BELITSA, Bulgaria -- Ah, to be a bear in Belitsa.
Food is plentiful and living quarters are soon to be more roomy, thanks to an eightfold expansion of a bear sanctuary being completed at the expense of western European animal lovers. As the bears enjoy their salvation from a harsh street performer's life, as visitors to Belitsa enjoy seeing the bears, residents of this impoverished town shake their heads at the ironies of existence on the outskirts of the European Union.
"At the beginning, people said, 'We've never seen such food,'" says Kostadin Trichkov, 45, an unemployed construction worker with rough, swollen hands. "During the winter, the bears had bananas, watermelons and oranges."
That's a step up from the usual winter diet for people -- a diet that consists chiefly of beans and potatoes and whatever might have been preserved in jars the previous summer.
The monthly food bill for each bear runs to $200 a month, roughly $80 more than the average Bulgarian monthly wage. Nearly one in five Bulgarians is out of work, still better than the unemployment rate of about 50 percent in Belitsa, a town of about 3,000 people in southwestern Bulgaria.
"The people in the town are shocked. All of Bulgaria is shocked," says Assen Vladimirov, the Sofia-based producer and screenwriter of the documentary film Of Bears and Men.
"It's ridiculous to spend such money on six bears here," he says. "They are more horrified by the conditions of the animals than [those of] the people."
Says Trichkov: "There's a saying in town -- 'there's nothing better than to be a bear in Belitsa.'"
Six indigenous brown bears occupy a 2.5-acre park completed late in 2000 for the equivalent of $250,000 by a Vienna-based animal rights foundation called Vier Pfoten, or "Four Paws." A 17-acre addition that will cost at least $750,000 has been under construction since April, when the groundbreaking ceremony attracted a flock of reporters and European animal rights campaigners. The Paris-based Brigitte Bardot Foundation contributed a fifth of the cost of the park and expansion.
At the ceremony, Belitsa Mayor Hassan Ilan suggested a silver lining: "Before the bears came here, people said in their poverty: 'How can it be that the bears will be taken care of?' ... Today they wait with interest because they know that tomorrow the work will start and it will create jobs."
There's the work of building the park expansion and the two-person task of running the park. A few local people are making a few dollars selling food for the bears.
This is considered small consolation in Bulgaria, which is close to Romania as the poorest country hoping to join the European Union. Bulgaria is pursuing its admission to the union, an effort backed by broad public support. More than half the negotiable points standing in the way of its admission have been settled.
In the meantime, however, the country cannot afford to turn down any projects from abroad, even the conspicuous anomaly of a well-appointed bear park.
"If you don't have any real problems, you focus your attention on the small problems," says Yana Terzieva, 13, quoting a Bulgarian proverb in her attempt to fathom why western Europeans appear more concerned about bears than people.
She's sitting at a plastic table outside a cafe with a group of friends, sipping soft drinks. The girls say they're happy the sanctuary was built in their town and feel proud that visitors come to see the bears and enjoy the clean air and the beauty of the nearby Pirin mountains and lush forests.
They also wonder about priorities. "There are no textbooks in the school and children from the villages can't afford them," says Terzieva. "The windows are broken. It's very cold in the winter, and the school only has wood-burning stoves."
Her friend, Nadezhda Misheva, 13, plans to go north to Sofia to study dancing.
The best-paying work this region ever saw ended in 1991, when the Environment Ministry closed the uranium mine, which had been exporting to the Soviet Union.
The dancing-bear business is not so lucrative as it once was, either. For one thing, Bulgaria -- the only European country where dancing bears are still known to perform -- outlawed the practice in 1993. For another, groups such as Four Paws have been spreading the word about the practice's sundry cruelties.
Tsvetelina Ivanova of Four Paws-Bulgaria says a private security guard recently attacked a bear-keeper in Sofia, breaking one of the keeper's ribs while proclaiming his support for Greenpeace. Another bear-keeper was spat upon, says Ivanova.
"People are cursing me all the time," says Radi Ivanov, a bear-keeper who works in Sofia. For the past 15 years, he has been traveling the country with dancing bears. In peak summer tourist season at the Black Sea resorts, he used to make up to $140 a day.
That's nice for the keeper but perhaps less so for the bear. Trainers have forced cubs to walk on hot coals to musical accompaniment as a way of implanting the "dancing" response to music. The "dancing" bears are controlled by 10-foot chains attached to steel rings through their fleshy, sensitive, dog-like noses. The ring piercings never quite heal and are chronically painful.
If stopping these abuses and protecting the rights and dignity of animals do not have market value, animal advocates say, the expenses of the bear park are justified.
"It's not my business to think about money," says Four Paws' Viennese campaign director, Josef Pfabigan. "My business is a project for animal protection. Bears are the point. For the people in the region, it's about business."
In hopes of coaxing bear-keepers into a new business, Four Paws has spent $30,000 for six bears, or $5,000 each. The price of a bear equals about four years' wages for the average Bulgarian.
With few economic alternatives, bear-keepers were hesitant to sell when the park first opened.
"Now they are calling me all the time," says Ivanova of Four Paws-Bulgaria. "One guy's son just called from Italy, saying: 'Please take my dad's bear.' We can't take all the bears which they want to sell."
Four Paws plans to eventually buy all 10 bears that are still registered with the Environment Ministry and out dancing on the streets.
The bigger point in animal advocacy is a matter of changing human attitudes and behavior. This takes time, especially when economic incentives pull in a different direction. One couple sold their bear last summer but did not necessarily assume a more enlightened outlook. They wound up busking with a monkey.