Oct 9, 2026 · 10 min · 7 segments
John Pickard chats to Country Life from the German countryside where the New Zealander has an unusual job helping rescued bears learn to hibernate and regain some of their freedom. You can find…
Basically, it's got, like, an S-shaped streak through the middle of it, where there's a whole lot of old concrete bunkers built off them.
And they covered it all in earth and planted trees and everything, and so it's set in the middle of a forest, and it looks just like the forest.
The charity that I work for came along, and they put fences all, all around it, and we divided it up into seven enclosures.
How big is it, John?
And you have 11 bears.
Tell us a little bit about the circumstances that these bears have come from.
The circus had left him on the side of the motorway in a pa- parking area in his wagon unattended for several days, and that was reported to the local council, and they confiscated him and sent him to us.
They've been in private ownership, terrible little cages, boxes, even cages in the corner of restaurants.
And dancing bears.
That was-
Basically, it's got, like, an S-shaped streak through the middle of it, where there's a whole lot of old concrete bunkers built off them.
And they covered it all in earth and planted trees and everything, and so it's set in the middle of a forest, and it looks just like the forest.
The charity that I work for came along, and they put fences all, all around it, and we divided it up into seven enclosures.
How big is it, John?
And you have 11 bears.
Tell us a little bit about the circumstances that these bears have come from.
The circus had left him on the side of the motorway in a pa- parking area in his wagon unattended for several days, and that was reported to the local council, and they confiscated him and sent him to us.
They've been in private ownership, terrible little cages, boxes, even cages in the corner of restaurants.
And dancing bears.
That was-
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
