Brian Crudge, Matt Hunt

For decades, Free the Bears has provided lifelong sanctuary care to Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus) and sun bears (Helarctos malayanus) rescued from the illegal wildlife trade and bear bile industry in Laos and Cambodia. While this approach has delivered substantial welfare gains, it offers limited scope for population-level conservation. In response, we are developing a structured, multi-stage pre-release programme aimed at identifying and preparing suitable individuals for potential future rewilding. This presentation focuses on the practical challenges, iterative testing, and lessons learned throughout the development of this programme. We describe the design and function of Pre-Release Stage 1 and Stage 2 facilities, which incorporate restricted human-bear interaction, automated weighing devices, concealed observation points for behavioural monitoring, and progressive access to increasingly large and complex, forested enclosure space. Husbandry and feeding regimes have been repeatedly trialled and refined to reduce predictability and human association, including randomized feeding schedules, dispersed feeding locations, and experimental remote feeding devices. Behavioural monitoring across both stages combines structured direct focal observations with indirect behavioural measures derived from trials of proximity loggers, VHF collars, fixed antenna arrays, and accelerometers to evaluate enclosure use and activity while minimising disturbance. We highlight operational constraints and technological limitations encountered during testing, as well as solutions adopted throughout this process. Overall, this process is designed to generate detailed individual-level behavioural profiles that, when linked to eventual post-release outcomes, will allow retrospective evaluation of candidate selection and pre-release conditioning, thereby informing the refinement of future pre-release strategies.