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Extremely painful, with a pipe or not We cannot help asking, "this must be really painful?" Mr. Wong said, "Of course. If a hole is opened in your body, does it hurt or not? We are using the most technologically advanced pipe less induction. Every bear's stomach was surgically opened and a piston inserted. Once the needle pokes in, the piston will be opened. Anyway, this is better than killing him." Most bear farms in China use the traditional method of a pipe to induce the flowing of bile from the bears' gall. I have visited another bear farm in Yunnan that uses this method. However, the major difference is that the bears are not so easily infected with bacteria with the pipe less induction. The pain for the bears seems the same. This bear farm is about 400 kilometers from Kunming, relatively small, with only 300 bears. The bile room is located on the third floor of a building. It is dim and there is no ventilation. Iron cages with bears are spread over the whole floor. The noises of bears bumping into the frames can always be heard . There is a wound in the stomach
of the bears that can never be closed. An aqueduct is surgically
implanted, with a transparent plastic pipe inserted right
into the gall. When the time comes, a syringe will be poked
into the pipe to suck the bile. When the yellow and green
bile flows out of the gall, the poor bear opens his mouth
wide, his eyes pop out, and his stomach shivers nonstop with
the pain. Some of them yell loudly to diffuse the suffering,
some of them are too weak to make any noises. In the bear farm, newborn bears are put into an incubator, separated from the mother bears. When they grow to two or three months old, they start to receive circus training so that they can attract tourists. When they grow to three years old, they will be put into the bile room, starting their unending torturous confinement. Starting from the age of three, a bear can normally be used to extract his bile for three to five years, two or three times a day. Every time, about 150 to 200 cc liquid bile will be extracted. The attendant told us these bears will stay confined this way all the time until their bile is exhausted. The bears are under the protection of the "Convention for International Treaties of Endangered Species" (CITES). Export of bear products is in violation of CITES provisions and Chinese laws. Even though the Chinese government vows that bear products will never be able to get through the borders of China, bear products can be found in many countries. In the bear farm of Sichuan,
we saw many buses loaded with tourists, and the counter for
bear products was flooded with customers. These people are
return customers, few of them ask for a bargain. A bag of
bile powder of half a kilo is sold for RMB 4000 ($500). Those
customers would each pocket anywhere from 2 to 10 bags. Witnessing so much cash flowing in, Mr. Wong laughed "Ours is the biggest bear farm in China with the biggest output of bile liquid. Of course, we have the best wholesale price. Most of our customers are traditional Chinese medicine merchants, many are from Taiwan. Mr. Wang mistook us as a big client from Taiwan and attended us warmly. He introduced in detail various drugs made of bear bile. Under international pressure, the number of bear farms has dramatically decreased in China over the past several years. But the total production of bear gall actually increased. Before 1980, there were only 500 kilos of bile produced annually, but the annual production was increased to 7,000 kilos in 1998. In the past, bile was only
used as the raw material to make traditional Chinese medicine.
Now bear farms have developed various products such as gall
tea, wine, eye drops, cream, pills, capsules, even canned
drinks and hair shampoo. The commercialization of bile has
gone far beyond the scope of traditional Chinese medicine.
Bears suffer this tragic fate because of their precious bile, but even the old bears whose bile is completely sucked out cannot escape the tragedy of the last stages of their lives. Because it is banned by law to slaughter bears, each bear farm sets up an old bears' prison in which to place them. In the Yunnan bear farm, we saw scores of relatively spacious iron cages, where those old useless bears removed from the bile room are placed. These bears behave like they are under the influence of drugs, shaking their heads constantly, or banging against the iron cages back and forth. Each bear retrieved from the bile room after several years' of torture becomes crazy. By repeating these moves without stop, they exhaust their life and sanity. The abdominal area of some bears was infected due to being cut open for a long time. The wound is often festering and blood-flowing. One of them had all his teeth pulled and his paws cut off. The attendant sneered, "He deserves it for biting my coworker. With all his teeth pulled out, let us see who he still can bite?" In fact, these old bears are not totally unexploitable. If there is a restaurant order for the bear paws, the farm will slaughter an old bear and report a natural death. The manager comments, "These old bastards are really a burden for the bear farm. Luckily there are many people who like bear paws and this brings some extra income to the bear farm. A pair of paws can be sold for three to four thousand RMB yuans ($400 to $500). |
