It’s been nearly two years since the wider public learned about Pizza, a polar bear who was found living in deplorable conditions at an aquarium in the Grandview Mall in Guangzhou, a city in southern China. The three-year-old bear became the focus of global media attention in the summer of 2016 after footage surfaced of him alone, lying in his bare, concrete enclosure at the shopping mall. Another video showed him swinging his head and biting and pawing at an air vent—behaviors that signal distress.

Animal lovers jumped to his aid. More than a million people signed petitions calling for the release of the “world’s saddest polar bear,” and 50 nonprofit organizations sent a letter to Zhu Xiaodan, the