The date of Macau’s beloved Asian black bear Bobo, who died in his Flora Garden enclosure where he had lived for over three decades on Tuesday, was confirmed by The Macau Post Daily yesterday, following considerable confusion about the date before and after his passing.
The article published on December 20, 1986, said that “yesterday morning, a restaurant in Macau took the initiative to take a black bear cub to the municipal kennels.”
The article said that the authorities were considering moving him to Flora Garden later for the public to see him.
The article also said the bear was “not old” and that he had been illegally brought to Macau without an import licence.
According to the article, someone had offered nearly 10,000 patacas to buy the bear, adding it was suspected that the cub would be slaughtered for human consumption.
The article also quoted the municipal veterinarian, surnamed Saco, as saying that every day a number of wild animals were entering Macau through the Barrier Gate checkpoint, such as snakes, civet cats and pangolins. However, the vet pointed out that all those animal imports needed to have an inspection certificate issued by the mainland Chinese authorities.
The article underlined that municipal regulations ban the slaughter of cats and dogs for human consumption in Macau. However, according to the article, there were no such regulations for wild animals at that time.
Bobo died of a string of old-age ailments on Tuesday afternoon. He was about 32 or 33 years old.
He was removed by Leal Senado (the predecessor of the Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau/IACM) officials from a restaurant in Rua da Felicidade famous for its game dishes on December 19, 1986.
IACM officials erroneously said in the past few years that Bobo had been rescued from the cooking pot in 1984. An IACM official told The Macau Post Daily yesterday that the bureau was checking the facts and was ready to correct the date of Bobo’s dramatic rescue from a tiny cage outside the Seh Wong Fan Restaurant. A plaque outside Bobo’s enclosure also mentions the wrong “summer 1984” date.
Witness reports from that time said they believed that Bobo was about six to nine months old when he was rescued.
This scan shows the December 20, 1986 article by Jornal “Va Kio” about Bobo’s rescue from the cooking pot on the previous day. A copy of the page was provided by the Chinese-language newspaper yesterday.
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