I’m guessing the funky character in your name is the problem. Care to choose another?

~I think it’s just the ` that’s the problem.

That thing looks like a mock up of several diferant animals. O.o

@DaftFader 455559 wrote:

That thing looks like a mock up of several diferant animals. O.o

its a real and unique bear, a family friened worked for Telekom Malaysia and one of his tasks was to discourage it from scaling satellite upliink towers – it mistakes them for trees and batters the LNB to shit (this is the important bit which transmits or receives the signal), as it thinks it can get hold of honey. Malaysia and the surrounding countries is a lot of islands, and not all have fibre optic cables.

They are strong enough to knock the entire dish out of alignment, and when that happens thats half the bandwidth to Sarawak and the Phillipines gone. The end result of this is the Telephone Exchanges (a mixture of old Plessey kit the British left behind and modern Chinese stuff held together with string and gaffer tape) go totally pear shaped and route the calls randomly – I managed to repeatedly wake up this unfortunate Chinaman at about 02:00 their time, as I was trying to telephone an aunt out there (who would normally be awake) but the calls were being routed to this dude (who also spoke no English, and sadly I don’t know way Hokkien (even my Dad didn’t!)

This isn’t good for the bear either as there is strong radiation and it can affect its fertility (the engineers get a list of safe zones, but bears can’t read)..

The Telekom chap was even issued with a 12 bore for protection – but only blank rounds – as the bear is already protected/endangered. He never used it though as he felt it would be more hassle than its worth, he was in his middle years and not in that good physical fitness and bear up a tower 100m away from you is better than being chased by a angry one – instead he’d just use his mobile to call the Environment Ministry.

I’m not sure what they’ve done recently but TM appear to have stopped this problem – and reports say the Sun Bear has lost a lot of its fierceness and is increasingly being kept as a pet.

This is somewhat bizzarely partly due to the “mail order bride” phenomenon – the way it works is that they use pretty 20 something girls what work in shops for the photos – the real women are somewhat plainer and of larger build (they are called “ah so’s” in China) in their 30s to 50s, and were the ones what their family couldn’t marry off. They are however usually good cooks and housekeepers used to work as maids but are losing that job to younger Fillipino and Indonesian women, so go looking for Engiish husbands, and usually end up with men in their 50s-70 from places like Bolton and Chelmsford.

By and large many of these marriages do end happily ever after (provided the man has decent DIY/maintenance skills, and all the corner shops sell tools and supplies at all hours) – apart from one thing, many SE Asian women start menopause very early (as soon as mid 40s). So these couples can’t have kids, and tend to acquire collections of animals. They start by taking in the many stray cats (some of which are actually wildcat hybrids), then dogs and before you know it its bears. In a richer country like Malaysia this isn’t so bad (they do get looked after) but in other nations they end up as “pets” in bars etc which is a unsuitable environment.

We took in two at Colchester Zoo from the Cambodian Environment Ministry who had confiscated them and tried to offer them to Malaysia and Singapore but they have loads already. I might be tempted to visit there (they have made the enclosures much better) and photograph them…