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VINH PHUC, VIETNAM — Video of an Asian black bear joyously swimming in a pool at an animal sanctuary is making the rounds online, but the dark existence he suffered through to arrive there is widely unknown by the general public. Tuffy was rescued in September 2015 by an animal welfare group named Animals Asia. He needed a surgery and six months of rehab after suffering for years on a bear bile farm in Vietnam. There, he spent his days confined to a tiny cage. His feet had likely never touched ground. To learn more about Tuffy and Animals Asia, go to https://www.animalsasia.org/ Tuffy’s fate is shared by an estimated 10,000 bears in China, and roughly 1,200 more in Vietnam. The bears endure a life of imprisonment for their bile, extracted from their gallbladders daily. Bear bile is sold in many forms, from flakes, to pills, to powder, or as liquid in bottles. Whole raw bear gallbladders can also be found on the market. For more than 3,000 years, many Asian cultures have carried the belief that bear bile can be used to supposedly treat a variety of human ailments — hemorrhoids, sore throats, epilepsy, fevers, and the improvement of eyesight, just to name a few. Bears used in the bile trade are either captured in the wild via steel poaching traps, or born into factory farms, enslaved for up to 30 years before death. Their cages, known as “crush cages” for obvious reasons, measure 130 cm x 170 cm x 60 cm on average, robbing them of the mobility to stand up or turn around. Bear bile can be extracted in a number of ways, all of them incredibly painful. Most methods involve cutting the bear open and inserting a catheter or similar device through the abdomen, then puncturing the bear’s gallbladder. This is usually done without anesthetics or pain medication. Bile then drips out of the gallbladder, and is collected in a bag. The catheter is sometimes left in permanently, to create an auto-drip function for continued harvesting. A number of substitutes to bear bile have been produced and are sold as alternatives, yet the worldwide market stemming from bear bile production and bear parts is estimated to be a $2 billion dollar industry. In 2005, Vietnam placed a ban on bear bile farming and production, yet loopholes still exist to allow the cruel trade to continue. Rescue groups like Animals Asia are working tirelessly for the remaining 1200 bears in Vietnam factory farms to be released into sanctuaries, realistically planning for practices to be eliminated by 2020. EDITOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this video stated that the day before the footage of Tuffy in the swimming pool was taken, he had been rescued from a bear bile farm in Vietnam. A correction has since been made to reflect that Tuffy was actually rescued by Animals Asia in September, 2015, where he then underwent surgery and six months of rehabilitation before being able to swim at the group’s bear sanctuary. The previous version of the video also noted that Chinese herbalists and scientists have found no benefits to using bear bile products to treat various human ailments. A correction has been made to reflect that while bear bile remains on the market, there are a number of substitutes that can be used as alternatives for treating such illnesses.