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Vietnam's elixir: Bear
bile
By Tran Dinh Thanh Lam
HANOI - When Nguyen An bruised his legs in a
motorcycle accident, the traditional doctor next door to
his home prescribed that he use an ointment mixed with
some bear bile. "It's very effective. You can find it
everywhere in town," he said.
The traditional
doctor is right - the trade in bear bile for traditional
medicine continues to flourish.
Anyone visiting
brasseries or restaurants selling "wild-meat delicacies"
in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in
the south is likely to come across announcements telling
you where to buy "natural" or "pure" bear's bile.
Officials have refused to issue licenses to
these places, because Vietnam is a signatory to the
Convention on the International Trade in Endangered
Species (CITES) and has committed to fighting the trade
in products derived from plants and animals facing
extinction.
"Vietnamese law severely restricts
the use of endangered animals," said Nguyen Mao Tai, the
director of the Forestry Control Department of the
Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD).
"We do not give licenses to institutions that exploit
these animals."
But part of the problem is that
the country's law also does not make it explicitly clear
that having bear farms is illegal.
Last year,
CITES imposed an embargo on Vietnam's trade on
endangered species. CITES has also warned Vietnam about
the trade in bear bile, but nothing much has changed.
Bear bile is believed to cure fevers, liver
ailments and muscle injuries, beliefs that have been
around in Vietnam and other East Asian countries for
thousands of years. Many believe it can be an
aphrodisiac. Mixed with rice wine and herbs, it can be
made into a "tonic" that is believed to improve strength
and well-being.
Officials at Hanoi's Forestry
Service estimate that three to four liters of bear bile
are consumed in the capital per day. That volume, they
said, is equivalent to the total quantity of bile
extracted from the gall bladders of 40 bears. A
one-centimeter cube of bear bile sells for VND60,000
(about US$4).
Asiatic black bears are listed in
Vietnam's "Red Book" as an "endangered" species, and are
already threatened with extinction in forests that have
been dwindling because of illegal hunting.
In
the past, poachers scoured the few remaining forests to
shoot the animals and get the bile. Then they sold the
bears' gall bladders and bones to traditional
pharmacists and the flesh and some organs - paws in
particular - to "wild-meat restaurants".
But as
wild bears became scarcer, poachers chose to trap the
animals and sell them to people who raise bears for
bile. Thousands of bears have been captured from the
wild and kept in cages in major cities of Vietnam, where
their bile is extracted periodically and sold.
Hoang Ngoc Can, director of the Law Department
under the Hanoi Forestry Service, said there are now 760
bears raised in Hanoi. "Our office is encircled by
bears," Hanoi forestry officials joke. They point out
that just about one kilometer from their office, there
are three bear farms, each with 10-15 bears.
A
100-130-kilogram bear can produce between 50 and 80
milliliters of bile per extraction.
The process
is anything but pleasant, and often soon kills the
unfortunate beast. "The surgeon opens up the bear's
stomach before extracting the bile by inserting a
syringe into the animal's gall bladder," said Nguyen
Minh, an official from the Forest Protection Department
of MARD. "It depends on how good the surgeon is, but
after three or four extractions the animal usually dies
or the owner will kill the bear because they believe the
bile is no longer any good," he said.
"Around 30
bears die each year in Hanoi," Can said. To replace the
dead animals, poachers scour the country's few remaining
forests to trap the animals and sell to "bear raisers".
Small populations of bears now survive in forest
pockets in Tuyen Quang province, Lao Cai, Son La in the
north and Ha Tinh, Tay Nguyen in the central part of the
country. "If we do not stop the holding and raising
bears in captivity, wild bears will be extinct in very
near future," Minh warned.
Environmentalists
have been trying to limit the damage by declaring
bear-bile remedies bogus and calling for ban on the sale
of such medicine. But such appeals appear to have had
limited impact.
Some entrepreneurs say the
belief in bear-bile products will never stop, so that
there might be a way to extract bear bile without
causing too much suffering to bears or killing them.
It is a controversial enough idea for many
environmentalists, but Hanoi biologist Do Khac Hieu is
the first to develop a "humane" method to extract the
bile from raised bears. First, he implants an artificial
gall bladder into the bear's body, attached to its real
gall bladder. A suction pump can then be used to extract
about 100ml of bile every three or four weeks from the
artificial gall bladder.
Hieu received a patent
on his extraction method from the Vietnam Patent Office
in 1994.
He plans to set up a bear farm, but has
not been able to get official permission for it. "The
farm will help save bears from extinction. People need
to kill 300 or 400 bears in the wild to obtain the same
amount of bile, which one bear gives us at the farm,"
Hieu pointed out.
Le Duc Thuan, former director
of the health service in central Ha Tinh province, was
luckier than Hieu. In 1998, Thuan obtained funding from
the province to carry out a project raising bears for
bile extraction.
While the project was reported
as a success, all the bears had been supplied by illegal
poachers in the first place.
"People say they
raise bears for bile, and thus contribute to preserve
them from extinction. False. Instead of killing the
animals immediately to get the gall bladder, they
lengthen their suffering and exploit their bile more
fully," said Tao of MARD.
(Inter Press
Service)
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