To celebrate the landmark achievement of 1,945 pharmacies, pharmaceutical manufacturers and hospitals committing to reject bear bile products, Animals Asia founder and CEO, Jill Robinson MBE delivered the following speech at Monday’s Healing Without Harm press conference in China’s Hunan province.

I would like to offer our heartfelt thanks to Mr Sun, the Director of Changsha Food and Drug Administration, the Hunan province Pharmacy industry trade association, to the pharmaceutical associations, our pharmacy and doctor friends, and to the hospitals here in Changsha too, who have collaborated so kindly in Healing without Harm. Your presence here today gives China's endangered species of Asiatic black bears their strongest voice.

Today, we are delighted to be joining you as we celebrate our 16th anniversary this year of the founding of Animals Asia. It is also 21 years since I first visited a bear farm in 1993 and struggled to understand why bears were being exploited in such a cruel way. 

Forgive me, as a Westerner and as someone who is of course not qualified in the long history and discipline of TCM for understanding little about the intricate and complicated culture of your prestigious and respected work. I have been extremely honored to have been made a Council Member of the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies Herbal Committee - and what I have understood from talking with eminently qualified doctors such as yourself is that, while bear bile has held a somewhat limited use in Chinese pharmacopoeia, it is now viewed by ethical doctors as being unnecessary, against the very principles of being in harmony with nature, and can easily be replaced.

So, we have been thrilled to have joined a long journey of collaboration with traditional medicine doctors, to the point when we held our first big event in Chengdu in February 2010, where we were joined by four chains comprising 33 shops in a campaign we called Healing without Harm. 

Three years later in 2013 we celebrated a massive growth in support with 11 chains and 260 pharmacies refusing to sell or prescribe bear bile. In 2014 another staggering 1,684 came on board – and today, we are absolutely delighted to be seeing no less than 1,945 TCM shops and pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals joining this celebration of respecting and protecting China's wild species of bears.

I would like to say on behalf of all in the Animals Asia team and our supporters across the world, that we are touched and impressed by your stand today, acknowledging that the bear farming industry moves closer to ending as the sale and demand of bear bile is reduced.

Your action of removing bear bile from your shelves will encourage others in the medical profession to more readily help endangered species, and will encourage people here in China and across the world to applaud your intelligence and compassion towards China's fragile species of moon bears.

We welcome you all to our sanctuary in order that we can show you some of the evidence we have found over these past 21 years – evidence that shows how tragically these bears are suffering, and dying from liver cancer and other disease in numbers too high to be coincidence. And we welcome you too to enjoy the lives of bears now far away from their misery on the farms. 

Today, because of your kindness and support we believe that together we are closer than ever in seeing the end of suffering and we sincerely hope that more professionals, like you, in the medical field will join in this campaign to end bear farming once and for all. Your decision to refuse producing, prescribing, or selling bear bile is something that will be noted in history, and will highlight the true harmony between traditional Chinese medicine and nature.

Our thanks to you all for your collaboration and help - which, together, sees us moving closer towards the day when China's majestic moon bears can walk free from pain and fear - and have sanctuary where they truly belong - in the wild.

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