Brown Bear Rina steps out of the ‘bear house’.
Brown Bear Rina steps out of the ‘bear house’.
Four Paws is currently running a petition to strengthen animal rights in Albania, where an estimated 50 bears live under insufficient conditions. In cooperation with Albanian authorities, the first five bears were rescued in late 2016. Three of which, Pashuk, Tomi and Gjina, were already transferred to the Pristina Bear Sanctuary, while the other two, Luna and Jeta are in current refuge in a zoo in Tirana, Albania’s capital, and are due to be transferred to Kosovo in spring 2017.
In Ukraine, the fall of former president Yanukovych, who allegedly held five brown bears in his winter residency himself, opened the way for reinforcement of animal rights. Assisted by Four Paws, a new law against the use of bears and wolves for the training of hunting dogs was conceptualized and passed in 2015. With a large parts of the construction work already carried out, another Bear Sanctuary by Four Paws is scheduled to open mid-2017 near the city of Lviv in western Ukraine. The new sanctuary will work alongside two already existing facilities, the Bear Rescue Centre Nadiya and the Bear Rehabilitation Center Syvenyr.
