VINH PHUC, VIETNAM — Video of an Asian black bear joyously swimming in a pool at an animal sanctuary is making the rounds online, but the dark existence he suffered through to arrive there is widely unknown by the general public.
The day before this video was taken, Tuffy the bear was transported to safety by an animal rescue group, from a bear bile farm in Vietnam. There, he spent his days confined to a tiny cage. His feet had likely never touched ground.
Tuffy's fate is shared by an estimated 10,000 bears in China, and roughly 1200 more in Vietnam. The bears endure a life of imprisonment for their bile, extracted from their gallbladders daily. Bear bile is sold in many forms, from flakes, to pills, to powder, or as liquid in bottles. Whole raw bear gallbladders can also be found on the market.
For more than 3000 years, many Asian cultures have carried the belief that bear bile can be used to supposedly treat a variety of human ailments – hemorrhoids, sore throats, epilepsy, fevers, and the improvement of eyesight, just to name a few.
Bears used in the bile trade are either captured in the wild via steel poaching traps, or born into factory farms, enslaved for up to 30 years before death. Their cages, known as "crush cages" for obvious reasons, measure 130 x 170 x 60 cm on average, robbing them of the mobility to stand up or turn around.
Bear bile can be extracted in a number of ways, all of them incredibly painful. Most methods involve cutting the bear open and inserting a catheter or similar device through the abdomen, then puncturing the bear's gallbladder. This is usually done without anesthetics or pain medication. Bile then drips out of the gallbladder, and is collected in a bag. The catheter is sometimes left in permanently, to create an auto-drip function for continued harvesting.
Chinese herbalists and scientists alike have found no proven medical benefits of using bear bile to treat human illnesses of any kind, yet the worldwide market stemming from bear bile production and bear parts is estimated to be a $2 billion dollar industry.
In 2005, Vietnam placed a ban on bear bile farming and production, yet loopholes still exist to allow the cruel trade to continue. Rescue groups like Animals Asia are working tirelessly for the remaining 1200 bears in Vietnam factory farms to be released into sanctuaries, realistically planning for practices to be eliminated by 2020.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to TomoNews, where we animate the most entertaining news on the internets. Come here for an animated look at viral headlines, US news, celebrity gossip, salacious scandals, dumb criminals and much more! Subscribe now for daily news animations that will knock your socks off.
Visit our official website for all the latest, uncensored videos: http://us.tomonews.net
Check out our Android app: http://bit.ly/1rddhCj
Check out our iOS app: http://bit.ly/1gO3z1f
Get top stories delivered to your inbox everyday: http://bit.ly/tomo-newsletter
Stay connected with us here:
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/TomoNewsUS
Twitter @tomonewsus http://www.twitter.com/TomoNewsUS
Google+ http://plus.google.com/+TomoNewsUS/
Instagram @tomonewsus http://instagram.com/tomonewsus
