One-on-one with a tiger: the fearlessness of an Indian bear (6 photos + 1 video)
Just like modern-day Baloo explained to modern-day Shere Khan that he wouldn't be getting fresh bear meat for dinner. And if he hadn't understood the second time, he could have explained it even more bloodily. And why is it only English-speaking colleagues who call the sloth bear a sloth bear? It's immediately obvious that the Indian Potapych is anything but lazy. 
Yes, he's not large in stature, and he doesn't have a mighty roar or a stately figure, but he does have other qualities that allow him to decide what the big cat will have for dinner today. But don't get me wrong, this bear is actually very kind and completely harmless. Until someone bothers him. Or he thinks they want to bother him.
If you look at the sloth bear when he's in a calm and blissful mood, he doesn't resemble a stern predator, but rather an employee of Potap Nikanorovich's design bureau a year before his well-deserved retirement.
The sloth bear is indeed not particularly tall: just 60-90 cm at the withers and weighing around 100 kg—absurd for a bear—so it's perfectly natural that his diet is simple and unpretentious. As the saying goes, he eats whatever he finds: he might snack on a piece of fruit, an onion, some honey, or even a snail, but it all depends on his mood, and our hero's favorite food is something else entirely—it's no wonder he grew such long lips. The sloth bear is a specialized animal, after all, and it specializes in feeding on ants, termites, and wasps.
There's plenty of competition for fruit in the jungle, but there aren't many willing to compete with a bear for a snack of stinging and biting insects. Having punctured the wall of an anthill or termite mound with his curved claws, the hungry Baloo unleashes his main weapon. His flexible and highly elastic lips can stretch into a long tube, and by inserting them into the breach, the bear, like a vacuum cleaner, sucks out the inhabitants. A little dirt getting into his mouth is no big deal, but his respiratory tract is reliably protected, as sloth bears' nostrils can be closed with tight valves.
And it's precisely at this moment that our Baloo is especially vulnerable. His eyesight isn't particularly impressive, his "pump" is very noisy, drowning out the sounds of the outside world, and his most important sense—his sense of smell—is disabled by the closed nasal valves. If anyone gets too close to the bear at this point, it will attack without thinking, and it almost missed everything already. Tiger – then we'll fight the tiger. Human – well, sorry, human, that's just how it turned out.
But the worst thing for a predator planning to feast on bear meat is an encounter with a mother bear. She literally never leaves her cubs and carries them on her back for several months, but only once they're a little older, as the babies are born tiny and bear-like. However, sloth bears have an advantage other bears don't have: while the cubs are tiny and she's in the den with them, the father bear patrols the area outside. That way, it's safer!
