Photo Credits: Animals Asia
After 18 years of collaboration with the Vietnamese government, Animals Asia reached a landmark agreement that calls for the animal welfare organization to be in joint-charge with the Vietnam Forestry of bringing the horrific bear bile industry to an end.
Animals Asia released the encouraging news today that a memorandum of understanding (MOU) has in fact been signed with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. The document is confirmation that both parties have agreed to work together for the common goal of creating of a bear bile free Vietnam.
The move follows the opening of the final double bear house at Animals Asia’s Chengdu sanctuary; which now allows space to accommodate 40 more bears.
As explained on its website, more than 10,000 bears are tragically confined on bile farms in China, with about 1,200 suffering the same fate in Vietnam. Most farmed bears are starved, and dehydrated and are kept permanently in small cages with little to no room to move around or stand upright.
Sadly, some bears are caged as cubs and never released, with many kept caged for up to three decades.
Bear bile, which is extracted using various painful, invasive techniques that cause massive infections in the animals, is used in traditional medicine as well as in many ordinary household products.
Animals Asia’s first entered Vietnam in 1999 to investigate the scale and practices of the bear bile industry where it learned bile farmers were using invasive surgery to cut into the abdomen and gall bladder of captive bears to remove their bile.
In the end, it was determined that bears subjected to this barbaric abuse would usually only survive three or four such mutilations before succumbing to death.
Following an Animals Asia investigation into the conditions of bile farms in Quang Ninh province in 2015, the Prime Minister declared that 38 bears in the province must be moved to Animals Asia’s sanctuary.
By the end of the year, every farm had been closed down, and the government had renewed its commitment to ending the industry instead of the financial interests of bile farmers.
That year, Animals Asia and the Vietnamese Traditional Medicine Association also signed an MOU holding the TMA to an agreement to stop bear bile prescriptions by 2020 completely.
