Tapping the wells of kindness in China and southern Asia
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, January/February 2001:
HONG KONG; PAN YU, Guangzhou, China; SEOUL, South Korea; KARACHI, Pakistan–Two burly Asiatic moon bears at a time lick strawberry jam from the hands of Jill Robinson, 42, at the prototype Animals Asia Foundation sanctuary in Pan Yu, China. Four more bright-eyed bears watch, as eager for their treat as any dog, yet with patience too. Another bear, the oldest, is blind. He follows with his nose each handful of jam, each apple, each grape, and each blueberry that Robinson dispenses. Only scars in the bears’ abdomens reveal their past.
Robinson met these bears in 1993 at a so-called “bile farm” behind a decrepit hospital in Hui Zhou, almost immobilized in small cages. There were 13 bears then. Metal shunts resembling those driven into trees to extract maple syrup were implanted in each bear’s belly, to collect bile. The bile, with medicinal qualities akin to corticosteroids, was used to make a variety of traditional drugs.
“It was absolutely devastating, almost unbelievable that sentient creatures were kept in such a way,” Robinson told
Australian reporter Lyn White. “The bears had scars along the length of their bodies from the pressure of the bars on the cages. They had ulcerated paws, ingrown claws, wounds from banging their heads against the bars, and gaping implant sites–inflamed and infected.”
The bears were crazed to the point of being deadly dangerous, and their keeper teated them brutally, to maintain dominance. Robinson became inflamed and infected with determination to get them out of there. But China at the time had 10,000 bears in similar cages with catheters poked into their stomachs, with plans to quadruple production by 2000.