#bear bile

Cintron, a previously rescued moon bear. Courtesy of Animals Asia

Excerpt from this story from Treehugger:

Two moon bears were rescued from a bile farm early Tuesday morning in Vietnam. Rescuers from animal welfare organization Animals Asia freed the two female bears who were believed to have spent years in captivity on the farm.

Moon bears are often kept in small cages in order to collect bile, a fat-digesting fluid found in many animals, including humans. Bear bile is sometimes used in traditional Chinese medicine. Although bear farming is illegal in Vietnam, limited enforcement has let the practice endure.

Very early in the morning, the rescue team arrived at the farm, just 65 kilometers (40 miles) from Animals Asia’s Vietnam Bear Rescue Centre in Tam Dao. The bears were kept in a shed with little sunlight or ventilation, according to rescuers.

Rescuers named the bears Storm and Torrent in acknowledgment of the devastating floods that recently affected the area.

"The bears were held in a big brick barn. Inside it's dark, it's dank, it's very humid. It's oppressive actually. Oppressive is the perfect word for it," Bear and Vet Team Director Heidi Quine described the scene.

"And to think that these majestic creatures, who should be living in the complexity and beauty of the forest, have been living there, in Storm's case for perhaps seven years, and from what we know of Torrent, she's been living on the farm for 18 years. So to think that their spirits can survive so long in that kind of environment, it speaks to the courage and the tenacity of the bears."

The team live-streamed the rescue and returned to the sanctuary on Facebook Live.

I tried to write something smart and intelligent, but all I was doing was keyboarding intellectually boring words to hide my anger. I’d rather go with the anger: fuck this folk medicine horseshit wherever it may be, including China, or within any country into which these Chinese folk medicine “cures” may be applied. It’s hillbilly crap, regardless of origin, pure and simple, dangerous and environmentally destructive.

Little side note about the EcoWatch story. Read the fourth paragraph of the excerpt below. There has been an identical synthetic version of the chemical extracted from bear bile available for decades. The prescription is called “ursodiol.” One of our dogs has been on ursodiol for a couple of years for a liver disorder. Unfuckingbelievable. Our dog is eating a derivative of bear bile chemistry.

Excerpt from this story from EcoWatch:

Even though China recently banned open air markets that trade wildlife, the government has issued guidelines for treating COVID-19 that include medicines containing bear bile, according to National Geographic.

A list of medicines to treat COVID-19 that the Chinese government put out included both traditional and Western medicines. The list was compiled and published by China's National Health Commission, the government body responsible for national health policy. One of the alleged cures from traditional Chinese medicine that the government recommends for treating severe and critical cases of COVID-19 is an injection of Tan Re Qing, which contains bear bile, as National Geographic reported.

Wildlife advocates are alarmed by the disconnect of a comprehensive ban on trading wildlife for consumption in open air markets but allowing and promoting the use of wildlife in traditional Chinese medicine, according to the International Business Times.

"Restricting the eating of wildlife while promoting medicines containing wildlife parts exemplifies the mixed messages being sent by Chinese authorities on wildlife trade," said Aron White, a China specialist at the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency, in a statement. "Aside from the irony of promoting a wildlife product for treatment of a disease which the scientific community has overwhelmingly concluded originated in wildlife, the continued promotion of the use of threatened wildlife in medicine is hugely irresponsible in an era of unprecedented biodiversity loss, including illegal and unsustainable trade."

Traditional Chinese medicine is science, ma-an! National Geographic (@NatGeo) promotes TCM quackery in its January issue.

Traditional Chinese is science, ma-an! No, really, TCM is science! Really and truly it is! It’s real medicine!

That’s a frequent refrain from proponents of TCM. Indeed, it’s a propaganda line that I see so frequently that, seeing the latest example of it that I’m going to discuss here, I decided to name it the “traditional Chinese medicine is science, ma-an” gambit, or maybe just the “TCM is…