Two Lebanese bears migrate to the United States in search of a better life!
Two Syrian brown bears are being transported to the United States today after they were rescued from a zoo in Lebanon, where they lived in a cramped space and did not have enough food, two animal rights organizations said.
The bears Homer and Ulysses, 18 years old and weighing 130 kilograms each, lived in a zoo near the city of Tire in southern Lebanon, according to the Animals Lebanon association.
The non-governmental organization explained in a statement that it was able to get the owner of the two bears to release them after convincing him "that they deserve better than the two small concrete cages in which they have been held for more than ten years."
The two bears are supposed to be transferred from Beirut this evening to the United States, where they will bid farewell to the Wild Animal Sanctuary in the US state of Colorado.
The Syrian brown bear belongs to a relatively small subspecies of the endangered brown bear. This type of bear is no longer found in the wild in Syria or Lebanon, according to the British non-governmental organization Bear Conservation.
Animals Lebanon director Jason Mayer told AFP that the two bears at the zoo were likely imported from Eastern Europe.
Al-Dabban was originally scheduled to be transferred from Lebanon at the end of 2019, but the move was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and banking restrictions linked to the economic crisis.
The international organization Four Paws, which is also involved in transporting the two animals, indicated that it saw them for the first time in November 2019.
The NGO explained in a statement that they were "confined to two small cages" and had no water, nor were they regularly supplied with food, while their shelter was not "adequate" when the weather conditions were bad.
The statement noted that "the two bears were not only suffering from malnutrition but also severe stress as well as severe behavioral disturbances."
Meyer reported that about 30 lions and tigers, as well as dozens of other bears in Lebanon, live in private zoos or in private homes as pets.
Since the fall of 2019, Lebanon has witnessed an accelerating economic collapse, the worst in the country's history, which led to the impoverishment of a large part of the population and to hyperinflation, while banks impose strict restrictions on withdrawals and transfers abroad.
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