It’s more than Bob can bear

Former game show host and longtime animal rights activist Bob Barker has made a personal appeal to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina to stop exhibiting bears in pit-like enclosures at three local zoos.

Meeting last week with Principal Chief Michell Hicks and five members of the Tribal Council, Barker called the bears’ conditions inhumane and asked that they be turned over to a sanctuary in California.

“To think that with as advanced as our civilization is now that there is any place in the United States were bears are kept in pits is just unbelievable,” said Barker, who is part American Indian and grew up on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

“Just picture yourself, if your life, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, month after month, was in a pit.”

The bears are displayed in walled enclosures set into the ground at three local attractions that bill themselves as zoos and theme parks.

Hicks told the Asheville Citizen-Times that the tribe follows federal regulations in caring for the bears.

Collette Coggins, who owns one of the attractions, the Cherokee Bear Zoo, with her husband, Barry, said the bears don’t stay in the pits all day, every day.

“We love our animals,” she said. “They are like our pets.”

Barker retired as host of “The Price is Right” in 2007 after 35 years on the job.

The birthday bunch

Singer Frankie Ford is 70. Actress Tina Cole (“My Three Sons”) is 66. Actor-comedian Richard Belzer (“Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” “Homicide”) is 65. Actor/musician Billy Bob Thornton is 54. Actress Kym Karath (“The Sound of Music”) is 51. Actress Lauren Tom (“Joy Luck Club,” “Men In Trees”) is 50. Producer Michael Gelman (“Live with Regis and Kelly”) is 48. Actor Daniel Dae Kim (“Lost”) is 41. Rapper Yo-Yo is 38. Actors Dylan and Cole Sprouse (“Big Daddy,” “Grace Under Fire”) are 17.