Baloo is the fictional bear featured in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book from 1894 and The Second Jungle Book from 1895. Baloo and Bagheera, the panther, save Mowgli from Shere Khan the tiger, and endeavor to teach Mowgli the Law of the Jungle in many of the stories of the Jungle Book.

Name and species

He is described in Kipling's work as "the sleepy brown bear". Robert Armitage Sterndale, from whom Kipling derived most of his knowledge of Indian fauna, though Daniel Karlin, who edited the Penguin reissue of The Jungle Book in 1989, states that, with the exception of colour, Kipling's descriptions of Baloo are consistent with the sloth bear, as brown bears and Asian black bears do not occur in the Seoni area where the novel takes place. Also, the name sloth can be used in the context of sleepiness. Karlin states, however, that Baloo's diet of "... only roots and nuts and honey" is a trait more common to the Asian black bear than to the sloth bear.