Eight Bears by Gloria Dickie

Author:Gloria Dickie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

TWO WEEKS AFTER I LEFT VIETNAM, I received an email from Animals Asia. A farmer in Phung Thuong had surrendered his female bile bear to the Tam Dao sanctuary. What would be considered a routine rescue anywhere else in Vietnam was an astonishing achievement in Phuc Tho District. A farmer had finally broken ranks with his peers, disregarding the community’s pact to never give up a single bear. A crack had formed in their resolve.

“The first bear is the hardest bear,” Bendixsen told me two years after my visit to Vietnam. “We’re starting to see a shift in attitudes. When we visit farmers in Phung Thuong about their bears, it’s no longer a firm ‘No.’ It’s a ‘Maybe.’ ” Recently, he said, an old man had come into the mobile medicine clinic in Phuc Tho. He had a sore back. Bendixsen began chatting with him and realized he owned one of the biggest bear farms in Phung Thuong. Bendixsen asked the man why he had visited the clinic rather than use bile for his aches and pains. “He said, ‘I just need something that will work.’ And then he agreed for us to come visit him at his farm to have a conversation.”

Slowly but surely, progress is being made across Asia. Five thousand residents of Phuc Tho District signed a petition in 2019 calling for an end to bear farming in the region. In 2015, the Vietnamese Traditional Medicine Association agreed to stop all prescriptions for bear bile. Wild sun bears are turning up in places where they haven’t been seen in decades. And dozens of moon bears are arriving at sanctuaries. Maybe the furless bear in Phung Thuong would make it to a rescue center, too. And while moon bears and sun bears are still a long way away from achieving panda status, public sentiment in China is turning against bear bile farming. Many Chinese citizens now consider bile extraction to be a cruel practice. In 2018, a representative from Hebei Province at the National People’s Congress submitted a proposal to end bear farming by 2035. In China’s major cities, protesters have frequently gathered to speak out against the cruelty of bile farms. Everywhere I look, there are glimmers of hope, rising over the horizon like the sun and moon and casting their light into the darkest places.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.