Bear bile for Traditional Chinese Medicine is big business throughout much of Southeast Asia. The victims are the creatures themselves whose caged existences are akin to torture. Sara Dickson talks with Dr Jan Shmidt Burbach

The creation of the Little Ease was a stroke of cruel genius. A small cage not big enough for the incarcerated person to lie-down or stand up in the Little Ease does exactly what it says on the tin. There is no rest for its inhabitant as they are kept continually in a crouching posi­tion, unable to comfortably stretch out.

It was a very effective form of torture in mediaeval Europe. The British anti-Royalist, plotter Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up the English Parliament 400 years ago, cracked after less than a month in a Little Ease revealing his co­conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot. Today behind nondescript shop fronts in Vietnam there are rooms packed full of these cages -stacked on top of each other.

Their inhabitants have to spend all of their lives in them, from the age around one-year-old to when they die. Intelligent and playful creatures, whose natural habitat in Southeast Asia are the rainforests, Asiatic black bears are kept throughout Vietnam and China for their bile in conditions akin to torture. Many are captured as cubs in the forests of Laos, China and Vietnam, their sad, depressed eyes stare out of the barren cages.

Some bears – seemly driven mad their long stimulationless incarceration – have rubbed the fur away from parts of their bodies while the metal bars they stand on cause untold damage to their paws. But that is just the begin­ning of their suffering as their bile is harvested to be sold to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioners.

To get to the bears’ bile the ‘farmers’ use a variety of methods. In China a tube is inserted into a bear’s gall bladder to continually drip bile which is col­lected and sold. In Vietnam harvesters use modern ultra-sound techniques to pierce the gall bladder to get at the animal’s bile used by mammals to di­gest fats and in TCM to treat a variety of ailments – from tumors to arthritis and even to attempt to improve failing eyesight.

The practice of TCM stretches back over a thousand years and many peo­ple in Asia will turn to their TCM practitioner rather than a western-style doctor. It uses a variety of techniques from herbs to acupuncture but most controversially for animal-lovers products are used from a variety of species including seahorses, snakes and bears.

It is against this deeply entrenched culture that the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WPSA) is working as it tries to slowly eradicates the farms. The organization has decided to take the long road and it is a road WSPA vet Jan Schmidt-Burbach is committed to walk down – especially af­ter witnessing the suffering of these intelligent creatures first hand.

To bring about its demise WPSA is working with the Vietnamese govern­ment to try to make it a dying industry and stop any new cubs being cap­tured and incarcerated rather than shut down the farms immediately.

“We eventually want to stop the industry, we do have the agreement of Viet­namese government on that,” Jan Schmidt-Burbach said.

In a Kafkaesque ruling bear farmers are still allowed to keep and cage the animals in Vietnam – they just can’t farm them for bile or capture new cubs but if WPSA’s long-term work goes according to plan thousands of Asiatic black bears will be saved from cruelties of the bile industry.

Jan said: “In Vietnam people are allowed to keep the bears but they are not allowed to extract bile from the bears or to get new bears in – that is why we have micro-chipped the bears and check them regularly.”

To help in that process Jan travels to Vietnam on a regular bases, visiting farms and witnessing their horrifying plight – a deeply emotional journey for him.

He said: “I consider myself a rather tough person, but going to the bear farms can be really depressing.

“The farmers keep varying amounts of bears in these small farms. Some just have five bears or so while some have more – up to 100. There are around 4,000 bears on farms in Vietnam.

“They are in villages and towns – some just in a normal house where you don’t expect them to have any bears, but you walk into the backyard and they have a couple of cages. “People don’t even have to have a lot of space as every cage is on average two meters by one meter. They stack the cages or cram them all together.

In the wild the Asiatic Black Bear – with its distinctive half-moon creamy crest on its chest – can live to as old as 25, foraging for food like nuts, berries and bamboo as well as small rodents. In the cages their life span is greatly reduced to just five years as they fall prey horrific diseases and tumors.

“Bears are all kept in horrible conditions in these tiny cag­es, some unable to turn around in the cages.

“The bears are in these barren cages for all their life. As bears are really clever animals they suffer massively with psychological problems, but they also suffer with physi­cal problems. They have to lie down on the metal grids. It is pretty much the worse you can imagine for many of them.”

In the wild the Asiatic Black Bear -with its distinctive half-moon creamy crest on its chest – can live to as old as 25 foraging for food like nuts, berries and bamboo as well as small rodents.

In the cages their life span is greatly reduced as they fall prey horrific diseases and tumors. Apart from the strong cultural link to the medical benefits of bear bile, another reason why the bear bile farming is so hard to eradicate in Vietnam is the large amounts of cash people can make from the animals.

“There is lots of money involved. Bear bile is used in many TCM areas,” explained Jan. In a country where the average worker’s wage is $45 the cash cow of bear bile is strong lure for people to keep the animals. Bear farming can es­sentially function as a cottage industry.

WSPA is working across Asia to protect the animals -which range from the western Himalayas to Japan and Ko­rea. This leads Jan to also travel to Pakistan in his work to save these creatures which are on the World Conservation Union’s Red List of Threatened Animals as their natural habitats are increasingly threatened.

In Pakistan the animals are used for bear baiting and fight­ing and while in Southeast Asia a seismic cultural shift is needed to stop the trade in bile WSPA has a very useful ally in Pakistan – the Koran.

“Bear baiting will hopefully get sorted out quicker in Pa­kistan because we are making really good progress there,” he said. “There’s no big money in bear baiting – it’s more like a reputation thing for the bear owners – so we do lots of work through religious networks.

“The Koran is quite clear about animal rights and quite clearly states that animals should have the same rights as humans. We visit a couple of thousand mosques a year and talk to the Imans and they introduce the message into their Friday prayers that animal welfare is important. We have a number of official statements by Muslim religious leaders who support our cause and who have given us proof in signed documents.