The Chinese have long believed that bear gall bladders hold special healing qualities — leading to the worldwide massacre of bears to feed the Chinese traditional medicine market. Now a publicly traded pharmaceutical company, Guizhentang, has introduced “Bear bile farms” where hundreds of bears are held in cramped cages to be harvested for their bile. The horrific practice is carried out on drugged bears with a hypodermic needle.
The Chinese government of course has done nothing to stop this disgusting practice and the company now plans to triple the size of its bear-bile farms. It currently has 400 bears being “milked” of their bile.
What is a positive development is the growing opposition in China. Environmentalists are often arrested in China. Animal rights activists believe that about 20,000 black bears are kept on about 100 bile farms in China.
It is a practice that any government with a modicum of decency and humanity would shutdown. Then there is the Chinese government.
This is not just a problem on the mainland. Years ago, I went to Taiwan as part of a delegation to discuss environmental issues among other subjects. I went to “Snake Alley” to show government officials that it was easy to buy bear, tiger, and other prohibited items. When confronted with the evidence, the minister responded that these remedies actually work — a curious response since they are banned internationally. There remains a cultural hold on many Chinese — including educated Chinese — with these traditional medicines. That is why the opposition in China is so encouraging.
Source: NY Times
There is no humane slaughter. Less than 1% of farm animals live the Normal Rockwell fantasy of pastoral bliss.
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Michaelb1. The products I talk about are almost always raised in relative humane ways. Though, depending on your perspective there may not ever be a humane way to slaughter or even keep an animal.
The perspective I view the world through, shows me that humans are meant to consume products that come from animals, including the meat of those animals.
In my experience with the dairy farm, I can tell you that those animals lived lives that were similar to their ‘wild’ counterparts…save for the sheltered barns they lived in. The slaughters I experienced were done quickly and humanely as possible.
I know where my beef, bison, elk, chicken come from…I know they are raising/slaughtering the animals in accord with how I believe humans can best do so without undue stress to the animals.
I have seen a specific bison I got meat from at pasture and, ahem, ‘enjoying the comforts’ of a lady friend. Yes, he ended up spread out amongst 10 dinner tables, but he lived decently.
If I were a cow…I would take a day in that sort of setting over 3 years on a corporate feed lot.
I’m comfortable within the natural food cycle.
Woosty and others,
Warning for grass-fed if in fact it is fed RoundUp Ready alfalfa.
An FDA study, and many before , show that RoundUp, causes the minerals in the soil to be fixated (chelated) and unavailable for the plant grown on them. This even effects the amount of small grains produced after two years use of RoundUp. FDA stats.
No word as I know on omega 3 content however, which is supposed to be higher in grass fed beef.
Can give a startling link revealing much more serious consequences of RoundUp as determined by FDA scientists, and abroad (Argentina).
Woosty “Doing so would have many benefits. It would give us a more humane livestock system, a healthier human diet, less deadly E. coli, elimination of feedlots, a bonanza of wildlife habitat nationwide, enormous savings in energy, virtual elimination of pesticides and chemical fertilizers on those lands, elimination of catastrophic flooding that periodically plagues the Mississippi Basin, and most intriguingly, a dramatic reduction in global warming gases.” The health benefits are only in comparison to really bad food.
( shipping the toxic industry to a foreign country keeps home clean)
The good it does is in relation to a worse unnecessary scenario. We are not dependent on them, but at this stage of domestication they are of us. Stop breeding them and they humanely cease to exist.
Animal products in this day and age for first world countries is choice of desire for pleasure.
In every long lived culture of the world, Animal products are used minimally.
People enjoy hearing justification for their bad habits.
But back to the article…….somewhere we as a population say the cruelty is too much. Where do we put the mark on the cruelty scale?
pigs or cruel…
Michaelb1, February 23, 2012 at 12:03 pm
How much like the condemned Chinese are like the posters here talking about how good the animal products are indifferent to how they are obtained.
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disagree.
How an animal is slaughtered…raised…kept or husbande is absolutely important. But I am not a vegan, not for lack of trying….we are interdependant as a species….that does not mean that we need to be pigs of cruel, both of which will (and are!) tainted with the karma of our actions.
and for personal health…it’s good for heart!
http://www.motherearthnews.com/sustainable-farming/grass-fed-meat-zmgz11zrog.aspx
How much like the condemned Chinese are like the posters here talking about how good the animal products are indifferent to how they are obtained. This should be a Wikipedia link defining cognitive dissonance.
There is no humane slaughter. Less than 1% of farm animals live the Normal Rockwell fantasy of pastoral bliss.
Michaelb1, February 23, 2012 at 10:38 am
“These remedies actually work”. There would be the spark of a logical argument there if they were the only remedies that work. Thousands of years of use and no double blind studies yet?
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I suspect they work by ‘magic’….ie: in the eye of the beholder. Debunking would be the way to go for sure. And I second(third) what JCTheBigTree said and would add that the health benefits of grass fed beef are actually profound.
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Sustainable-Farming/Grass-Fed-Meat-Benefits.aspx
Sounds delicious. Butter (and red meat) gets a horrible rap on health, but the fact is that healthy grass fed dairy/meat products (in moderation, like all things) is quite healthy, providing many vital nutrients.
I have had ‘real’ butter. My family owns a lake cabin with some acreage that used to have a dairy farm backing up to it. Of course, they family couldn’t keep up with the multi-national corporate farms and shut down about 20 years ago…had they made it to today they could have done well with the grass fed market. But, back when I was a youngster we’d get milk and butter from the farm (ocassionally some beef too, mmmm) and I still hope to get butter that good some day.
My grandparents spent their summers up at the lake and while both ate what we now consider a horrible diet based on red meat, butter, eggs, and all that stuff now labeled ‘bad’, they both lived a long healthy life…in fact if it hadn’t been for the smoking and heavy drinking they both would likely have made it past 100.
It kills me to see my parents, both of whom were raised on this healthy stuff, now using horribly unhealthy products such as margarine and believe they are healthier options because that’s what we were convinced in the 80’s and 90’s.
JC,
Right on.
Actually how many Americans (or Swedes for that matter) know what real butter tastes and smells like. Zero percent!
Real butter is an “aged” product. The aging process is a matter of days, and enzyme activities produce both a taste and a smell in the finished product.
The stuff you eat is NOT aged, but supplied by a synthetic compound which supposedly replaces the results of the aging process.
Don’t know how it is now, but almost 45 years ago in Switzerland, where I lived in Geneve, the butter was like none I’d ever tasted before or since.
Try it if you ever get there.
What’s the difference between Bear Bile Farms and the large corporate feed lots in which we grow American beef, poultry, and pork?
There is none. Our cattle are raised on corn because the ranches they live on couldn’t sustain the hundreds of thousands of animals packed onto them. Ranchers have learned how to put the most meat on a cow in the fastest time, some to the point where their bodies can’t handle the weight…those just get forklifted to the slaughter house.
Chicken are raised in pitch black hen houses with thousands and thousands of other chickens…laying around in their own excrement and dead chickens, packed in so tight that they can’t move and don’t have the ability to walk.
There is a documentary out there that highlights some outrageous practices here in our own food system…I don’t think we have a leg to stand on when it comes to telling other countries how to treat animals.
Eat grass fed meats and related products (ie. butter, milk, eggs) they taste better (once you lose the taste for the hormones, excrement, ammonium, and other chemicals lacing our typical meats) and are far far healthier for you. Try to get your products from a farm/ranch with a sustainable healthy model.
Also try Bison and Elk meat (delicious red meats with less fat than beef) they are phenominal and are raised right.
“These remedies actually work”. There would be the spark of a logical argument there if they were the only remedies that work. Thousands of years of use and no double blind studies yet?
I can’t help be amazed by thinking that some of the comments written condemning the Chinese are written over a breakfast of ham and eggs.
Jeff,
The Chinese way is better, you get to witness the abattoir routine and know it’s fresh. Here they bear the live lobster out to the kitchen , put it in a holding tank, and bring in a defrosted product. Why do you think that sommeliers open the bottle at the table. Proof of the goods.
You also can pray for forgiveness of the lobster. The American indians and others did and do.
So much for the concept of “harmless superstition.”
That is sick ! How low can people go?
I can’t wait for Elaine to create a limerick for bad bear bile.
I was honored by my Chinese host with 5 snake stew. Part of the ritual is that man of the house goes to market & selects the snakes (all poisonous) for the meal. One (I forget which) is hung up by its ‘neck’ & split open while alive. The gall bladder is removed, crushed in a class & drown in some sort of clear booze. As guest I was given this ‘treat’. I, of course, had to pretend it was just wonderful despite tasting like poop. Upon reflect I did feel very bad for the snakes but then again the only difference with that and McDonalds (well to be fair everything at McD tastes bad) is I don’t have to witness the death of my dinner.
This however is not death but slow torture, There really is no excuse.
To harvest ANYTHING from a being deliberately kept in fear and want will be tainted with that very fear and want.
Of course people that indulge in this fashion are already filled to the brim with it…. so…..I guess that thier spirits filled thusly must need to create that in the poor bear.
blech….it is so bereft…..
I was at Snake Alley as entertainment for guest speakers at a Telecom sponsored conference.
I was informed that the brothel across the way, whose odd-looking workers were on view, services the needs of clients whom the snake potions had rejuvenated. I witnessed the draining of fluids from living snakes and then their flaying alive to be prepared as food. Talk about freshness.
But then we point out the lobster we want to eat.
Anybody feeling hungry now?
Insane cruelty.