The internationally famous pair of cute-to-cuddle polar bear Knut and his keeper Thomas Dorflein will no longer perform for the public. The announcement was made by the Berlin Zoo on Monday less than four months after the snowy white polar bear made it first public appearance in March. "Mr. Doerflein's safety counts first of all, of course," zoo spokeswoman Regine Damm told the AP adding that it was high time to associate the 7-month-old Knut with other bears than exposing him to people.

After spending their lives enduring brutal treatment, the last of Bulgaria's dancing bears are headed to a mountain sanctuary where they can rest their paws. The bears are the last in a line of centuries of bears in the Balkans that have been trained to dance by walking across burning embers on their bare paws hopping from one foot onto the other to escape the fire while their trainer beat a drum until they connected the drum to the pain. The bears were caught while they were cubs and trained. Many Gypsy, or Roma, families earned their livelihoods with bear dancing for generations.