Text by Cortlan Bennett, Images by Paul Hilton
In the former Liangzhou nursery, where pandas were once presented as gifts to foreign heads of state, British-born Jill Robinson and her team are leading one of the biggest captive rescues since The Great Escape. Over the next 18 months, 500 endangered Asiatic black bears – affectionately known as “moon bears” for their golden crescent chests – will pass through this converted rescue and rehabilitation centre, en route to a sanctuary in China’s southern Sichuan Province. Some will die before they reach it.
Their road to freedom has been a tortuously long one. Most of these bears have been caged since they were cubs for up to 23 years. But it wasn’t until 1993 that an almost single-handed investigation by Hong Kong-based Robinson, then China director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), revealed their plight by exposing the brutal practice of bear farming on the mainland.
While bear bile has been used as a traditional oriental medicine for more than 3,000 years, farming it by surgically implanting metal tubes into the bears’ gall bladders and draining them twice a day, was only introduced to China from North Korea 20 years ago [in the early 1980s].
Although Asiatic black bears are protected under Appendix I – the most critical category – of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), to which China is a signatory, they are the species most threatened by the bile trade. Black bear bile contains high concentrations of ursodeoxycholic acid, or UDCA, which has modern medicinal properties.
Since the 1950s, China has established more than 1,000 natural reserves, of which 200 provide habitat to its four native bear species: the Asiatic black, brown, sun and giant panda. Yet over the last 50 years, bear numbers have continued to decline as they are hunted for their gall bladders and other parts.
Beijing had claimed that harvesting and breeding was the only way to protect its estimated 50,000 wild Asiatic black bear population, a figure conservationists put at 16,000, while meeting traditional demands. Yet Robinson’s investigation also exposed plans over a 10-year period to increase four-fold the number of farmed bears in China to 40,000 in a bold bid to apply for overseas trade. The proposal led to an international outcry.
In 1995, after the mediation of Hong Kong Legislator and former bear hunter David Chu Yulin, the Guangdong State Forestry Department agreed to close down one of the worst farms investigated by Robinson in the southern city of Huizhou. She and IFAW became the proud owners of seven adult moon bears, which now reside in a small sanctuary in Panyu, donated by Chu. It was a bitter-sweet victory.
“I don’t feel very proud of that,” Robinson said of the investigation that led to the closure. “Going around smiling, giving the kids sweets, pretending to be a tourist while taking pictures of the bears. That family took me into their home and I ruined their livelihood. But it was the only thing I could do. I’d never seen such misery.”
In 1998, Robinson received an MBE for her work and left IFAW to establish the Hong Kong-based Animals Asia Foundation (AAF). The following year, she accepted an invitation from the official China Wildlife Conservation Association (CWCA) to visit 11 bear farms in Sichuan. What they saw sickened them. Locked in cages no bigger than their bodies, teeth sawn off or worn down from biting rusty bars, dozens of bears dripped blood and green bile from the dangling metal catheters in their abdomens. The crude implants had left most of them infected, while the constant cage banging had scarred their heads and worn strips off their fur. Bears which hadn’t lost their paws in traps were declawed, while another had grown so big for its tiny cage that its ribs and internal organs were crushed. “Its oesophagus was squeezed flat so that it couldn’t swallow. We had to put it down on the spot,” said AAF veterinary director Dr. Gail Cochrane.
In June 2000, after seven years of heartwrenching work, AAF signed an historic agreement with the Sichuan State Forestry Department and CWCA to secure the immediate release of 500 Asiatic black bears and close down the worst farms in Sichuan Province. The agreement also called for an eventual end to the practice. Sanctioned by the Central Government Administration for Wildlife Protection, it was the first accord between Beijing and any outside non-government organisation. For Robinson, it wasn’t before time.
In the early 1990s, at the height of China’s drive to expand the industry, there were more than 10,000 caged bears in 480 registered farms across the mainland. These figures have since fallen to 6,928 bears in 220 farms, which produce about seven tons of bile each year. While Beijing has agreed not to issue any new farming licences, AAF says it hopes to end the practice over the next 10 years. Western critics, however, claim this will never happen.
Like Mao’s Great Leap Forward in the 1950s, Beijing’s original plan to expand its bile trade backfired. Oversupply led to a crash in local prices; down from US$10 per gram in the mid-1990s to about US$1 per gram today. With China likely to be admitted into the World Trade Organisation this year, one way to revive the market would be to secure an export licence from CITES. This is exactly what some US-based animal rights groups believe Beijing is planning to do.
“That’s what we’re finding being levied against us now,” says Robinson. “They say we’re pawns. They call us naive. But we’re there with our eyes open. The next 10 years are crucial – we want it stopped. We don’t want people coming here saying we’ve cleaned up the industry, made it more humane, when all we’ve done is pave the way for international trade. With China there has to be trust on both sides. Our agreement has been approved by Beijing – they don’t sanction things like that freely – so I believe they really are doing something about bear farming. So are we.”
“God. What have we taken on?” Robinson is standing in the middle of madness: a room full of rocking bears like babies in hard-wire cribs. Clang-clang, clang-clang sounds the constant sway of steel on concrete as they swing their heads in pendulum. “This is the worst part,” she says. “The cages, the smell, the noise – it’s just like something out of mediaeval England.”
Another truckload of 10 bears has just arrived at the Liangzhou rescue centre, bringing the total to 63. Local workers are still busy laying bricks, welding pens. An electric fence will soon be installed. The bears’ swimming pool is finished and full of water, but the rescue centre is fast running out of temporary storage space. Resources are being stretched.
“We’ve been taken by surprise at how fast the Chinese authorities have acted,” says Robinson. “We were expecting 30 to 35 bears to be released to us initially, but the farms are being closed down quicker than we thought.” So far the authorities have closed 27 farms, revoking their licences and presenting them to Robinson “as a small token of their sincerity”. But this still leaves another 440 arrivals and AAF has agreed to look after them for the rest of their natural lives.
One room already houses an orchestra of groaning bears in rows of rickety “crush cages”, so-called because each has a sliding metal roof that clamps up or down, pinning the animal to the floor unable to move while it is being milked. Iron corsets are sometimes wrapped around their midsections to hold implants in place. Often through idleness or fear, the bears are left pinned motionless to the cage floor.
‘We’ve been taken by surprise at how fast the Chinese authorities have acted’, says Robinson.
‘We were expecting 30 to 35 bears to be released to us initially, but the farms are being closed down quicker than we thought.’
As the Chinese truck unloads, one cage is given a conspicuously wide berth. This “Most Vicious Bear in the World” is nicknamed VB by the crew. She is demented with rage, biting at the metal tube poking from her abdomen, lashing out lightning-quick at anything that comes into range. Two workers have already had their coats ripped, while a volunteer sports a bleeding claw gash the length of her forearm.
“That one will be going on Prozac,” Cochrane nods. “Now that we know it works on other animals, I’ve been trying it out over the past few weeks. It chills them out. It’s been used very successfully on polar bears.”
VB is too aggressive to handle. Cochrane decides to anaesthetise her with a harpoon syringe. But the vet is running short on ketamine, and the first shot fails. So does the second. The third slowly takes hold and the bear is finally dragged eyes open, jaw twitching to a makeshift triage station on the ground. Suddenly a paw moves and one of the female volunteers screams and jumps back. “She won’t hurt you,” laughs Cochrane. “It’s a reflex action.”
The source of VB’s rage is soon discovered. One of her sharp claws has grown so long that it has curled under and impaled the soft flesh of her paw, which is now bleeding and infected. “She’s just had a fresh catheter implant, too,” observes Cochrane as she feels the scar tissue around the abdomen, checking for signs of a hernia.
While there is evidence that qualified Chinese surgeons are performing these operations, Cochrane will not confirm this. Many of the implants, she says, are completed in less than an hour by unqualified vets. “And that’s what miffs me. The farmer knew he had to get rid of the bear, so why did he have a fresh catheter implanted? The worst thing is, someone has operated and hasn’t even bothered to remove her infected ingrown nail.”
VB is flea-sprayed, manicured and microchipped before being put into a larger made to order cage from nearby Chengdu. Watching curiously from her own tiny crush cage is another female, Poppy. Her check-up is next. In contrast to most of the other angry moon bears, she’s relaxed and licks anyone near enough to scratch her ear, lolling about like a minx in her cage. “She’s the most lovely bear I’ve ever seen,” smiles Robinson. “She’s a poppet.” Hence the name.
Although the bear rescue will cost more than US$3 million over the next 18 months, including purchasing and preparing a 10-hectare sanctuary, AAF has so far raised just over US$1 million. The cost of compensating the farmers, housing, feeding, treating and rehabilitating each animal works out to about US$6,500. And for that, sponsors get to adopt and name a moon bear of their own.
“I was nagging a pilot friend of my husband’s one night when he was drunk,” recalls Robinson wryly. And he said, “Yeah, I’ll sponsor a bear. So long as I can name it Bottom. Then every time I show my friends, I can point to it and say: There’s my bear Bottom!”
After a reversal shot, VB awakens with a snarl. She paces her new cage with the shifty eyes of a madman, disorientated by the drugs. But after only one shot of anaesthetic, calm Poppy curls up to sleep – sweet as a teddy bear. The check-up reveals her to be in good condition, though bile still drips intermittently from her catheter, slowly forming a bright green pool on the floor below her cage. Left like this, the liver will continue to produce up to 50 millilitres of bile each day to be stored in the gall bladder. Most farmers simply plug the catheters with a piece of rag to stop it from dripping.
In an adjacent room rocks Gail. She was amongst the first Liangzhou arrivals three weeks ago. Her condition is catatonic. In the dark and quiet seclusion of her den, she shivers and convulses uncontrollably all day. “She wasn’t expected to live,” says Cochrane.
“That’s why I got to name her. She’s an old bear and had been kept pinned down in a tiny cage for years. She has massive scarring all over her body, including a huge burn on her back. She’s completely mental. No-one can go near her, and it’s taken us this long just to get her to eat something.”
As the vet makes her final rounds for the evening, she discovers a new arrival in serious condition: it appears to have ripped out its catheter, leaving a gaping, festering hole in its stomach. The bear is anaesthetised and dragged out of its cage, then put immediately on two intravenous drips. It has lost a lot of weight. “
If its gall bladder is torn and leaking into the abdominal cavity, it’s going to die of peritonitis [severe inflammation],” Cochrane says as she examines the wound. “All I can do is top it up with fluids and antibiotics before looking at it again in the morning.” And then she discovers the giant abscess under its shoulder. “Jesus!” came the exclamation.
The infection is so large that Cochrane starts removing pus by the syringe-full. The stench is sulphuric. “This bear will be lucky to make it through the night,” she says. Robinson kneels next to it and starts stroking its withered paw: “Maybe if we give it a hopeful name?” Someone decides on Faith, then notices it’s a male.