Bile bear - Video Learning - WizScience.com

"Bile bears", sometimes called "battery bears", are bears kept in captivity to harvest their bile, a digestive fluid produced by the liver and stored in the gall bladder. The bear species most commonly farmed for bile is the Asiatic black bear , although the sun bear and the brown bear are also used to collect bile. Both the Asiatic black bear and the sun bear are listed as "Vulnerable" on the Red List of Threatened Animals published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Bears are farmed for bile in China, North Korea, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar. China was the first country to use bile and its storage organ, the gall bladder, as ingredients in Traditional Chinese Medicine . Bear bile was first recorded in "Tang Ban Cao" . For thousands of years, the traditional way to acquire bear bile was to kill a wild bear and remove its gall bladder. The use of bear bile in medicines was adopted by Korea and Japan centuries ago as a part of TCM. In the 21st century, the use of TCM is widespread, not only in Asia but also throughout Asian communities in other areas of the world. In the early 1980s, bile bear farms began appearing in North Korea, and then spread to other regions. There are several extraction methods: When the bears outlive their productive bile-producing years , they are slaughtered and harvested for their other parts. To facilitate the bile extraction process, the bears are commonly kept in cages known as extraction or crush cages. These measure approximately 79 cm x 130 cm x 200 cm . Because the bears weigh between 50 to 120 kilograms,, these cages prevent the bears from being able to stand upright, or in some cases, restrict the bear's movements even more. In two model Chinese bile farms, the HSUS reports that the bears are moved to the crush cages for milking, but the rest of the time live in a cage large enough to stand and turn around. Wiz Science™ is "the" learning channel for children and all ages. SUBSCRIBE TODAY Disclaimer: This video is for your information only. The author or publisher does not guarantee the accuracy of the content presented in this video. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. Background Music: "The Place Inside" by Silent Partner (royalty-free) from YouTube Audio Library. This video uses material/images from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bile+bear, which is released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ . This video is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ . To reuse/adapt the content in your own work, you must comply with the license terms.