#10, Bear Bile

My heart just sank when I read about this:-

Source: http://www.acres.org.sg/issues_bearbile.html

Bear farming
Horrific and inhumane methods of bile extraction have been developed by the bear farming industry. All of them cause severe mental and physical trauma to the captive bears.

The history of bear bile extraction
Bear bile has been used in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for over 3000 years. It is used to aid ailments ranging from fevers to heart disease.

In the 1980s the bear farming industry was set up to farm bears more intensively. Over 7000 bears were found being kept in Chinese bear farms; additional animals were held in Korea and Vietnam.

Originally, bear farming was introduced to reduce the number of bears poached from the wild. However, it is actually feared that bear farming is causing a decline in wild populations in China and across Asia, as the bear farming industry stimulates demand.

Welfare issues
Bears suffer when they are removed from their natural environment. They are often kept in cages that provide insufficient space to allow them to turn around, sit up or even lie down properly.

The extraction of bile is an extremely painful procedure, often carried out by untrained technicians. This causes immense and prolonged suffering to the bears.

Some bears are reported to curl up after the extraction, shivering and holding their paws to their stomach. There are numerous reports of bears twitching, gnashing their teeth, biting bars and uttering distress calls during the extraction process.

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These bears really suffer.

2 comments:

Mangrove Tom said...

Wow, you take really great photos! Taking pictures of spiders on webs is certainly a hard thing for me - the focus changes with each small breeze.

Thanks for sharing your discoveries of nature from so far away.

It is disheartening to hear about the bears. It is really scary how cruel and brutal people can be to both nature and ourselves.

Cheers!
MangroveTom

Unknown said...

thank you for the compliment! I'm still definitely have lots of room for improvement! haha those spiders were shot on a wind-less day so it was pretty alright. guess I was there at the right time/place. =]

you could employ focus tracking (Al Servo) on the spider if it moves.

It's cool to meet people from afar too! Your blog's interesting too! Ecology is something I wana explore further if I can.. any advice?

Nice meeting ya!
Euniceeeeeesh (: