After a lifetime of brutal treatment, including walking on burning embers, Bulgaria’s last three dancing bears will get to rest their paws at a mountain sanctuary, in an apparent end to the centuries-old performance tradition in the Balkans. Activists today purchased the freedom of Mima, 8, Misho, 19, and Svetla, 17.

Bulgaria is believed to have been the last country in the Balkans where dancing bears still performed, even though the practice was outlawed in 1993, when there were 20 to 30 such bears in the country.

The three bears will join another 20 brown bears on Mount Rila at a 12-hectare sanctuary for former dancing bears about 180 kilometres south of Sofia.

“Our aim is to make their life more bearable in their remaining years,” Ioana Tomescu of the Austria-based Four Paws Foundation, which created the sanctuary, told The Associated Press.

Throughout the Balkans, families, mostly among the Roma community, have long earned a living through performing bears. But the techniques to train them led the practice to be banned, and animal rights activists have moved to find the bears new homes.

Because dancing bears are illegal, authorities could simply have taken Mima, Misho and Svetla away from their owners in the eastern village of Getsovo.

Instead, the Four Paws Foundation decided to pay for their freedom by giving their owners small grants to set up new businesses. It did not reveal how much was paid. In return, the owners signed declarations pledging never to take up the bear dancing business again.

The Deliverance of Dancing Bears,
by Elizabeth Stanley

ASPCA Henry Bergh Children’s Book Awards and 1995 Australian Picture Book of the Year winner, this thought-provoking story presents the plight of the dancing bears of Turkey and Greece. The author tells the story of a captive bear whose dreams of freedom sustain her, even while being forced to perform in a Turkish marketplace by a cruel and angry keeper. During the quiet hours when she is confined to her cage, the bear imagines a different life in which she is free to wander through mountain streams and sleep lazily with her cubs. It is a kind-hearted peasant who liberates the bear and who reminds all of those watching of an important moral lesson about dignity and life.

Stanley saw her first “dancing bear” in 1979 in Athens and decided then to write a book to challenge the assumption that men could cruelly use wild animals to make money. In 1992 she took her written text to Turkey to take photos and to make sketches for the artwork. In the same year The World Society for the Protection of Animals effected the release and the return to the wild of all chained bears in Turkey. Today there are no dancing bears in Greece or Turkey. Today, it is the last Bulgarian dancing bears who have been freed.

But a recent WSPA report has revealed that the trade in dancing bears is still alive and well in India.

Into the Glaswegian staidness of our psychiatry centre,
seminar room adoring with trainees,
came Ronnie (my namesake) Laing
of apostolic hairline and oracular eyes,
the slight man who recast schizophrenia
from a chasm to a plateau
where its sufferers looked down with a terrible status.
Author of The Divided Self,
his own Scottish childhood barren and cold,
his topic that day was “Birth Trauma”
begun in a defensive brogue:
‘There’rr those who accyooz me of bein’ an anti-psycheye-iatrist,
But in feck, nuthin’ coold be ferrther from th’trooth.’

Beside him sat Dr. Gordon, late of the U.K.,
whose coal-miner build had burrowed
to full professorship and could crush
Laing with a single blow,
whose beefy arm
only ten minutes into the talk
as the great man began uncontrollably to sob,
and the rest of us froze in silence,
reached out to comfort.
“There, there, now. It’ll be alright.”
Master of “inner self versus outer”,
Laing shook off the hug,
and invoking the patron saint of peaceful birth Fréderik Leboyer,
soldiered on, almost an hour.
‘What d’they groo on th’stony soil o’ Scotland?’
–the old joke–’They groo men!”
Yet here was one such man
from across the stormy Atlantic
showing us that greatness can unravel
like three-ply tissue,
to honour an illness
people would rather dismiss
and delivering us
from illusions of invincible fame
with his own full-throated cry.

Ron Charach, “R.D. Laing”
from “Dungenessque”

Society for Langian Studies

Summer Reading:

O Devayani, you thought they would never die.
You bought a bag of tomatoes in October,
and ate most of them
half ripe, as they always are,
from the grocery store.

But — having momentarily lost
the taste for tomatoes –
you set two aside to ripen.
Week after week they remained
on top of the refrigerator,
not quite ripe,
yellowish-red, their skins firm,
their flesh smooth.
They didn’t ripen and they didn’t rot.
Months went by,
they remained the same as the day

you put them atop the refrigerator.
You laughed with your friends about them,
you speculated on the horrors
of genetically altered foodstuffs.
You thought of the half dozen you had eaten.
Would they stay in your stomach

month after month,
unchanged, forever, like the two tomatoes
on top of the fridge?
You read an article that said irradiating
vegetables
keeps them in a state of not quite ripe.
It didn’t say forever, but…
Irradiated food. One month,
two months
three months
four months

five months –
possibly in the sixth month,
first one and then the other tomato
began to rot.
They soon began to smell abominably.
Is this food?
Two tomatoes,

two immortal tomatoes.
O Devayani,
do you wonder
that you fear the sustenance
of this society:
fear, anxiety, permanence, insurance,
the desire to forego change
and death?
O Devayani,
a wise woman would fear to eat
anything at all.

Two Tomatoes, by Jan Haag

FlavrSavr tomatoes, thanks to Monsanto and friends. StarLink corn too. But their best shot was the Terminator.

Corporate multinationals like Monsanto could change the way farmers around the world have operated for millennia. Bent on controlling the food chain, their “technology protection system” rendered seeds sterile. It would protect their intellectual property - mostly herbicide tolerance and insect resistance. Farmers would be forced to buy their seed at every planting.

So much for the myth that commercial biotechnology’s aim is to Solve World Hunger.

Dinner at the New Gene Cafe

Seeds of Deception

Don McKay is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Strike/Slip for which he won the Griffin Poetry Prize on June 6. He has won two Governor General’s Awards for Poetry and has been shortlisted twice for the Griffin Poetry Prize, most recently for Camber: Selected Poems, which was a Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year. McKay is also known as a poetry editor, and he has taught poetry in universities across the country.

But close up it is more likely to be the commotion of stress lines swirling within each slab that clutches at the heart—each stone a pent rage, an agon. None of the uniform grey of limestone, that prehistoric version of ready-mix concrete, in which each laid-down layer adds to the accumulated weight that homogenizes its predecessors. Think instead of Münch’s The Scream with its contour lines of terror; then subtract the face. Or you could turn on the weather channel to observe those irresponsible isobars scrawling across the planet. Imagine our ancestors tracing these surfaces, whorled fingertip to gnarled rock, reading the earth-energy they had levered into the air. They had locked the fury into the fugue and car crash into the high-school prom. They engineered this dangerous dance. Better stop here. Better spend some time.

– Strike/Slip 39

“McKay doesn’t write about natural science so much as through it, using its terms and principles to explore the science of human nature. A poem about a hike through ‘the broken prose of the bush roads’ gradually, gracefully metamorphoses into a meditation on desire. . . . These exuberantly musical and shrewd poems are ecological in the fullest sense of the word: they seek to elucidate our relationships with our fragile dwelling places both on the earth and in our own skins.”

– New York Times Book Review

Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist and nature writer whose landmark book, Silent Spring, is often credited with having launched the global environmental movement. Silent Spring had an immense effect in the United States, where it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy.

Scientists such as American Cyanamid’s Robert White-Stevens (who wrote “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”), chemical companies, and other critics attacked the data and interpretation in the book. Some went further to attack Carson’s scientific credentials because her speciality was marine biology and zoology, not the field of biochemistry.

Former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson reportedly concluded she was “probably a Communist.”

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are never alone or weary of life. — Rachel Carson