Free the bears!
Bear bile farming is disturbing even by factory farming standards
Of all the ghastly, medieval torture-like things we do to animals, bear bile farming stands out as being exceptionally awful. Bears are stolen from the wild as cubs and put in tiny cages for their entire lives. A device is put into their gallbladder that extracts their bile. The substance is then used in traditional Chinese medicine.
There are synthetic alternatives that do the same thing as the bile. No matter. A certain type of consumer will not settle for less than the real McCoy. So, despite many bans across the world, this farming still exists. There are 20,000 bears being farmed in China alone, as well as unknown numbers in illegal operations in other countries. If there is money to be made by jamming a giant, intelligent creature into a metal box and then abusing it, someone out there will do it. Just ask the pig farmers currently battling to keep their giant intelligent creatures in tiny crates. (Call your senators on that one, btw, please!)
I know bears are apex predators and they’d gleefully rip my face off if they could. That doesn’t mean it’s cool to capture them as cubs and subject them to decades of extreme hardship. We humans are supposed to use our superior mental faculties for good. Subjecting our fellow mammals to solitary confinement, painful operations, dehydration, malnutrition, and lord knows what other ailments before they die a miserable death is not good.
It’s the duration of the bears’ suffering that gets me. Chickens and pigs on factory farms are put through horrendous ordeals, but in general they only live a matter of weeks or months. Ten years of doing nothing but withering away in a tiny cage is a whole ‘nother level of awful. Some bears have lived 20 years behind bars. One of the longest lasted almost 30.
Think of all that can be done in 30 years. All your ups and downs and adventures and meals and smells and learnings and swims and cuddles and runs. It’s hard to imagine all of that being replaced with hour after miserable hour of nothing but sitting hunched over, gnawing on steel bars, bashing your head on the cage out of frustration, the only interaction happening when a worker comes by to jam a tube into your internal organs.
The bears who have tubes go in and out are actually the lucky ones. Yes, they moan in pain while the twice daily extraction occurs. But at least they are not part of the group that lives all their lives with a catheter permanently embedded in their gall bladder. This is widely regarded as being excruciating and leads to nasty infections.
Bears have mental faculties rivaling primates. In the wild, they can roam a territory of up to 14 square miles. A bear bile cage, commonly called a “crush cage,” can be just 14 square feet. The tiny size can cause the bears to assume a bent posture that often becomes permanent even if they are freed.
Thankfully, the bears are indeed sometimes freed. Organizations like Free the Bears will rescue and rehabilitate the forsaken creatures who have been dealt this awful hand. I made a small donation while researching this article. If you feel compelled to support them, you can do so here.
With the magnitude of suffering going on around us, it can be hard to care about everything. I don’t blame anyone for not bemoaning the plight of captured bears. But when you couple the truly despicable conditions with the longstanding nature of their suffering, I do think it adds up to a blight that is worth some consideration. Especially when you remember that the reason behind it all, that oh-so-precious bile, is utterly trivial. I cannot think of a worse cost to benefit ratio. Fur farming, trophy hunting, the ivory trade — none of them have the wicked double whammy of long-term claustrophobic confinement for an end result of such little value.
We can rise above the call to dominate each and every thing just because we can. Yes, the bears would eat you in a heartbeat. They don’t know any better. We do, and we can feed them carrots instead. That’s what being human is all about.
It seems to be a law of the universe that every time I think I know all the ways humans immiserate animals, I immediately learn about another one. Tough read but thanks for spreading this info and directing us to a way to help. Donated.