It's 9.30 on a Tuesday morning and Monica Bando has her hand inside the abdomen of Monkey, a 1.5-metre-tall Asiatic moon bear that weighs in at 98kg and has a jaw that could snap a human arm with one bite. Bando moves her fingers and begins to palpate Monkey's liver, but the bear feels nothing, thanks to the anaesthetic administered by Wendy Leadbeater, one of the three veterinary nurses at the China Bear Rescue Centre, in Longqiao village, Sichuan province, an hour north of Chengdu.
Before Bando reached this point in a life-saving operation to remove Monkey's gall bladder, she knocked the bear unconscious with a shot of Zoletil and Medetomidine, shaved her abdomen, inspected her teeth and made a 50cm-long incision with a scalpel. For Monkey, this counts as a good day.
Two weeks ago, Monkey was 1,500 kilometres from Chengdu, on a bear-bile farm in Wendeng, a town in Weihai city, Shandong province. She was locked in a cage that gave her no room in which to stretch and wore a heavy metal jacket with a hole cut in its centre. A latex catheter had been thrust through the jacket and her abdominal wall into her gall bladder, so bile could be extracted. This was then sold to manufacturers of traditional medicines, health drinks and even toothpaste. The rusting cage had been her home for more than 15 years.
Britain-born Robinson has been a Hong Kong resident since 1985. She saw her first bear farm in 1993 and was horrified by the terror endured by the animals. She soon discovered that bear bile yields ursodeoxycholic acid, a valuable liquid used for treating high cholesterol, gallstones and liver disease.
'I knew I would be on a sticky wicket if people were dying and bear bile was their only remedy,' she says. 'I found out quickly that nobody will die for a lack of bear bile and there is an abundance of synthetics to take its place. I was so relieved. I felt that if I was disgusted by bear-bile farming the people of China would be disgusted, too.'
Since then, Robinson has been campaigning to end the practice. She has won support from influential people on the mainland and in Hong Kong, and, last weekend, China Bear Rescue was one of four animal-welfare groups featured at a fund-raising event in Beijing that was attended by a glittering array of celebrities and broadcast live on the internet.
