A word in favour of 7,000 persecuted Chinese bears
Bears are assumed to be bad tempered. Hence we call a man ‘bearish’. Dr Johnson was often described as such. Boswell objected: ‘He has nothing of the bear but his skin.’ I am not so sure. He was certainly surly to two of the greatest men of his time. One of his rare meetings with Adam Smith ended with the doctor calling him ‘a lying dog’ and Smith retorting, ‘You are the son of a bitch.’ And Gibbon found him frightening. On Friday 7 April 1775 (the year before The Wealth of Nations and the first volume of Decline and Fall were published), Johnson dined at a tavern ‘with a numerous company’ and held forth on bears. Boswell wrote: ‘He continued to vociferate his remarks, and Bear (“like a word in a catch”, as Beauclerk said) was repeatedly heard at intervals ... we who were sitting around could hardly stifle laughter. Silence having ensued, he proceeded: “We are told that the black bear is innocent; but I should not like to trust myself to him.” Mr Gibbon muttered in a low voice, “I should not like to trust myself with you”.’ It is unclear how bears themselves got such a bad reputation. The official name for the Grizzly is Ursus horribilis or ferox. There is, of course, the dreadful story in the Second Book of Kings ii 23-4, when Elisha was going up to Bethel: ‘and there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head.’ Elisha ‘cursed them in the name of the Lord. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.’ Hence endless fairy tales of bears being bad to children. The dislike was reinforced early in the 18th century when ‘bearskin jobbers’ emerged in the City of London, from the proverb ‘don’t sell the bearskin before you have caught the bear’. Bears sold stock at a future date in the hope that prices would meanwhile fall. The term ‘bull’ came in later. At any rate, bears were always unpopular, and no animal has been persecuted by humans so much or for so long.
How and why did teddy bears come into fashion, then? President Theodore (‘Teddy’) Roosevelt was famous for his bear hunts in the Rockies. Early in 1906 two bears, presented to the Bronx Zoo, were called ‘Roosevelt Bears’, and imported German toy bears were called after them, becoming a sudden rage. The American Stationer reported in September: ‘No toy of recent years has become so popular as Teddy Bears.’ John Betjeman got his ‘safe old bear, Archibald, whose woollen eyes looked sad or glad at me’, two years later. The song, ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, did not come until 1932.
All the same, bears are still ill-treated in parts of the world that have never heard of teddies. I have seen dilapidated old dancing bears in both Morocco and Turkey. That, to be sure, was a long time ago, but I believe performing bears are seen in Arabia even today. And there is gross cruelty in China to the socalled Moon Bears. These Asiatic black bears have golden crescents on their chests. Hence their name. They also secrete bile, which has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for 3,000 years. In the past, Moon Bears were trapped in pits by peasants who supplied Chinese doctors with their raw materials. The bears were then caged and milked daily. There were two methods. A hole was bored in their abdomen to the gall bladder, and the bile ‘weeped’ into it; this was known as the ‘free dripping’ technique. An alternative was to insert a catheter deep into the gall bladder. Either technique led to infection.
Moon Bears are officially classified as at risk, in the most urgent category, in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. There are only about 15,000 left in the Chinese wilds. In an attempt to protect them, the Chinese authorities, in the 1980s, introduced bear farming, which could be supervised. Strictly speaking, even in China it is illegal to kill Moon Bears, or export their bile or products made from it. But it is a grisly fact that these bears are still hunted for their whole gall bladders, or as an (illegal) source of new stock for the bear farms. Such farms involve just as much cruelty to bears as the old practice. They are kept in cages no bigger than their own bodies. The old methods of extracting the bile are still used. One rescued bear had been in the same cage for 22 years. Imprisonment for years on end in these horrible cages is normal. These bears sometimes have a missing limb as the result of the brutal methods used to trap them. Their teeth are often cut back or their paw tips sliced off to prevent them resisting the milking. Their bodies are injured from head to foot by the cages. Head wounds show that they frequently bang their heads against the cages in desperation. Imprisoned bears usually die quickly from septicaemia, liver failure or mental suffering. But others survive to endure long lives of torture.
A brave and energetic lady called Jill Robinson was appalled to discover the practice of bear farming in 1993, and started the Animals Asia Foundation. This is linked to Moon Bear Rescue (patron Jilly Cooper) which aims to end the practice of bear farming once and for all. It has had some success. Since October 2000, 39 bear farms have been closed down, and 138 bears released from their cages and handed over to the Animals Asia Foundation, which has a rescue centre in Sichuan, deep in China. The bears arrive in a desperate state, always undernourished, often in need of emergency surgery to repair the dreadful damage inflicted by traditional methods of bile extraction. Some operations last as long as eight hours. All the bears have gall bladders damaged beyond repair, and these are removed as a rule. Even with the attentions of the excellent veterinary surgeons at the Sichuan centre, 15 per cent of the bears die. All the same, of the 138 bears brought there, 116 are now alive and well, and playing with each other for the first time in their lives. But there are still 208 bile farms known to be in existence, holding just over 7,000 bears in cages. The immediate plan is to free and save 500 of them in Sichuan Province. The Chinese government has agreed to co-operate with the Animals Asia Foundation in eliminating bear farming completely. The fact is, as even Chinese doctors agree, bear bile can be replaced by herbal and synthetic alternatives, which are just as effective and much cheaper.
The Rescue people are holding an auction of paintings by West Country artists at Taunton on 27 August to raise funds. I have agreed to give one of my paintings for the sale, which will be in the Great Hall at Queen’s College in Taunton. But I also ask readers who want to help to contact Mrs Lee Gibbins of Moon Bear Rescue, who lives at The Old Rectory, Holford, Bridgwater, Somerset TA5 1RY (tel: 01278 741648). Dr Johnson would agree that the bears are ‘innocent’ and ought to be saved.
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