When will bear farming end?
16 July 2012, 03:59AM
The anti-bear farming movement has been moving at such a frantic pace that we can hardly keep track. Across the country, over 1.4 million people have watched the disturbing undercover film of the bears suffering on the farms, and many thousands more are driving a movement calling for the end.
Not surprisingly, the opposition has begun a dirty smear campaign, posting untruths in media stories, and hacking our website relentlessly each day in an attempt to bring us down.
Are we deterred? Not a bit. Never before have we seen such an outcry, and every opportunity now must be taken to keep the issue out there – well and truly in the public eye.
Unbelievably, the two most searched words recently on the internet in China, behind Chinese basketball player "Jeremy Lin", were thewords "bear farming". Citizens everywhere are making their disgust known about this truly evil trade.
Now, the disgust of the country is being seen in a new artistic wave of talent from compassionate Chinese illustrators, designers, photographers and artists who have taken the time to express, from their hearts, the plight of bears on the hideous farms today.
With the slogan "Every life is equal. How do you know that it won't hurt?" they are using their creativity to answer the ridiculous statement made by Fang Shuting, Chairman of the Chinese Association of Traditional Chinese Medicine who uttered the immortal words: - "The process of extracting bear bile is as easy, natural and painless as turning on a tap."
Meanwhile, support emerges from other incredible sources now that Jia Youling, a member of the national committee of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and the state chief veterinary officer, has said that bear bile farming is immoral. “The vet's professional ethics is to cure rather than create disease. Operating on a healthy bear to create a free drip fistula is against the vet's professional ethics. From the veterinary point of view, this is slaughter, this is cruel."
Just who stands behind the surgery of these bears? The mutilation of their bodies to create the dripping hole? Who will stand up and respond to Jia Youling and our own veterinary staff and debate the veterinary science behind the draining fistulas they cut into sentient warm-blooded mammals? Who can possibly believe them when they maintain that this butchery is humane.
I wonder too what the farmers really think as they lie in bed at night knowing, as they must, how the bears under their "care" suffer so terribly?
Do they hear the clattering of the steel, or see the demented weaving of these animals, as they rock miserably to and fro in their cages? Do they feel even a shred of shame or remorse as they see the bears whither and die from the diseases that take their lives on the farms.
What do the farmers do with the bears’ bodies - and what do they do with the parts? Are the bears buried with respect and love by a team of grieving carers as they send them on to the afterlife with handmade flowers and garlands, and their favourite food and toys?
To you, the farmers - especially those who say they treat the bears like their own children - how on earth do you sleep at night?
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