͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌ ͏‌To prevent cruelty to animals, we promote enacting and enforcing good public policies. To enact good laws, we must elect good lawmakers, and that’s why we remind voters which candidates care about our issues and which ones don’t. If you’d like to unsubscribe, click here. [[link removed]]

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Dear friend,
In a knock-you-off-your-feet tremor of the COVID-19 crisis, some Chinese government officials declared that Tan Re Qing—an offering in the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) pharmacopeia, with its main ingredient being bear bile—can be used as a palliative for the symptoms of the virus.
With tens of millions of people infected just a couple of years ago, what would become of hundreds of thousands of bears, across all eight surviving bear species, should demand for bile surge?
There are more than 113 cities in China with more than a million people (compared to just nine in the United States). Add up the bears in the world—including North American black bears, grizzly and brown bears, pandas, sloth, and spectacled bears—and you’d probably fall short of a million individuals.
We know that the poaching of rhinos for their horns for use in TCM brought those primitive-looking African and Asian giants to the precipice of extinction.
It’s our aim to halt the bear parts trade and promote alternatives to bear bile, whether synthetic bile, which is widely available, or alternative treatments accepted in the world of eastern medicine.
Getting bile from a bear is not like drawing milk from a cow. You must grievously injure the bear, or kill him or her, to get the viscous fluid.
To extract the bile, you kill a wild bear—any kind of bear in the world, whether endangered or abundant. Cut open the bear and pull out the gallbladder. And then extract the bile contained inside it.
Or you imprison bears on “farms”—really, just concrete pits—and stab them with a catheter and extract the bile from the bears without anesthesia.
The good news is, bear bile farms are being phased out in South Korea and Vietnam. But there’s no sign of the CCP shutting them down any time soon in China.
As nature and hunting writer Ted Williams points out in a news feature we are publishing today [[link removed]] , the very hopeful downturn in bear “farming” in two nations will nevertheless have consequences for wild bears if demand for bile does not recede. Bears from all eight species, of every color phase and size, are at risk of life and limb from this trade, since their gallbladders and bile are indistinguishable, Williams reports.
That’s just one reason why it’s a priority for us to work with members of Congress leading the fight to stop this trade—Reps. Mike McCaul (R-Texas) and Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) and John Kennedy (R-La.). Legislation they plan to introduce —the Bear Poaching Elimination Act—would forbid any interstate transport or foreign sales of gallbladders and bile.
Two decades ago, citing rampant poaching in Kentucky and throughout the United States, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) introduced identical legislation, noting that “bear gallbladders are worth more than their weight in gold, fetching a price of about $10,000 a piece!” He said the bill was aimed at “the growing illegal trade in bear parts, in which at least 18 Asian countries are known to participate. The poaching of bears is a national problem that is destined to become worse.”
We’ve got to leave behind the whole set of archaic, inhumane practices where we treat wildlife as potluck or potion, as textiles or trinkets in the making. The COVID-19 crisis was a sort of air-siren about our mistreatment of animals—from live wildlife markets, where the viral spillover from animals to humans may have occurred, to the bear bile farms and poaching rings that attracted brisk new business as suppliers of “treatments” for a contagion of our own making.
Today, I hope you’ll do two things: 1) write to your two U.S. Senators and your U.S. Representative in support of the Bear Poaching Elimination Act and ask them to cosponsor the bill when it’s introduced [[link removed]] , and 2) read the piece we published today from acclaimed nature writer Ted Williams. You can do so here [[link removed]] . We’ll be publishing in-depth examinations of major animal issues on our website, and we start today with Ted’s thorough analysis of this trade.
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For all animals,
Wayne Pacelle [[link removed]] Wayne Pacelle
President
Animal Wellness Action
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