The latest lucky bears to leave the horrors of bile farming are, in China, a male moon bear, “Jonah”, whom we rescued from an illegal farm in Dandong, Liaoning Province - and in Vietnam, two females, “Clover” and “Mary”, and a male, “Soo”. Please see our Rescue Diary for more about Jonah in China and our new Vietnam bears.
Well done China and Vietnam teams for bringing another four farmed bears safely home to our door.
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I looked with disbelief at a story that has recently appeared in the media here in China - dogs being dyed to resemble wild and exotic animals.
This is a trend that could prove deadly if inappropriate dyes are used - and stories abound of puppies, especially, losing their lives in agony in China at the hands of traders who dye them with toxic colours to make them look "cute". Many of the dyes on the market are poisonous to animals and see them dying in agony a few days later as the toxins enter their system and slowly and painfully poison them.
Please, please anyone reading this - don't be tempted to dye your dogs. Apart from the stress caused to the dogs during the process, and the terrible indignity of trying to change an animal so beautiful in its own right, you could be risking the life of your pet.
See the story here.
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Just seconds after returning to my room after enjoying seeing Oliver outside in his grassy enclosure, I heard a message on the walkie talkie from Bear Manager Anna inviting me back again to House 10 where brown bear Rocky was being let out into a den for the first time. So much excitement in one afternoon!
I called Sailing to see if she could help with some pictures and she ran over with her camera and took the most beautiful images of them both.
Oliver, if you remember, was the bear needing surgery on the way back from the farm in Shandong. A hideous metal coil was removed along with his gall bladder in a surgery of several hours performed by Heather and Monica on the back of the truck. As if that wasn't enough, poor Oliver had stunted limbs and a body grossly deformed from his time in the cage - he had languished on two farms no less than 30 years.
Well .... the sight of him literally swaggering out into the enclosure - stretching his stiff old body high into the air to retrieve juicy tomatoes from the tops of the hanging logs, was not to be missed. Every so often he glanced over as if to say "it's pretty good here", before wandering off again to retrieve another tasty treat.
There are simply no words in the English dictionary that can adequately describe how my heart lurched with love and affection for a bear in his twilight years who was so much enjoying his freedom at last. The sun shone, the pool glistened and Oliver smiled for China as his feet got wet.
And then it was on to see Rocky run out of his cage into a den. Except it didn't happen that way at all. This humungous brown bear with the enormous head simply stood and stared when his cage door opened. Confused, cautious and not really understanding what to do with all the space in front of him - it was several minutes before he plucked up the courage to take a cautious step forward, and another couple of minutes before he was brave enough to go the whole way and walk for the first time into his den.
From then on, there was no stopping him - he stretched his face and nose over to the jam and yogurt smeared on to his new hanging-basket bed, or stopped to plunge his soft lips into his drinking bowl and then check out his neighbours next door.
Finally confident enough to walk into the outside section of his den, Rocky looked out in to the enclosure, blinking into the brightness at Oliver as if understanding that his turn outside would be next.
Anna told me later in the evening that Rocky had done a fantastic job of turning his large water bowl into a swimming pool as he repeatedly plunged his head into the depths and tried to wiggle his giant body in too. With a little patience, Rocky will be experiencing the delights of a proper pool later this week.
This blog is dedicated to them both - our handsome, joyous brown bears with fortitude and forgiveness that belies their lives on the farms.
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While we were in Shandong rescuing your bears a few weeks ago, I heard that you’d told some of our Chinese staff that you felt sad seeing the bears laid out for their health-checks, because now you could see the full extent of their wounds as they were free of their cages.
I wonder what went through your mind as you saw Oliver and his ridiculously stunted limbs, acknowledging that his cage confinement for 30 years had led to his tragic deterioration into a grotesquely unique “dwarf” bear.
I wonder too how you felt looking at the open, bleeding wounds in the abdomens of most of the bears as they lay there sleeping on the tarpaulin, while our team were performing the necessary health-checks to determine just how sick they all were.
Did their broken and desperate forms cause you to experience just one small pang of remorse remembering that just hours before we’d arrived, you had torn the metal corsets from their bodies and even tried to rip out the latex catheters from their gall bladders, which had been milking their bile for 10 long years.
One of those bears we called Kylie. Our first vision of this beautiful copper-brown bear, was seeing her balancing painfully on her elbows and knees in the cage. Unable to lie on her abdomen, she knelt for hours, hardly able to breathe as the stabbing pains continued until we were finally able to reach her cage and provide her with a merciful anaesthetic to help her into oblivion and sleep – for just a few hours.
As you saw the infected area pouring with pus, and noted the hernia surrounding it leaking purulent bile, did you also notice, as we did, the latex catheter that was jagged at the edges having been forcefully pulled and then torn from her damaged, bleeding gall bladder? Or the scars of a metal corset around her midriff and neck which had caused scabbing and skin irritation and loss of her hair?
Did you notice the disgraceful condition of her teeth as our vets gently pulled her top and bottom lips back to reveal flattened edges of black and rotten canines, which had been hacked back to the gum? Did you see the rotten food and tissue lodged in these teeth and smell the putrid stench of her poor abused mouth, which would have seen unrelenting and searing pain as the nerves and pulp were exposed?
How would you feel today, I wonder, if you knew that Kylie was dead.
Weeks of tender, loving care, multiple surgeries to heal her abdominal wounds, and to remove 19 rotten teeth – even blessings by Buddhist monks – were futile in the end as her body gave up and she succumbed to those years of abuse on your farm.
Strong words perhaps from someone who should be grateful that Kylie found herself at least in the care of those of us who were able to gently put her to sleep and allow her to put the decade of pain behind – resting at long last in merciful peace. But how sick we all are, once again, to see our surgery table doubling up as a mortuary slab – where our heartbroken team cut into the body of a dead bear, take the tissue samples so critical for our research, and cry for an animal so casually treated as a “thing” for profit and gain.
If what you said to our staff is true, will you now join us in speaking out about this industry, admitting – as you must know in your heart – the reality of a trade that cripples and kills these stoic animals, and help us bring it more rapidly to an end? It is too late to help Kylie, but if you honestly reflect on bear farms today, August 2010, perhaps your words can still help the thousands of miserable Kylies patiently waiting for your testimony of truth.
RIP Kylie from a team who loved you.
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A big man with a big heart and a profound understanding of how any living being suffers behind bars. In the 1980s Terry Waite CBE made several trips to Lebanon to free hostages, before being taken captive himself from 20th January 1987 in Beirut. A hostage for 1,763 days, Terry was in total solitary confinement for four long years before finally being released on 18th November 1991.
I met Terry during our UK Roadshow in 2008 and watched in silence – along with everyone else in that awestruck room – as Terry spoke about his experiences and how he related so poignantly with the suffering of caged and abused bears on farms across China and Vietnam.
Now, Terry is helping the animals once again in his narration of a new film, where he speaks of mindless cruelty inflicted on thinking, sentient animals – the most voiceless victims of them all. He is talking about circus animals – forced to perform degrading and humiliating tricks for “our” entertainment in a film called “The Performance”, which features safari parks across China.
The film has been produced through our partnership with the fabulous Ella Waite and her team at Environment Films, and uses footage taken largely by our Animal Welfare Director Dave Neale, who was helped enormously during hours of exhaustive investigation by our China Animal Welfare Officer Lisa Yang and Irene Feng our China Dr Dog Manager in Guangzhou and Sailing Wang, our PR Officer in Chengdu.
Joining Dave and team during some of these investigations towards the end of last year, once again I watched performances which saw a burning rage in my heart. Particularly during the moments when elephants were forced to stand on their heads causing them much pain, or on one leg, spinning like a top – humiliated and wearing ridiculous costumes on their bodies.
Or the memorable day watching one of the trainers smash a young moon bear in the face with his fist when he didn’t understand how to skip. It was more than I could stand – and from nowhere expletives came from my mouth as a bear so miserable and confused was punched and punched again, until she got it right. All this before being locked away in the dirt and the dark – in cages behind the stage – waiting for the next performance with its bright lights, loud music and a screaming crowd who would learn nothing about the animals themselves.
As Terry said in the film, that’s all they have in their lives – and he was angry because he knew how they felt. He asks the viewer to take a moment to think how much you’ve done in the past couple of years, how many places you’ve been to, how many things you’ve experienced – and then to remember that these animals have been suffering in their confinement and pain throughout all of this time.
Thank you Terry for your connection and kindness – for describing events of your past which must be painful to recall, and for relating the animals’ physical and psychological pain with yours. Thank you Ella and your team for creating such a stunning and heart-wrenching documentary – and thank you Dave, and Lisa, Irene, Rainbow and Sailing and all in our Education team in Chengdu for bringing us closer to when the misery, and those countless cruel “performances” must end.
Please click here now to read our full report, to see "The Performance" and help the voiceless performers.
It seems unbelievable that following the exposure of performing animals in China, our Australian Director Anne Lloyd Jones in Sydney read the news that the Ku-ring-gai Council on Sydney's North Shore has recently rescinded its ban on performing exotic animals in circuses, which was introduced in 1999.
Anne quickly began a petition that so far has seen over 600 signatures and comments from all over the world asking for the ban to be reinforced on the grounds that teaching animals to perform inappropriate tricks does nothing to educate the public or foster respect for animals.
Thank you to all our supporters who have added their voices to the campaign already and to the RSPCA NSW for declaring they were "gob smacked by Ku-ring-gai Council’s archaic decision to overturn a policy to allow circuses with exotic animals back on to council land".
Sign and make a difference in Australia
Please take a minute to “sign” the petition online. It’s easy – just click here. We have until Tuesday, 24 August to get enough signatures to have this ridiculous decision reversed.
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