A brown bear rescued by Russian pilots as an orphaned cub, has now been saved by the same men once again - after they discovered that he was being used as dog bait.
Mansur the bear's first encounter with the pilots came as a cub, when they found him wandering near their air base on the edge of a forest in 2016, and adopted him.
However, after a while at the Orlovka air base in Amur Oblast, Russia, the pilots decided it would be better for Mansur if he could live somewhere more suitable.
They ruled out returning him to the wild, and instead found him sanctuary in Seliger nature reserve, where he would be monitored and protected from hunters and poachers.
'A local official from the Ministry of Nature Resources and Ecology volunteered to help,' said his main carer, pilot Andrey Ivanov, 39.
'We trusted him, but we wanted to keep an eye on our bear - yet this official did not tell us how Mansur was doing.'
After not getting any updates on Mansur, Mr Ivanov and the other pilots investigated, and found out they had been conned.
Mansur had not been taken to the nature park but instead to a notorious 'bear-baiting station' in Kaluga region where hunting dogs are trained using tethered wild animals.
'We started our own investigation, which led us to finding Mansur in a horrible condition at one of dog baiting stations,' Mr Ivanov said.
When they discovered how he would be chained with vicious dogs attacking him, the pilots staged a rescue swoop to free the bear and bring him back to their airdrome.
The wild animal immediately recognised the pilots, hugging them and jumping in his 'father figure' Andrey's lap.
The sad-looking bear was in a poor condition, his fur covered in excrement, but thankfully the baiting station had not yet cut his teeth and turn out his claws, as is normally done to protect the dogs.
Mansur was taken back to the airdrome where pilots built a shelter and installed electronic fencing to protect humans in case the growing predator went on the attack.
They also built a shelter to act as his den - and Mr Ivanov would lay with the bear to successfully coax him into hibernating for the winter.
'We rescued him, and from that moment we didn't even think about letting Mansur be taken by anyone else.
'We decided to join forces and to build him a house, with his own protected territory and a pond.
'We want to make him a really good comfortable place to live. He is part of our team.'
When he was first found, he was the size of a domestic cat. Mansur now weighs some 440lbs, stands almost 6ft tall and eats 45 lbs of food a day.
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