range they'll probably attack if you surprise them at a long distance it's a good chance it's just going to run away so making noise to avoid them avoiding moving around and brush during like dawn and dusk when they're most active but this is actually a really interesting bear because there's not a great consensus yet on the right messaging for what you should do

thomas sharp my co-author on my sloth bear paper wrote a paper with tom smith my mentor on sloth bear attacks and there's some other authors in that paper as well. What they found is that it's kind of a tricky bear. Sometimes playing dead actually works. That's a good name for it. Tricky bear. Tricky bear. Sometimes playing dead actually works pretty well with despair

because it just kind of wants the threat to be gone and if you're suddenly not a threat anymore. But they did find that people that played dead often had more serious injuries than people that ran or people that fought back. But people that ran or fought back died at a higher average than people that played dead.

So it's kind of tricky. You don't want to run. You don't want to fight back necessarily. But playing dead also, you might get pretty beat up when you do that. So the best advice I can give people is make plenty of noise. If you see a sloth bear

and it hasn't seen or heard you yet, you want to quietly just leave that area so it doesn't even hear you or know that you're there. And if you're being charged by a sloth bear, I would try and slowly back away. But if it makes contact with you, play dead, go into the fetal position,

protect your neck, protect your face, protect your stomach, and hope that it stops that attack. And hopefully someday India will have access to bear spray and these other tools that would be really good deterrence for sloth bears. Yeah.

India. I thought we'd been talking about Indiana this whole time. Okay. Um, that's a really interesting paper, though. If you want to read it, it's with Tom Smith and Tom Sharp and you thought we were talking about like Gary, Indiana. Yeah, Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana. All right. Next category.

That's like often cited as one of the most dangerous cities in the country. So it makes sense why I would think that. Yeah. Gary, Indiana. Yep. Look it up. Look up the stats. The bear attacks, probably.

Huh. All right. Next category is I wanted you guys to give me a hot take on Balloo the Bear, a beloved children's. I think you're both more opinionated than me on this, so I'm going to let you guys cook. I'm going to let Mike go first because I think he's the most upset about it. I have never, I hate this bear. I've never liked him. The biggest offense in the whole movie, and I think this is like, it's pretty messed up how he kind of tries to hijack King Louis' song by the end. in with a little leaf dress and starts dancing and singing like it's his song. You already had your song, Ballou.

Like King Louis cook for a bit. But no, he has to get out there and steal center stage. That always bothered me so much. And King Louis' song is like the best song. It's the best song in the whole movie. Yeah. Yeah. But I think even in his song.

You don't think he was just vibing in the, it's the cameraman's fault for going on Baloo? No, he takes over, dude. He does like the Kool-Aid man thing through like, a rock wall he bursts onto the scene he's like now it's my turn to sing he's like dude he probably took over that song though because his song sucks the bare necessity is terrible song i think he takes minimalism to kind of an extreme and he's talking about how to pick the prickly pears and the paw-paw fruits it's like maybe get like a fork or a tool you don't have to have like

absolutely nothing i hate dude i didn't realize when i came up for this category that you had such strong feelings. It bothers me, dude. Because he's all about, like, taking it easy. But then he's like, just steal from the bees. They're working hard. And, like, they can sustain our lazy lifestyle. It's like, what the bees are trying to take care of themselves? Why don't you do, like, a modicum of work

for yourself? Yeah, I think Ballou is a real. I think he's a fraud. And I think he's, I don't know. I think he was happy to see Mowgli leave by the end, because he was like, now I have one last thing to worry about. The bare necessity of myself again. Yeah, you're probably right. I don't have nearly as

strong feelings, but I'm glad I picked this category. Such an attention hog, dude. This is my favorite Disney movie, Jungle Book, the original animated one. More than Pirates of Caribbean, huh? Yeah. And Ballou was like pretty consistently one of my favorite characters, but it was actually when me and Jeff recently had our Lions versus Tigers discussion, it made me look at Sher Khan differently where I was like, Sher Khan was just trying to get rid of Moguli who he

saw as a threat to like the jungle like he was the only one really protecting the jungle and belu was trying to like make him part of their whole world and everything and i think that was pretty dumb i think balu should have killed mowgli immediately instead of trying to like float on a river with him so no that's kind of that was mine too baloo's kind of the actual villain because what mowgli burns down the whole jungle and baloo enables that You know? Yeah. And then the...

Just trying to, like, get rid of the threat to their whole ecosystem. Yeah. The second Mowgli sees a hot girl, he's just like, I'm out of here. I don't care about you guys at all. And he's just gone. See, that one, that one I don't blame him. Yeah. All right.

We're going to move on to our Anaconda scale. We're bringing that back for this episode. That's true, dude. He sees a girl from, like, a mile away, and he's like, well, I guess I'm forsaken. All of my friends and family. By lifetime friends that have risked your life to save me over and over and over again. Man, see you. Anaconda Scale.

You want him to have sex with a wolf? I would prefer that, yeah. Are we good? Can we move on to Anaconda Scale? I don't know. All right. You can try. Blue.

Who do you guys think from the movie Anaconda? Who do you think Kenneth Anderson most is aligned with? curious about this one because I think you could go a lot of directions here. Yeah, I would say from the jungle book, he's most like Shirkhan. Shirkon trying to get rid of a threat to his way of life. All right. We're going to do our cage match next. This is a new animal, so we're going to plug it into our cage match.

This is kind of like a mid-sized bear. So I think for its weight class, we're looking at like American Black. Bears, leopards, mountain lions, wolves. Yeah, that's interesting for bears where do you think it places? I think it probably is beating American black bears, even though they're bigger on average. So it's like the third best bear after Grizzlies and polar bears in a cage match? Yeah, if I had to like have one on my team. No, I think I'd agree with that.

I'd pick it after those two bears, yeah. Unless you're picking the biggest of each species, then I would probably still go with an American black bear. but if you're doing average size, I think I'd pick a sloth bear just because they're little brawlers, you know? They know how to fight. They do sometimes have interactions with leopards where they've fought.

They've killed leopards. Leopards have killed them. So I think that's a really good fight between those two species. But yeah, I think for our bears, I'd rank it third. And then I'd probably take it over a leopard and I'd take it over a wolf too.

Okay. Interesting. So that's kind of where I'd put them. All right. Jaguar. I was about to ask Jaguar. I think I would take the Jaguar. Nice. Yeah.

How about you guys? Who are you putting your money on? For Jaguar? Yeah, I think I'd go Jaguar. Yeah. I honestly think the one I'd be most interested in is like versus American Black Bear. Me too. Sam.

Yeah. Okay. We're going to do a little bit about conservation. They're IUCN vulnerable. They're protected under Indian law. There's likely about 10,000 sloth bears left in the wild, but they're rapidly losing their habitat to a growing population in the Indian subcontinent. Some of their other threats involve poaching for traditional medicine,

and then bears being killed in direct conflicts with farmers or other people. So kind of like this bear that was killed by Kenneth Anderson, you know, but sometimes people will just shoot them if they're like in their field or whatever. So luckily, more and more people are seeing the value in conservation in this Indian subcontinent. So when you say Indian subcontinent, it's like Nepal, India, Bhutan, kind of all those countries. And sloth bears like tigers have strongholds now in different national parks that have been set aside by local governments.

So they are doing better in those places. Yeah. Shout out to, like I know there's for sure problems, but shout out to India for at least like conserving some wildlife, setting aside some like national parks. And like, you know, we went there. We saw sloth bears. Like that's for sure. Something to give them credit.

credit for. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. And I think sometimes with eco-tourism, you kind of like think, man, like, this is kind of messed up that there's all these cars watching this tiger or whatever. But when you think about the alternative of that tiger being forced to live in a habitat that's rapidly being degraded by, you know, expansion and people building things in agricultural stuff, it's better that people have realized the value of tourism. Yeah. If the ecotourism didn't exist, that land might not. be the way it is. All right, briefly, I want to talk a little bit about the wildlife organization I worked with when I was doing sloth bear work and their efforts to save dancing bears.

So this organization is Wildlife SOS. They started their work with sloth bears in the 90s. And it's, I'm going to just like preface this with a quick trigger warning. It's a hard story to hear the way that some of these bears were treated. But I do think it's important to see how big of a difference just one organization can really make when it comes to animal welfare. So basically there's this nomadic tribe of people in India called the Colendar people.

And about 400 years ago, they started this practice where they would kill a mother sloth bear, kidnap her babies. And when the cub was about six months or older, they would put a red-hot poker through the muzzle of the bear through its nose that would create a hole in the muzzle and they would run a rope or a chain through that hole. and they would essentially then have this bear on this chain in its nose.

And it's so painful for the bear that the bear would immediately kind of follow whatever pressure they would put on that rope. So they could then take these bears. Initially it was for like royalty. They would take them and they would make them dance. So they're pulling on this rope and the bear's dancing. But really it's kind of like reacting to this really painful stimulus. It's really terrible. After this left more royalty, they just started.

of doing it in the street where they would have these dancing bears for tourists. People could come see a dancing bear that give these people money. And this continued for a really long time, and it affected hundreds and hundreds of bears. And Wildlife SOS launched this program to rescue dancing bears and replace this lost income for these people with something else. So basically they would go take a bear from one of these Kallendar tribes people, and they would replace it with like a little corner kiosk or some kind of shot. that they could then still make money, but they wouldn't have to exploit these animals anymore.

And it worked really well. And all these bears that were rescued were placed in sanctuaries. They're treated really well. I worked in one of those sanctuaries. And I honestly don't know if I've ever seen happier bears. They had this terrible life. And then they get to go live with a bunch of other bears. They're fed amazing food.

They're just really, really happy animals. And it's really beautiful. Yeah. Over time, Wildlife SOS essentially took every. single dancing bear off the street. I think it was over 600 animals that they rescued in total. And the practice is now essentially eliminated in India. There really aren't dancing bears anymore.

It's a huge win for animal welfare. And for sloth bears, super inspirational to me. Sometime we might have Kartik on the show. Kartik is one of the founders of Wildlife SOS and helped start this whole project. And he's just really an interesting person. Yeah, they'd be great. Yeah, no, that's amazing. Yeah.

And I'd just say it's easy to like see something like that on social media and like just give it like a like a like because you like bears and it's someone with a bear. Or whatever else. And it's like good to know that that's a bad practice and not to like, I don't know. I feel like the more public opinion changes on those things too, it's helpful. Just like not being impressed by bears that have been trained to do things that's not natural. For sure. Unless they're on a motorcycle. Yeah.

Wildlife SOS. I'm going to like that. I can't help myself. Wildlife SOS has gone on now to they're rescuing elephants that have been tortured. They even rescue like cobras that, you know, like the snake charmer people often violently like alter cobras to be able to do that. And they're rescuing cobras. They're doing all these different things to rescue animals, wild animals that have been

essentially tortured their whole lives. So they're a great organization. They do a lot of research too. I really have liked working with them. Well, let's donate some money. Let's donate some money. And we'll match up to 2000 if listeners donate money. Okay.

We'll set up a way for yet to track that. That's a good idea, though. Mike, what were you going to say? Oh, I was going to just say that same thing. But now Jeff looks like the good guy. Now he looks like the magnanimous bear lover. No, I like that. I know.

It's my bad. It's on me. Maybe let's do it through our Instagram. I know Instagram has like a way to raise money for different causes. So I think we'll do it on there. And yeah, like Jeff said, if we raise $2,000, we'll match that donation. So we'll put a little bit more fanfare into it when we launch it. But we'll let you guys know when that's going to be.

Cool. All right. Well, that's it. We're going to do our clause. I have one other question. Yeah, yeah. What other countries besides India have sloth bears? Bhutan.

Bhutan. Nepal. and what was the other one I said? Indiana. Nepal and Sri Lanka. That's right. Did you say it in the episode? Yeah.

Oh, that's on me. That's on you, dog. Yeah. Shoot. Let's do our claw ratings for this animal. It's a new animal. I'll go first because mine's not a surprise. Ten claw animal.

It's a bear. It's a bear I've worked with. I think they're like one of the weirdly most cute bears, but then just like so fascinating and interesting. So yeah, for me, it's a ten-housy. a 10 quah animal. One claw. I hate blue.

In actuality, seeing the bear was a real special experience in India, I'd give it eight claws. Yeah, I don't know. I guess I haven't thought

about it a whole lot since. Do you have any bears that are higher than that? I like polar bears and pandas, I think, are both nine claw, nine claw bears. Yeah,

I'm going to give it a nine just because I have four bears ahead of it. So I feel like it deserves a 10%. but also I can't have five, ten claw bear animals. So I'm giving a nine, and it's number 62 overall. What are your, well, I guess you're doing a video for backpacker

where you're going to rank your bears. I think this would come out after, though, so. Okay. Well, yeah. It might not. Give us a tease. Tease you? Yes, you just did kind of.

Let's say. I'm teased. Bears are not in the top four. Okay. I got to watch the rest of that now. That'll be coming out on our Instagram as well as theirs, I believe. But yeah, thanks guys for listening. I'm glad we finally did sloth bears.

We'll do them again. There's a lot of attacks out there. They're really interesting species. I've kind of been saving them for a while. So I'm glad we finally talked about them. We will link my paper in our show notes and then also some info about. backpackers bear month so you guys can learn more about bears this month be fun sweet i like that all right idea okay we'll see you guys later love you we'll see it love you love you bye