On Saturday, the school’s Zoological Society presented a day of lectures on Exotics medicine (which of course I attended because I don’t know about you but after a long week of lecture filled days, nothing appeals more than to using personal downtime to attend more lectures.) They were for the whole, quite frankly, pretty amazing presentations on an array of interesting challenges (dealing with rabies epidemics in wild dog and wolf populations in Africa, treating avians in veterinary medicine, cetacean rescue efforts and challenges, etc.) One of the most heartrending topics and particularly educational presentation for me (my prior knowledge on this topic being shamefully non-existent) was the efforts of Animal Asia Foundation to improve animal welfare in the bear farming trade.

As you may know, the Asiatic black, aka Moon bear , population status vulnerable, are farmed by the population of China for their bile - a potent “cold” drug used in traditional Chinese medicine to eliminate “hot” diseases of the liver and such. (According to our lecturer, ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA), the active ingredient of bear bile, can be an effective treatment of Parkinson’s and Huntington’s symptoms but as the UDCA patent has yet to produce commercially viable drugs, the capitalist Western pharmaceutical field has yet to push that aspect. That the chemical compound is artificially producible is antithetical to traditional thinking and so frankly, not the solution per se or maybe yes but just a very hard sell.) Farming was introduced as a proposal to stem the poaching of bears from the wild but has failed horribly, actually increasing the bile harvest from 500 to 7000 kg per year. The conditions in which the bears are kept are truly horrific. Not only are the animals raised in painfully constricted cage conditions, a hole is gouged in their abdomen to access the gall bladder. At one point, steel tubes were used to provide permanent access, although simple more available items such as buttons and tubes could also be implemented, but now more often than not the abdomen is just cut open and provoked twice a day to “milk” the bile, creating in the bears a festering open wound. The “surgery” (performed by the farmer, not a veterinarian) has a 50% mortality rate, and the “farming” reduces the animal’s life expectancy to a 1/4 of it’s potential.

The level of passion and compassion shown during this presentation was inspiring. Clearly, his love of these creatures is completely encompassing. We were told that they, physiologically, are a wonder, built to endure long periods of hibernation and (thus?) able to rebound from remarkable extremes of cruel treatment. We were told that the bears which have been rescued can never return to the wild but are enjoying their retirement in rehabilitation. We were told that the Chinese public have no concept of animal welfare and that few people see anything WRONG with the (by my standards inhumane, torturous) conditions. In conversational review with my mother (the reason for this blog posting, thank you for the reminder) of what we had been told, she reminded me that HUMANE rarely wins in the face of the blinding allure of an extremely lucrative endeavor; when a demand is generated by those who can do, they will do.

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