#labiated bear

[fridaybear]

This sloth bear is living her best life. Live your best life as well.

Be awesome to each other and listen.

Happy Friday, pals! ❤️

[bearlyfunctioning]

Patreon voted & the next anatomy study is THE SLOTH BEAR! https://www.patreon.com/posts/20549705  covers detailed looks at the sloth bear's face, mouth, paws, claws and more! These and other sketchy bear doodles are available to my $1 patrons

[boschintegral-photo]

Sloth Bear (Melursus Ursinus)

[sitting-on-me-bum]

Sloth bear by Marieke IJsendoorn-Kuijpers Via Flickr: Sloth bear spotted in Safaripark Beekse Bergen Netherlands

[animalworld]

COMMON SLOTH BEAR carrying young (Melursus ursinus ursinus) ©AP

NOTE: I am not a bear fan, I have seen bears several times in the wild and had a close encounter with one in the jungle. I also don't want to add flame to the fire of "killer bears" — that said, the statistics are pretty amazing to me, especially in this day and age. Since they are also easily trained and smaller than many other bears, I wonder if perhaps people underestimate their danger...

The common sloth bear is is an arboreal, nocturnal and insectivorous species of bear restricted to the Indian subcontinent. The sloth bear evolved from ancestral brown bears during the Pleistocene undergoing convergent evolution similar to that of other ant-eating mammals. They feed on mostly termites and local fruits that grow around India. The bears are typically preyed upon by Bengal tigers. Sloth bears often attack humans that encroach on their territory.

According to Robert Armitage Sterndale, in his Mammalia of India (1884, p. 62):

[The sloth bear] is more inclined to attack man unprovoked than almost any other animal, and casualties inflicted by it are unfortunately very common, the victim being often terribly disfigured even if not killed, as the bear strikes at the head and face. Blanford was inclined to consider bears more dangerous than tigers...

Captain Williamson in his Oriental Field Sports wrote of how sloth bears rarely killed their human victims outright, but would suck and chew on their limbs till they were reduced to bloody pulps. One specimen, known as the Sloth bear of Mysore, was singlehandedly responsible for the deaths of 12 people and the mutilation of 2 dozen others before being shot by Kenneth Anderson. Although sloth bears have attacked humans, they rarely become man-eaters. Dunbar-Brander's Wild Animals of Central India mentions a case in which a sow with two cubs began a six week reign of terror in Chanda, a district of the Central Provinces, during which more than one of their victims had been eaten, while the sloth bear of Mysore partially ate at least three of its victims. R.G. Burton deduced from comparing statistics that sloth bears killed more people than Asian black bears, and Theodore Roosevelt considered them to be more dangerous than American black bears.

In Madhya Pradesh, sloth bear attacks accounted for the deaths of 48 people and the injuring of 686 others between the years 1989 and 1994, probably due in part to the density of population and competition for food sources. A total of 137 attacks (resulting in 11 deaths) occurred between April 1998 and December 2000 in the North Bilaspur Forest Division of Chhattisgarh. The majority of attacks were perpetrated by single bears, and occurred in kitchen gardens, crop fields, and in adjoining forests during the monsoon season

Fact Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloth_Bear

Other photos you may enjoy:

Asian Black Bear

Polar Bear

Tiger - Sloth Bear predators