Freeing Captive Bears from Armenia’s Backyards and Basements

Since 2010, rescue efforts in Armenia have reduced the number of illegally held Syrian brown bears — an endangered subspecies native to the South Caucasus region — but experts estimate that between 20 to 30 remain in captivity. Now, with Armenia set to host the global biodiversity conference (COP17) in October 2026, a local nonprofit is working to remove the remaining bears from captivity, and government representatives have committed to supporting the effort. Conservationists are hoping their efforts will demonstrate to the world that Armenia’s attitude toward wildlife has changed.

For over a decade, the Foundation for the Preservation of Wildlife and Cultural Assets (FPWC) has rescued roughly 30 bears from restaurants, gas stations, hotels, bus stops, backyards, and, recently, a car repair shop. One of the organization’s first rescues was in a gorge along Yerevan’s southwestern edge, where a riverside restaurant kept two adult bears in cages that flooded regularly. “When the water level was rising, it was almost up to here,” recalls Tsovinar Hovhannisyan, a project manager at FPWC, raising her hand to her neck. “The conditions were really miserable.” The bears’ mother used to be kept at another restaurant, known for its sprawling garden, but as online complaints grew, the owners eventually allowed the elderly bear to be removed and taken to a rehabilitation center.

In 2017, another bear was found in a man’s home, confined to a cage scarcely wider than a doorway. The space was so small the animal couldn’t sit, and half the floor was piled with its own feces, recalls Ruben Khachatryan, FPWC’s founder and director. The bear’s owner was a member of parliament at the time. 

Taking from the wild animals listed in the Red Book of Armenia — a compendium of the country’s endangered flora and fauna — has long been prohibited, but the nation has no explicit ban on keeping such animals. After passage of a law in 2023, ownership is now possible, but only with a permit issued by the Ministry of Environment’s biodiversity department. The new law was prompted by a 2016 Daily Mail article about the “world’s worst zoo” — a collection of lions and bears in the northern Armenian city of Gyumri that had been bought for entertainment by an Armenian oligarch, who then abandoned the animals and left them in tiny cages. Before the law’s passage, “nobody could say that it was legal, but it also wasn’t illegal,” Hovhannisyan says. Now, individuals keeping such animals without a permit can be fined up to $520, or 200 times the nation’s minimum hourly wage. 

Often, the bears found in captivity were poached (which carries a fine of $1,560) and then given as gifts or bought. Hovhannisyan’s investigation of the online market for brown bears on list.am — Armenia’s equivalent of Craigslist — found cubs offered for between $5,000 and $20,000. The site no longer posts such listings, though Hovhannisyan says sellers may have moved to other platforms. 

Fifteen years ago, caged bears were a common sight at restaurants, says Andranik Gyonjyan, a mammalogist at the Scientific Center of Zoology and Hydroecology of Armenia, but the numbers have dropped since rescues began. There are no recent estimates of how many brown bears remain in the Armenian wild, but Gyonjyan puts the number at around 600, concentrated in a few mountainous and forested regions. 

About an hour northwest of Yerevan, two brown bears pace along a six-foot stretch of their enclosure, their heads swinging compulsively from side to side. One slumps to the ground when approached; the other huffs in labored breaths, exposed to the afternoon sun in 100-degree heat. Around the facility, other animals, including a lion, monkeys, vultures, eagles, and an Australian emu, show similar signs of stress and boredom. 

This privately run zoo, which is open to the public, has long been on FPWC’s radar. “They don’t know how to manage the zoo,” says Khachatryan. “There is no basic infrastructure, no funding, no knowledge of how to treat animals.” The animals, he says, are often fed scraps from a nearby army kitchen or leftovers from a kindergarten. Enclosures are bare, lacking any elements that might engage animals’ minds or bodies. Veterinary care is nonexistent. Khachatryan says the facility will be among the first places that FPWC will target for rescues ahead of COP17. 

Armenians need to understand that endangered animals are not for entertainment, says Arsen Gasparyan, a biodiversity researcher at the American University of Armenia. “Kids shouldn’t learn that this is normal,” he says.

Many conservationists argue that keeping Red Book animals should be banned outright, noting that places like this zoo exist in an enforcement vacuum. Under Armenian law, keepers of wild animals must provide for their biological and behavioral needs, ensure their health and safety, and prevent their escape. But countries like Armenia lack the capacity to either track whether owners meet the requirements or to enforce its laws, says Gasparyan. 

But even those standards stipulated by the law are insufficient for bears, Gasparyan adds. The law sets minimum enclosure sizes, but “brown bears need kilometers of walking per day, so they cannot live in the space of 15 square meters.” 

Rescues, while critical, also create new problems and expenses, the most immediate being where to house bears once they are freed. The animals rescued from the backyard in Malatia-Sebastia are now in quarantine at a rehabilitation center near Urtsadzor, about an hour from Yerevan. There, a former zookeeper uses target training to build trust with the bears. He approaches the male with a ball on a stick: When the bear dips his head, touching the ball with his nose, he is rewarded with an apple. This coming winter, this bear will have the chance to hibernate in an underground den — something many rescued bears experience here for the first time in their lives.

Some young bears that have had limited human contact may be candidates for release into national parks that are remote from people and have appropriate food sources. In the caretaker’s cabin of the rehab center, Khachatryan opens a live stream showing a cub recently rescued from a village home. It zooms around its secluded enclosure, which contains piles of hay and logs, clawing at a rope dangling from the ceiling, racing to a tree, and kicking around a toy. It learns survival skills — like finding hidden food — alone in its enclosure. “If he gets used to people, we cannot release him,” Khachatryan says. Last year, two cubs fitted with trackers were released into Armenia’s mountainous Vayots Dzor region, where researchers monitor their movements. 

Older bears, though, will never return to the wild. Many arrive malnourished, with broken teeth and compulsive behaviors from years spent in cramped cages. One female, long confined to a six-foot-wide enclosure, could pace only that distance in her larger enclosure at the center. “She never had a chance for a bigger area,” says Hovhannisyan. It can take a year or more in the center for bears to relax out of these behaviors. 

But having such long-term residents poses another challenge. While Armenia’s COP17 committee has pledged to rescue the remaining captive bears, there is little space to house those that cannot be released to the wild and limited resources to ensure their lifelong care. “If we rescue them all,” asks Gyonjyan, “where are we going to take them?” 

FPWC runs the country’s only rehabilitation center, but its Urtsadzor site is already full. It is currently building a new center, to partly open this month, with an initial capacity for 20 bears; but that’s not enough space to house all the bears that need rescuing. To address this gap, says Khachatryan, the Ministry of Environment and Armenia’s environmental regulator are preparing a tender to select an organization capable of caring for rescued bears and other illegally kept wildlife. 

Still, the underlying drivers of Armenia’s animal-welfare problem — antiquated public attitudes about keeping wild animals in confinement and lack of law enforcement — remain unaddressed. “We cannot simply remove the bears and say, ‘Problem solved,’” Gasparyan says. “Because after a while, COP17 will finish, and we will have the same problem again.”