Please Help Save the Bears in China - Tortured for their bile

Sick, injured, locked in cages, so small, the bears can never stand. In China's "bear farms", over 7000 bears live in misery and pain. This suffering is for collecting their bile for the Chinese healing business.

Even though it is not scientifically proven that bear bile to cure ailments, superstition keeps the demand high. So, thousands of bears are kept captive in over 247 "bear farms" in China.
 
The people that run these "bear farms" say they contribute to the preservation of bears, but the mortality rate is so high, that China keeps capturing more bears every year.

Poachers wait until the mother bear leaves her den to search of food to capture new-born cubs. Sometimes the mother is killed. Some cubs die as a result of this.
 
The surviving cubs are packed together in enclosures to break them into their future detention in cramped cages. So they can approach the bears, the farmers often pull out their claws and break their teeth. At the age of three the bears undergo a surgical operation that will mutilate them for life: the farmers insert a catheter into the bear's gall bladder to milk the bile.

The catheter is never removed, creating an open wound that becomes permanently infected. Four out of five bears die during or shortly after the operation to insert the catheter. 
The bears show their misery by banging their head against the bars or chewing on their paws until they bleed, causing serious infection. Two times a day they are milked for their bile, always while feeding because more bile is produced. The bears moan with pain and clutch their stomach as the bile is removed. There conditions are so bad, that some mother bears kill their cubs at birth.

Sometimes the bears attempt to pull out the catheter. Those that do are powerless in an iron corset. Milking and selling the bile is not the farmers' only source of profit from the bears. Live bears are amputated of one or two paws which the farmers will sell to restaurants. When bears are no longer able to produce bile they are leaved in a corner until death comes through sickness or starvation. They are younger than fifteen years old. They usually lived to twenty-five or thirty.
 
The 2008 Olympic Games will be in China. It would be nice if we could end the existence of bear farms in China before then.

Sheldon McNaught,
Grade 7, Lester B Pearson Catholic School
http://www.ebiz-iq.com
 

Contact JT McNaught for more insights into this topic.
http://www.eBiz-IQ.com.

For More Information Contact:
JT McNaught
jtmcnaught@veretekk.com
http://www.eBiz-IQ.com

This release was published on openPR.