Bear Bile Farming Has No Place In Medicine or Modern Society

Final signature count: 0

0 signatures toward our 30,000 goal

It’s not surprising many people love bears. They’ve been a depicted in children’s literature and by plush playmates for over a century.

Exploiting caged bears for their bile ducts is hardly the stuff of fairy tales, but it is a horrific reality for untold thousands of Asiatic black and sun bears in China and southeastern Asia.

As estimated by Animals Asia [1], more than 10,000 bears are subjugated to the torture of bile farms in China, with at least a tenth that many held in Vietnam. The bears in these farms are drained of their bile, day after day, through unsanitary and painful catheters connected to the gall bladder that often leave the bears with infection and pain.

Some of the animals have never even seen the outside of a cage, and those that do live long enough to near the 30-year life expectancy, often spend every second of it suffering.

The bile is used for a variety of remedies and household products, although only its key ingredient, ursodeoxycholic act, has only been found beneficial to humans in a limited amount of liver conditions, The Guardian [2] reports. There is also no shortage of more effective alternatives. Kaibao Pharmaceuticals, for example, a major supplier of bear bile medicines, is transitioning to a synthetic alternative with the financial help of the government.

According to National Geographic [3], while bear bile farming was banned in Vietnam in 2006, the practice of poaching moon bears and transporting them to neighboring Laos for farming has grown tremendously. And in China, there are even fewer regulations surrounding bear bile farming, which is expected to grow if protections for the bears and a ban on exploiting them for their bile are not soon established.

Sign to demand China’s Ministries of Commerce and Agriculture ban bear bile farming in the country, once and for all.