Earth King Kuei’s (Phillip LaMarr) beloved pet bear Bosco (Clancy Brown) met a rather horrible end some time after the conclusion of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Following Aang's defeat of Fire Lord Ozai (Mark Hamill) and the end of the Hundred Year War during the finale of season 3, Kuei regains his position as the ruler of the Earth Kingdom and returns to Ba Sing Se along with his pet bear Bosco. After King Kuei’s death, however, the Avatar sequel series The Legend of Korra reveals that Bosco may have had a grim fate once the new ruler of the Earth Kingdom ascended to the throne.
In the season 2 episode “City of Walls and Secrets,” Bosco is introduced to Team Avatar when they crash a party held in Bosco's honor within the Royal Palace in Ba Sing Se, with the intention of speaking to the Earth King about the Hundred Year War. While Bosco is technically the Earth King’s pet, the bear is treated more like a member of the royal family, living a comfortable life and sitting at the head of the table. After Aang (Zach Tyler Eisen) displayed some waterbending tricks at the party, Bosco instantly took a liking to him, which earned Team Avatar Kuei’s trust and prevented them from being imprisoned by the Dai Li in the episode “The Earth King.” Although Bosco and King Kuei are eventually ousted during the Dai Li coup, Kuei retakes the throne at the end of the war, which automatically makes his daughter his successor.
In The Legend of Korra, Queen Hou-Ting (Jayne Taini), King Kuei’s daughter and the next ruler of the Earth Kingdom, was rumored to have eaten Bosco after her father’s death due to her taste for rare meats. In the season 3 episode “Original Airbenders,” Jinora (Kiernan Shipka) and Kai (Skyler Brigmann) visit a valley full of baby flying bison, but get captured by bison rustlers, a group of poachers who capture rare breeds and sell them in Ba Sing Se. When Jinora reprimands their leader Ganbat (Travis Willingham) for harming an already endangered species, the poacher explains that the Earth Queen and her wealthy friends pay an extravagant price for rare meats, such as flying bison steaks. “I even heard she ate her Dad’s pet bear,” says Ganbat.
While Ganbat’s claim that Hou-Ting ate Bosco might just be a rumor, the story unfortunately makes sense when considering that Bosco is a very rare breed of bear in the Avatar universe. When Team Avatar arrives in Ba Sing Se during season 2, Katara finds a notice for the party in honor of the King's pet "bear," but the team is thoroughly confused by Bosco’s species. Animals in the Avatar universe are usually a hybrid of two types of animals, which is why Team Avatar declares Ba Sing Se to be a "weird" place when they discover Bosco is just a bear and not a hybrid. Further proof that Bosco’s species is extremely rare is the fact that King Kuei deployed a search party of soldiers to find a mate for Bosco throughout the world, but the search was unsuccessful, making Bosco’s meat all the more valuable to Hou-Ting.
When considering that animals in the Avatar universe exhibit very human characteristics, with characters such as Momo and Appa (Dee Bradley Baker) endowed with their own personality and feelings, Hou-Ting’s act of eating Bosco becomes even more horrifying. When Kuei was forced to leave Ba Sing Se, he attempted to release Bosco into the wild, but the bear had trouble adjusting to a self-sufficient lifestyle. After years of living in luxury, Bosco had forgotten how to be a bear, since he could no longer fish, climb trees, or even roar. His identity was more aligned with that of a human, since he wore clothing, stood upright, and exhibited emotions. With this in mind, Hou-Ting’s act of killing and eating Bosco was on par with murdering a human.
While Bosco met an unfortunate end after the finale of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Bosco was essentially avenged when Queen Hou-Ting was killed by another rare species: the anarchist Zaheer (Henry Rollins), who was previously a non-bender that acquired airbending later in life. Using his new airbending skills, Zaheer created an air vacuum around the Earth Queen's head and sucked the air from her lungs until she died of suffocation. It's certainly a nasty way to go - though not quite as nasty as being eaten.