In China, Vietnam and Korea the moonbears (so called for a white stain in the shape of the moon on their breast) are abused and tortured to extract their precious bile, used in the Asian traditional pharmaceutical.
IN CHINA...
In the past, bears were hunted and killed in their habitat but at the end of the 1980s the government decided to set up the bile farms, where the substance is taken from living bears.
They extract the bile with a technique named "free-dripping": a hole (which is always open) is created in the abdomen of the animal and through it the bile drips out. This is totally inhuman and it provokes unimaginable pain to the bear and a high death rate in the farms, where the moonbears are kept in small cages.
IN VIETNAM...
The moonbears are subjected to an indefinite number of cruel treatments. Some of them undergo surgeries every two or three months and they often die after three or four surgical operations.
Bears usually have long needles inserted in the gall bladders to pump out the bile. They are drugged with Ketamine, which is illegal. All of this often leads to the dispersion of bile and to a slow and painful death caused by the peritonitis.
IN KOREA...
There are only 30 specimens left in the wild.
In 1992 the bile farms have been forbidden by the Korean government, but there are still 108 left where more than 1300 moonbears are locked.
The Koreans are among the largest consumers of gallbladders and bear bile and this has created a rich black market between Korea and China.
The Marsican Brown Bear (Ursus Arctos Marsicanus) originally lived in the entire central and southern Italy.
This subspecies of brown bear weighs almost 100-150 kilos and when in upright position it reaches a height of nearly 1,80 meters.
During the centuries it was ruthlessly hunted because there was the belief that it preyed the cattle grazing. Instead, this solitary and shy plantigrade has strictly nocturnal habits and a vegetarian diet for more than 90% (berries, roots, fruits, tubers) and only occasionally it eats small mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians.
Sometimes it eats carcasses of large herbivores that it finds in its territory (which is usually from 10 to 200 square kilometers, depending on the food available).
Today, the poisonings, the traps and the hunt are severely forbidden but this bear is practically relegated only in the Abruzzo National Park with a population of about 40 specimens (in 1969 they were approximately 60).
This is another proof of how the mankind adversely affects the environment that surrounds him, often without showing a modicum of respect to all the creatures with which he shares this world.
(Thanks to Lorenzo S. for helping me writing this post)
