Tue, Sep 27, 2005 page9

• The plight of Vietnamese bears

  An estimated 4,000 bears are kept caged and drugged in Vietnam, where they are tapped daily for their bile, which is sold for huge profits

  • By Pat Sinclair / THE GUARDIAN
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  To the crush cage go the gates, wedging him in. It's so tight he can hardly breathe. A man on each side jabs in a long metal bar, prising his limbs off his stomach. He's moaning, fighting, protecting himself. They force a leg up against the bars and inject him in the ball of the foot. Other people are standing and watching. Then the gates come up and, unraveled and drugged, the moon bear slouches back to his normal quarters.

  His captors, at this small farm in Hanoi say he's called Nghien. The name means addict; it's a bit of humor.

  The bear looks like a druggie, they think. He's tall, skinny and has "weird behaviors." He is also being tapped daily for his bile, a product revered as a cure-all in Asia -- drunk fresh or made into medicines, tonics, cosmetics and aphrodisiacs.

  

  ILLUSTRATION: YU SHA

  "People think bile is magic," Nguyen Quan Thong, a wildlife campaigner, said. "They believe they'd die if it wasn't for mat gau [bear bile]."

  In Vietnam, bile pays. Indeed, it is an astonishing "pick-me-up," yielding a living standard way above average for keepers. Just 1g of bile powder sells in local pharmacies for about 60,000 dong (US$3.80), but around the city, in upmarket restaurants, it can sell for 100,000 dong, a fortune, given that the average urban resident earns just 37,500 dong a week. Officially, captive "bile bears" in Vietnam number 4,000. Most have been snatched straight from the wild.

  Bile not being cheap, people like to know they've got the real thing. So extractions are often performed in front of customers. At the hangar-style shed in Thinh Liet-Hoang Mai, Hanoi, early on a Sunday morning, eight people surround Nghien's cage.

  Collapsing six minutes after being sedated, Nghien now has green straps round his limbs and a pump and scanner of the sort used to scan pregnancies are standing near the cage. The staff and the contracted "doctor" push him on to his back, anchoring him with the straps. As jelly is smeared on his stomach everyone gathers to watch the screen. After a couple of goes, and some head scratching as an insertion yields nothing, the doc licks the hypodermic needle and jabs it in. Fluid the color of Marmite slowly seeps up the syringe and through a plastic tube into a jar. The men smile, absorbed.

  Nghien's jaws quiver. The doc licks the needle again before re-inserting it then jabs the bear four times with antidotes. He dabs blood from the hole and leaves the cage with half a jam jar of bile.

  The collection takes 10 minutes, but it is half an hour before Nghien can sit up again and more than an hour before he stands on all fours. His head rocks and he drops flat again and again. He froths at the mouth. As he rolls near the upright bars of his cage -- with no solid floor, no inner retreat, no water trough -- the next-door bear nuzzles him and froths too. Nghien gently shifts when the neighbor starts to chew on the claws of his swaying paw. I ask if he can have water but he does not get it.

  Bear bile has been used medicinally for more than 3,000 years, but farms only began to appear in the 1980s, after North Korean scientists developed ways of extracting the digestive fluid from living bears. Other Asian countries followed suit. The prized ingredient is ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA), which, China's state pharmacopoeia says, makes a remedy that removes liver heat, relieves spasms, improves vision and banishes toxicity. These days, claims stretch to bile being able to rejuvenate brain cells.

  Traditional Chinese medicine accounts for about 500kg of bear bile a year but another 7,000kg ends up in consumer products; everything from eye drops to lozenges and shampoo. Annually, China, Japan and South Korea together use some 10,000kg of bile.

  Supporters of the industry say it has helped cut poaching of both Asiatic black bears, which account for 95 percent of the caged bears in Vietnam, and sun bears. But ecologists say the majority of Vietnam's bears continue to be plundered from the wild, sometimes smuggled in from Laos or Cambodia.

  Such is the appetite -- with communities in Europe, Canada, Australia, India and the US among those demanding bile -- that smugglers have been caught transporting gall bladders in car seats, dipped in chocolate or concealed in dirty nappies.

  Part of the tragedy for the bears is that there are already cheaper bile alternatives. An Earthcare report, with input from the Association of Chinese Medicine and Philosophy, noted back in 1994 at least 75 herbal substitutes for bear bile, dandelion, rhubarb and chrysanthemum among them. UDCA has also been synthesized, and medical practitioners claim it to be, like the herbs, just as effective.

  At long last, the Vietnamese government looks ready to act and has declared its intention to close the farms. Ecologists are split, however. While some back the pragmatism of the planned phaseout, critics, knowing how local governments can apply national laws creatively, are exasperated. They say the move will, in reality, legitimatize the trade and let keepers carry on business until the animals die, or even sneak in new animals under the wire.

  A group of young buyers making a Saturday morning visit to one bear site among 20 in villages in Ba Dinh district, on the Kim Ma road, 35km outside Hanoi, is typical of the customer base. Well dressed, they stroll around the small zoo -- crocodiles, white doves with red-raw patches and a monkey mothering behind chain link and welded pipes -- while waiting for bile.

  On the patio of their multi-storey house, the owners of the farm, Quach Thi Loc, and her son, Nguyen Quoc Trieu, are unruffled about the prospects for their farm, which holds around 80 bears.

  "With the ban, we won't have any problem changing jobs, we're in good health and young and can do many things," Trieu said.

  But he adds: "If they end the farms, people may secretly kill the bears to get the bile, and the price could increase enormously -- though you could get seven years in jail."

  One reserve, at Cat Tien national park, is being slowly set up. But Trinh Le Nguyen, head of PanNature, a newly founded Vietnamese conservation group, despairs over the sheer numbers of bears that have only known jail and over the trade's possible exploitation of loopholes even at a sanctuary.

  He thinks the bile industry should be broken entirely.

  "All the bears should be put out of their misery now and euthanized," he said.

  "The farms should be shut. Then it would be obvious -- anyone trying to hide new bears would be found and they would lose everything," he said.

  Our visit to the farm included a tour of the long dormitories of cages. There was one dark heap of fur after another. Some may have been dying. As we left, we were handed glossy leaflets on the wonder of bile.
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