farm | food | videos | price | information | history

9334View
2m 53sLenght
49Rating

An animal rights activist group has rescued 19 Moon bears from an illegal bile farm in Vietnam and transferred them to a rescue center. The bears were found at an illegal Taiwanese-owned operation in southern Vietnam by the Animals Asia Foundation where they were living in small cages converted from metal shipping cargo containers. Many of these black bears, some standing 6 feet tall, have been caged since being snatched from the wild as cubs up to seven years ago. "It is the first time that we have rescued a large number of bears, 19 bears in total, and also it is the first time that we have to travel such a long distance to rescue them." The bears were driven two-thousand kilometres north to a rescue centre outside Hanoi where they joined 29 others. Bear bile has been used for thousands of years in Asia to treat fevers, pain, inflammation and many other ailments. A synthetic version of it's active ingredient ursodeoxycholic acid is used in Western medicine for treating gall stones and liver ailments. The bears in such farms are typically housed in small cages, and the bile sucked from their gall bladders using crude catheters. Many of them die slowly from infections or liver ailments, including cancer. The bile is then smuggled worldwide and is especially sought after in China. "These bears, if you ask the owner he will say that he kept these 19 bears for pets, just like we kept dogs and cats, but we found out that one of the bears has an abscess on its stomach, and we found out that it came from the bile extraction (which) happened about a month and a half ago." Ultrasound tests found evidence of thickened gall bladders in one of the bears, a telltale sign of bile milking. "We know that a couple of them have missing limbs from being snared in the wild in a leg hole trap, so that's quite distressing to think that these were definitely wild animals at some point, and a couple of them have ocular disease so that could be related to poor nutrition or infection." -The moon bears will remain in quarantine for 45 days. They will then be moved to holding pens where they'll learn to mingle with other bears before moving ousted to the main enclosure. Vietnam outlawed bile milking in 2005 but the practice is still legal in China, where the government says seven-thousand bears are milked on around 250 farms. Animal welfare groups say the real number could be double that.