Let's be honest and admit that we Chinese do not have a good reputation among people of the world in terms of our treatment of animals. There is a joke about the Cantonese that they are entrepreneurial people capable of excelling in many professions - but not zookeeper. Our heritage, albeit rich and proud, is unfortunately also riddled with elements of animal abuse that clearly do not live up to the moral standards of modern civilised societies.
One of them is a treatment rooted in traditional Chinese medicine - the extraction of bear bile believed to benefit the liver and eyes. Although the practice of extracting bile from a bear's gall bladder was invented in Korea, it has been perfected in China over the past 10 years.
The bears used to be locked up in small cages for their entire short useful life with steel tubes connected to them 24 hours a day, seven days a week. One can only imagine the pain and suffering they must have gone through. The bears got sick, easily contaminated by bacteria and infected with pus and cancer. Even the bears fortunate enough to have lived beyond their usefulness and then released into the wild often became deranged and died shortly afterwards.
The bear-bile industry now claims the extraction practice has evolved so much that the bears can now live happily. But can one believe this? Representatives of the industry claim the tubeless needle-extraction method takes less than a minute each time and hardly causes any pain.
Regardless, the idea of raising bears to constantly extract an internal body fluid during much of their life span touches upon a sensitive issue of animal rights. What is astonishing is that one company is about to take this cruel practice to an industrial scale.
