Dear John,

Survey the world for the worst localized horrors meted out against animals — the animal sacrifices of the Gadhimai Festival in Nepal every five years, the fish-in-a-barrel shooting of captive lions in South Africa, the water-borne butchering of pilot whales in a Faroe Islands inlet, the dark-of-night slaughtering of two million kangaroos a year in their native habitats in Australia for their skins to make athletic shoes — and even with all such barbarities in mind, you could make a case for bear bile farms, an organ-extraction industry centered in China and Vietnam, as the very worst.

That’s why it’s so important that, in the U.S. Senate, John Kennedy, R-La., and Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., introduced the Bear Poaching Elimination Act, and in the House, Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Rodney Davis, R-Ill., did the same. The Senate may take up the anti-poaching, anti-slaughter legislation as early as this week.

These bills ban the trade in bear bile and bear bladders, mainly for use in traditional Chinese medicine. And while it’s the bear farms in Asia that torment the animals before extracting the bile, it’s the poachers in North America and other parts of the world who chase down and kill the animals for these same parts.

With the bear bile farms shrinking in number because of public pressure, and the shame that they bring to these nations, their dissolution will bring more pressure on the wild populations.

Several of the world’s eight species of bears are already critically imperiled, and the Bear Poaching Elimination Act is a small but powerful step the United States can take to join the global community in preventing more killing of wildlife for profit.

The trade in bile for Traditional Chinese Medicine has been a threat for a while. But why now particularly?

In 2020, China announced that Tan Re Qing — a concoction mainly composed of bear bile — is considered a recommended treatment for COVID-19 patients. There is a synthetic alternative to the bile acids, so it’s entirely unnecessary.

We shouldn’t be killing rhinos for their horns or bears for their gall bladders, or elephants for their ivory, or sharks for their fins.

We must 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 is an air-siren to be heard and heeded throughout the world, including for the protection of wildlife.

Please TAKE ACTION and contact your U.S. Senators and your U.S. Representative using our secure form and urge them to cosponsor the Bear Poaching Elimination Act (S. 3472 and H.R. 2325).

You can also call your Senators at 202-224-3121 and urge each of them to support S. 3472, the Bear Poaching Elimination Act.

Please act today and raise your voice for bears. We must protect the bears of the world from the scourge of poaching and bear farming. It’s a horror that must end.

For the bears,

Wayne Pacelle,
President