Black bears are free-spirited animals by nature, and in the wild there is only one per square kilometer. And in bear farms, they are kept in cages that prevent them from standing upright. A variety of squeeze cages make their lives worse than death, and some have been locked up for twenty years. Many bears self-mutilate by biting their own bladders and slamming their heads against the cages. Some bears have bloodied foreheads and faces without a single hair left because of the impacts. "Sometimes it really feels like a mystery, it took us a lot of effort to drag the bears out of the narrow cages, I really don't know how they stuffed the live bears in there at that time." Wu Guojian, a member of the rescue team, said.
A black bear named Weigang arrived with ulcers all over his face and paws. It turned out that the bear's finger claws, if not worn in the wild with, will grow into a 360-degree spiral, sharp bear nails will be y inverted into the claws of the bear, the whole day blood dripping. A year later Weenie became a champion tree climber among his pals.
In these bear farms, there is no medical equipment, and all bears will pump bile for life until they die.
Cherubichen's rescue center's office and dormitory is a row of thatched buildings. Next to her office is a similarly styled den housing a female bear called Fanz. She was only the size of a black pig, and not at all comparable to her two-meter-tall counterpart. It turns out that the bear was kept in a small cage that even people could only shrink into, and over the past 22 years she has become a pygmy bear with a big head and a small body. Her owner chopped off the first knuckle of all four paws, so she couldn't climb trees or grasp things, and her heart and lungs were sick. Robinson took the greatest pity on her and kept her bachelor bear club close to her quarters. Now she enjoys a free and easy life, and people call her "the smiling bear".
What opened the eyes of the Foundation's employees was another bear, whose abdomen had grown a huge tumor from years of bile extraction, but the owner didn't let it go, and a lengthened metal tube went straight through the arching tumor in his abdomen and into his gallbladder.
Breeding team leader Wang Shanhai is the original forest workers, in the past, he has never heard of the story of the black bear bile. The first time he just thought it was so strange why there was a tube all over his stomach. Now his favorite is a brown bear named Susai, a bear he rescued by driving from Sichuan to Tianjin in two days and three nights. When he met Susai, she was wearing an iron vest made of steel bars to prevent her from scratching and raping her belly wound. Open the front of the iron vest is a small iron door, a plastic tube straight through her gallbladder, and installed a switch, at any time like tap water to take bile. This thirty-pound iron vest Susai has been carrying for more than ten years. "If I could, I would be here all my life to guard them. 90% of us Chinese don't know their pitiful stories, and I'm going to tell the people I meet over and over again: we treat the animals as beasts, Ms. Luo, they treat the animals as life."
This primitive and cruel method of extracting bile (iron vests, plastic tubes for bile) is even outlawed in China ****, but is still used in large numbers in bear factories in the northeast. "There is a sharp pain when extracting bile, and the screaming bears just can't stand it." Hu Zhanfen, a reporter for the New People's Weekly who saw the bile extraction with his own eyes, spoke of the scene, shaking all over with anger, the glass on the table vibrating. "Every bear saved is a miracle." Guo Huiling, the beautiful Scottish veterinary director, told me.
If you compare the moon bear to a human being, it is a "very honorable" person. In the wild, the moon bear never shows weakness, and even when it is very sick, it will not moan and groan, not giving its opponents the chance to attack. As a result, bears that are found to be sick are often already dying.
Opening the abdominal cavity is often harrowing: "full of cysts, foul-smelling ascites, and various organs diseased by infection. A metal tube half was sewn inside the bear's gallbladder, deep into the gallbladder, and some even penetrate the gallbladder because of age. In severe cases, there is no way to save the bears and they can only be euthanized.
In CITES, the moon bear is designated as a Class I protected animal, and in China, because of the huge economic benefits, the moon bear is designated as a Class II protected animal, and taking bile is legal in China. Now the Ministry of Forestry has outlawed the use of tubular drainage in favor of campless drainage in order to "treat bears more humanely". Tubeless drainage is the use of intestinal coats to create a meaty tube in the bear's abdomen that leads to the gallbladder, instead of a metal tube. Tubeless drainage is considered "more humane", and this Chinese "humane" is considered by some experts to be self-defeating.
"Wrong, tubeless drainage because the opening on the surface of the abdominal cavity, bacteria are more likely to enter, easy to cause peritonitis." Guo Huilin told reporters, "What's even more frightening is that many of the field owners use a fake tubeless drainage, a transparent plastic tube sewn in the bear's body, in order to fix the plastic tube, while a metal clip sewn on the abdominal muscles. Except for the gall bladder, all the surrounding muscles rotted away, and as soon as the operation was done, we had to gut the bear's abdomen to the size of a bowl, deep into the guts of the blood and flesh. And all of this Chinese authority officials can only find out when they get to the operating table." When this Ministry of Forestry regulation came out, the injuries and illnesses of the bears rescued by the Save the Bears Center worsened. Wu Guojian, the head of the breeding team, used to be an ordinary carpenter, but now he loves his job. "I would like to point out that our authorities say that the bear breeding plant was built to better protect the bears in the wild, but 10% of the bears that are sent to us are missing their arms. Think about why? It's not profit that drives these farm owners to hunt new bears in the wild to clip off their bladders."
"No one, not one person, has ever died from not using bear bile. Bear bile, which is thought to lower fire and increase brightness, and whose main ingredient is ursodeoxycholic acid, can now be completely replaced with herbs and synthetics, and the only way to eliminate the suffering of moon bears is to outlaw the act of taking bile altogether." Cherubichen puts it this way.
---------------------------------------------------------------
"Live bear bile" pharmaceuticals, since the 1980s. In bear farms everywhere, the bears' whole point of being alive is to be used to collect bile. They all have holes in their bodies that won't heal for years, some with rusty metal or glass tubes stuck in them, from which the clear bile flows.
From the time they are born, most of them are confined to iron cages 1.5 meters long and 0.5 meters high, growing bigger and bigger every day - until the bars make it impossible for them to grow any further. They had to eat with their faces pressed against the narrow, square mouths of the troughs, and the bars scarred their mouths and noses. But even then, they are underfed all day long because the bear farm believes that hunger and thirst produce more bile.
In such small cages, they can only lie prone or on their sides, and turning, rolling and scratching are all out of reach for them. Some bear farms have iron cages with movable top bars. When removing bile, workers press the bars down until they are completely immobilized. Some workers, for convenience, never raise this grate.
The bears wailed piteously whenever the bear farm workers approached, stretched out iron hooks in front of the cages and hooked them around the neck. When the dark green bile is extracted by a strand, their mouths open wide in pain, they gasp violently, their eyes bulge violently, and their limbs tremble....... In their lifetime, such torture, perhaps two to four times a day, is a minimum of 30 milliliters and a maximum of 200 milliliters. After pumping bile, they tend to huddle in the cage trembling, bright little eyes hanging tears.
Some of these "bile bears" are unable to tolerate the pain of bile extraction, so they frantically claw and bite at the cage until their mouths are full of ulcers, and some of them are mentally disturbed and even commit suicide by pulling out their own livers and intestines, howling and waving them wildly. In such cases, bear farms "calmly and urgently" cut off their paws and strip them of their fur.
In order to prevent them from scratching the catheter due to pain or discomfort, the bear farms also use a torture device called the "iron vest". 2003, when a brown bear and a hybrid bear were rescued from a bear farm in Tianjin and transported to the rescue center, the staff saw the legendary iron vest: a hard piece of iron wrapped around the body, and their ribs were cut off. A turn, their ribs are firmly fixed, a long handle straight to the throat, they can not bow their heads all day. The bears wore these vests for nine years. (The Liberation of the Bears: Man's Path to Redemption)
Can't stand up straight, can't turn around, only pain! No woods, no sunlight, only darkness! No freedom, no end, only suffering! 12,000 bears in Asia are brutalized in bear farms in order to obtain bear bile! In fact, many herbal formulas and therapies can replace bear bile, and the cruelty suffered by the bears is simply unnecessary. Act now, give a helping hand and together we can end the practice of buying equals killing, please say no to bear bile products!
List of Bear Bile Replacement Herbs:
Huang Yao Zi, Feng Xian Hua (Acute), Passing Yellow (Moneywort), Honeysuckle, Lychee Grass, Leaky Glove, Rushes, Verbena, Peony Peony Bark, Dandelion, Thousand Miles of Light, Kung Ban Gui (Snake Backwards), Snake Berry, Lian Qian Cao (Turbinate Bone), Chinese Lychee Berry, Wild Chrysanthemum, Sulphur Fritillaria, Fishweed, Gardenia, Pleasant Tree, Vine of Vinegar, Pope's Cane, and White Flowering Snake Tongue Herb, Fiber Earwort, Watercress, Earwort, Longzhu Fruit, Ivy, Cartilage Peony, Paeonia, Poria, Cangzhi, Camphor Willow Head, Periwinkle, Sempervirens, Rhubarb, Huang Cen, Sempervirens, Sempervirens, Sempervirens, Nine-section Tea, Artichoke, Cypress on the Rock, Ironweed, Heavenly Fragrance Furnace, Seven-leafed One-flower, Nesting Sansui, Penetrating Lotus, Swelling Jetty Wind, Large-leaf Wintergreen, Tricuspidata, Phellodendron Bidentata, Hibiscus Leaf, and Maokongua, etc.