Thread: Move Over Knut - Meet Snowflake

Sometimes these animals need to be placed in sanctuaries/zoos because they have been mistreated their whole lives. This is my favourite animal, the moon bear (they look like my Thai dog or vice versa).

Wanna read the latest from Clever Magazine?
Click here and return to the coverpage!

©Animals Asia/Kees Metselaar

This is a Chinese Moon Bear...
destined to live its life in this cage
with a rusty catheter attached to its
gall bladder
so that Chinese can extract
its "coveted" bile!
Dee Walmsley, Clever's nature writer, first brought this Moon Bear information to our attention. She asks the following questions:
What would you do if you stood eight feet tall and were never able to stand?
What would you do if you lived in a cage with only enough room to stick out a paw for food?
What would you do if your teeth were cut off and your nails pulled out?
What would you do if your ulcerated insides burned from a rusty catheter thrust into your gall bladder to milk its bile?
What would you do if you were an Asian Moon Bear?
We contacted Andi Mowrer of the Animals Asia Foundation and she supplied us with answers to these very perplexing questions:
In October 2000, 63 long-suffering endangered Asiatic Black Bears, nicknamed Moon Bears because of the crescent-shaped marking on their chests, arrived at Animals Asia Foundation’s (AAF) Moon Bear Rescue Center in Sichuan Province, China. Thus began the world’s largest rescue of Moon Bears from bile farms in China, where today approximately 7,000 remain imprisoned in coffin-like cages throughout the country. This historic rescue is the result of a special partnership between the Sichuan Forestry Department, the Beijing-based China Wildlife Conservation Association and Animals Asia Foundation (AAF).
Although bear bile does have medicinal properties and can be used to treat gallstones and liver disease, the advent of bear farming in the early 1980’s led to a glut in production, and now bile is often marketed in products such as shampoos, wines, sodas, and lozenges, where it is absolutely useless. There are over 50 herbal and synthetic alternatives, which are used worldwide and are cheaper and equally if not more effective.

Truly sickening.