A heart-breaking video of a polar bear starving to death in the Baffin Islands of Canada brought attention to the challenges bears face due to climate change. While in China footage of a bear lying in its cage at a bile farm, the bars just wide enough to poke out a paw, and coverage of rescued ‘bile bears’ in Vietnam, arriving at sanctuaries with immense psychological and physical problems, some too weak to walk or climb after a lifetime in cages, raised attention to the plight of these mistreated animals. With habitats ranging from forests to woodland and grasslands to sea, bears are intriguing and captivating – but facing a bleak future.
With shrinking ice and inaccessibility to prey, polar bears could be extinct by 2050, climate change is causing their habitat to quite literally melt away. Grizzly bears are threatened with extinction as their habitat is destroyed by logging, mining, oil and gas drilling and land development. Thousands of Asiatic black bears (moon bears), sun bears, and brown bears, are kept, for decades, in cages and farmed for their bile. Panda bears are being pushed, by habitat fragmentation, into smaller, less liveable areas, and with bamboo making up 99% of their diets, the shrinking of bamboo forests is causing food shortages. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates that fewer than 20,000 sloth bears survive in the wilds of the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka. Of the eight bear species in the world, the IUCN lists six as vulnerable or endangered, the only exceptions being black and brown bears, who are still at risk in certain locations.
Remembering Wildlife is the collective name for the series of books created by British wildlife photographer Margot Raggett, who in 2014 began asking fellow wildlife photographers if they would contribute to a fundraising book for animal conservation. Their response was unanimous and Remembering Elephants, was published in 2016, with images donated by 65 of the world’s top wildlife photographers. Such was the success that Remembering Rhinos was quickly announced and launched in 2017, once again to critical acclaim. Remembering Great Apes, the third book in the series, was published in 2018 and featured images donated by 72 photographers and a foreword by Dr Jane Goodall. In 2019 the fourth book in the series, Remembering Lions launched, followed by Remembering Cheetahs, which won the GOLD award for best nature…
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