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.

Bear dancing was outlawed in 1993 but it is believed that about 20 to 30 bears continued to be forced to entertain surreptitiously. The freedom of Mima, 8, Misho, 19, and Svetla, 17 was purchased by activists on Friday and the trio will join about 20 other brown bears in a 30-acre sanctuary for former dancing bears on Mount Rila, about 110 miles south of Sofia.

"Our aim is to make their life more bearable in their remaining years," Ioana Tomescu of the Austria-based Four Paws Foundation, which founded the sanctuary, told The Associated Press.

Since bear dancing is illegal the authorities could have just seized the bears. But the foundation paid their owners an undisclosed sum to help them establish other businesses, the AP reports.