Mama bear and baby bear… on the bile farm

An animal rights activist I am not. I eat animals and I have no problem with humane farming. But whether you want to call it an animal “right” or a human duty, I think deliberately torturing animals is wrong, and I am appalled by the unnecessary torture of animals that goes on in China. I have complained about it before, but this news item about a mother bear and her cub utterly horrified me, and I think it ought to nauseate anyone with the slightest degree of kindness or compassion. In what I think is a good sign, the story has horrified many Chinese, because it touches on the most basic of instincts — a mother protecting her own:

The Chinese media has reported on an extraordinary account of a mother bear saving her cub from a life of torture by strangling it and then killing itself.

The bears were kept in a farm located in a remote area in the North-West of China. The bears on the farm had their gall bladders milked daily for ‘bear bile,’ which is used as a remedy in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

It was reported that the bears are kept in tiny cages known as ‘crush cages’, as the bears have no room to manoeuvre and are literally crushed.

The bile is harvested by making a permanent hole or fistula in the bears’ abdomen and gall bladder.

As the hole is never closed, the animals are suspect to various infections and diseases including tumours, cancers and death from peritonitis.

The bears are fitted with an iron vest, as they often try to kill themselves by hitting their stomach as they are unable to bear the pain.

A person who was on the farm in place of a friend witnessed the procedures and told Reminbao.com that they were inhumane.

The witness also claimed that a mother bear broke out its cage when it heard its cub howl in fear before a worker punctured its stomach to milk the bile.

The workers ran away in fear when they saw the mother bear rushing to its cub’s side.

Unable to free the cub from its restraints, the mother hugged the cub and eventually strangled it.

It then dropped the cub and ran head-first into a wall, killing itself.

At first I thought the story sounded a bit too fantastic. I found the link here, and I was very skeptical about the claim that animals would commit suicide.

Ever wonder if animals are intelligent? Consider this story from the Chinese press, which has been reporting this week on the strange case of a mother bear who broke free of her captors, strangled her cub, then killed herself, all to avoid a life of medical torture.

In Chinese traditional medicine, a bear’s bile, extracted from the gallbladder, is thought to have healing powers. “Bear farmers” keep the animals in tiny cages where they are literally crushed as they grow larger and larger. Meanwhile, a small hole is cut in their abdomens, permanently, where bile can be drained from the gallbladder.

The practice has led to people observing some rather unusual bear behavior, like bears that attempt to kill themselves by hitting their chests, gnawing off their paws or beating their heads against their cage as if they’d gone insane.

The problem with the above argument is that animals lack the same awareness of death (based on self awareness) that humans have. I have known for a long time that animals will inflict fatal or near-fatal injuries on themselves in order to escape, but that is not grounded in anything approaching suicidal thoughts. Rather, it is the instinct to escape. Many an animal has gnawed off its leg to escape a steel trap, and many have bled to death as a result. Animals wracked by pain will of course not only want to escape confinement, but they will do anything to escape the pain. Even humans do this, and I am not sure that those who have jumped to their deaths from burning buildings rather than burn to death have necessarily committed conscious suicide.

What I think happened here is that the mother bear had the maternal instinct to protect her cub in the only way she knew how and when that failed another instinct kicked in. Even hamsters will eat their babies when danger threatens. She stopped her cub’s suffering, and once she was temporarily loose, I think she made an all out mad dash to escape (the torture lasts for many years, until the animal dies), and took the chance that maybe she could crash through that man-made wall.  It is anthropomorphism to call it suicide, but that does not make it any less shocking. I may be naive, but I hope the spectacle of seeing a mother bear do that torments those callused torturers for the rest of their lives, and that it helps bring this monstrous, superstitious practice to an end.

Anyone who wants the details of what goes on routinely in China can read this sickening report.  Or this. Utilitarians ought to keep in mind that the stuff they extract from the bears is available elsewhere, so there is no need for these horrors to be committed by our principal trading partner.

What is done to certain humans in China isn’t much better.

MORE: Bear in mind that the animal rights activists in this country have done much to increase the suffering of animals in places like China. Not only do they argue that a bear is the moral equivalent of a chicken or a silkworm, but the constantly agitate for laws which, well-intentioned though they might be, have caused animal experimentation to be outsourced to places like China, where it goes unpoliced. By trying to address the problems rationally, animal welfare movement has been much more effective at preventing cruelty than the animal rights movement. PETA, for example, can’t do a damn thing about what happens in China; instead they engage in vegan exhibitionist antics:

“Where is PETA when you need them?”

Showering naked in Hollywood. I’ll bet the Chinese bears are really impressed.

http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2011/03/22/peta-models-shower-nude-in-hollywood-to-protest-meat/

Hey, bears eat meat, but they don’t lock their prey in cages and torture them for years out of superstition.  Nor should we.