Short story by Raimi Zamani
I did not always look this way. Long ago, I had thick, dark fur. I was a beautiful sun bear with a golden moon shape on my chest.
But then I got very sick. All my fur fell out. My skin turned gray and wrinkly. The hot sun burned me. I did not look like a bear anymore.
I was very hungry, so I walked out of the forest. I went into a farm where humans grew palm oil trees. My legs shook as I walked. I just wanted some food and a quiet place to rest.
But the food on the farm was bad. It did not smell like the sweet forest. It smelled sharp and bitter. The food was covered in a strange dust.
This dust was poison made by humans. It tasted like cold metal. I knew I should spit it out, but I was too hungry to stop. I ate the bad food anyway. The poison went deep into my body.
That is when the humans saw me. Usually, I would run away from them. But I was too weak. I stood up. The humans looked scared. They yelled and pointed flashing lights at me.
They thought I was a monster or an alien. They did not know I was a bear. Their loud yells scared me. I hid in the bushes for a long time. I got sicker and sicker.
One day, more humans came to find me. I was too weak to fight them. I was just skin and bones. But these humans were different.
They were kind. They did not yell. They had soft voices and gentle hands. They put me in a safe cage and took me on a long drive.
They took me to a wildlife center. For the first time in a long time, I felt safe. They gave me a cool room. They gave me fresh water and sweet, fresh food. I did not have to eat poison anymore.
The good food made me feel better. I got stronger. One day, I even climbed up on some wood! I felt like a real sun bear again. The humans smiled at me. They knew I was not a monster.
But my strength did not last. The poison from the farm had made me very sick. The sickness was called cancer. The sweet food could not make the sickness go away.
Soon, I was weak again. I stopped climbing, and I stopped eating. The nice humans visited me often. Their voices sounded sad. They patted my bare skin. They were never scared of how I looked.
At last, I closed my eyes for good. The pain in my tummy went away. I was not a scary monster, and I was not an alien. I was a beautiful bear of the forest. And in the end, I went to sleep like one.
This story is based on a heartbreaking true story that made global headlines in 2015.
Early that year, a strange, hairless creature were found crawling through an oil palm plantation near Bintangor in Sarawak, Borneo.
The plantation workers who found the animal were terrified, mistaking her for a mysterious alien or a frightening monster.
In reality, this creature was a severely malnourished and sick female sun bear who had lost all her fur.
We believe that fiction is a powerful way to build empathy and help us better understand the natural world.
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