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Animals Asia: until the cruelty ends

Zebedee the bear has a very hard past. He was locked in the kitchen of a bear farm, in complete darkness, and was mistreated by the farmer who hit him in the nose with a board, and broke his nose.

Our vets were able to patch him up and he is fine now. It just goes to show once again how this industry breaks bears. I was working for the International Fund For Animal Welfare as their Asia representative and was doing a lot of undercover work; that day I got a call from a reporter friend who had just seen a famous bile farm in China. At the time it was not well known so I wanted to see for myself. With two friends, we joined a group of Japanese and Taiwanese tourists, and we were shown around this bile farm in South China.

We knew that something terrible was happening to the bears to create this bile. We got away from the group and arrived in a basement, and discovered a shocking scene:

32 bears in tiny cages with metal pipes shoved into their bellies to extract their bile. Their cages were so small that they were growing between the bars, and there was this special moment, I was walking through this horrible room in shock, and I backed up too close to a cage, and someone patted me on the shoulder.

I turned around, a bear was reaching its paw through the bars. I don't remember hesitating, I would hesitate today, I took her paw and she didn't hurt me. It should have hurt me as a human. She shook my hand and I felt a message, a connection between us, it changed my life.

I left that farm knowing I would never see her again, and I haven't. I made a promise that I would try to help, if not her, bears in the same situation. That is why several years later

Animals Asia was founded, to specifically address the terrible bile farm industry and to fight for an end to the consumption of dogs and cats, and for the welfare of captive animals. And here we are now, more than 20 years later, that promise fulfilled.

The Bear Rescue Center is a project between Animals Asia and the Ministry of Agriculture of Vietnam. This joint project aims to help Vietnamese law enforcement agencies in enforcing the law, because before this center existed, whenever an officer discovered an illegal bile farm or poacher capturing bears, he or she didn't know what to do with the bears, or who would take care of them, due to lack of resources and expertise.

The main goal of the center is to help enforce the law, and for Animals Asia to save as many bears as possible from farms and trafficking, and to return these bears to good health. Unfortunately, there are still about 1000 bears held in "bear farms". I am about to move Humphrey, one of our collared Asiatic bears, he has a medical checkup tomorrow. I'm going to ask him to get into this rolling cage to bring him to the room for tomorrow.

We have 170 bears living with us so it's a big facility. The majority of the bears here are collared bears, or moon bears, and there are also 11 Malay bears. To stimulate the bears, we can pour sauces that they can sniff and lick, stimulate other senses with toys that make noise... We want to encourage the bears to have natural behaviors.

These toys encourage them to forage, we put food up high to encourage them to climb, because these are behaviors that they have in the wild. These sanctuaries are like spiritual food. They at least give the bears a chance to live healthy, happy lives in semi-natural enclosures, and allow the public to appreciate them as literal animals, not as machines whose bodies people use.

We need to become kind to them and stop using them as machines, when there are plant and artificial alternatives, and let them live in the forest. Every morning before the bears go out, if they are undergoing treatment, the team gives them medicine, wrapped in a delicacy like honeyed bananas.

For all our residents, we have a medical check-up every 2 or 3 years. This is to make sure that we don't let anything go wrong. We see the bears every day, they are trained to come to us, but we can't see everything in detail. One, two, three!

In the bile farms they eat badly, which weakens their teeth. Last time they were normal, but here we discovered a broken canine. When we save the bears they stay here until the end. This is our promise to the bears, to offer them a sanctuary where they are safe. Releasing them is not possible because there is no protected forest in Vietnam.

Another reason is that in Vietnam and China many people have high blood pressure. We don't know why, we think it's a result of chronic stress, so they have to be treated for high blood pressure like we do every day.

Bile farms must be stopped, it's cruel, it's horrible, it creates a product full of hatred, suffering, infections, cancer cells... It's dangerous to take it, and the animals suffer enormously, to an unimaginable extent. We don't need it, there are alternatives. Nobody needs bear bile, it shouldn't exist.

The center also serves to educate the public, we show them the bears we save and explain how bears should be treated, that they should be left in the wild.

I see a lot of hope in Vietnam, if we can show young people who these animals are and how to treat them, I hope they will convince their parents, the elderly in their family, to treat the animals better.

I am surrounded by a team, there are about 70 of us living and working at the sanctuary, 70 of the best people I know. This sanctuary and the one in China, as well as our other programs, cost a tremendous amount of money every year. We need the support of the public to make their voice heard, because Animals Asia is just one voice, when we talk to the government they say "you complain but you are the only one".

If many people join us, then we can change things in Vietnam. We do what we say we will do, we see the new life of these animals every day. But more broadly, we can all help animals everywhere in the world, here in Asia or in our own backyard, we just need to reflect on the life that animals have, as on our life. Their lives are as important to them as our own lives are to us.

It is certain that every year new discoveries show the physical and emotional awareness of animals, that they feel pain, that they have emotions as deep as we do; I think that as an intelligent species it is our duty, our duty to be compassionate towards other sentient beings.

Do not go to circuses with animals, just go to zoos that are also rescue centers and whose primary purpose is conservation. Check what you buy, if you buy makeup buy products that are not tested on animals. Please go vegan or even vegetarian 1 or 2 days a week or more if you can.

This is our chance to give the bears the best Christmas ever and show them we love them! Our hope, is that the forests will be replanted as they were before and that people will live in harmony next to free roaming bears and other animals that inhabit this great continent.