by Ted Williams
The black market for bear parts in the U.S. drives poaching of Earth’s eight species of bears including America’s blacks and grizzlies. Trade in bear parts is illegal in Alaska, but policing its long border and remote areas is an immense challenge.
Like all North American bears, Alaska’s are widely poached to supply Asian communities in the U.S. and markets in Asia with gallbladders (for mostly quack elixirs) and paws (for soup).
“Alaska’s black and grizzly bears are gravely threatened by black-market traffic because once a gallbladder is removed from a bear it’s virtually impossible to identify species,” notes Wayne Pacelle, president and founder of Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy.
A patchwork of varying state laws provides a loophole, enabling poaching. A poacher can legally hunt a bear in any of 27 states or 11 Canadian provinces, claim he shot it in, say, New York, then hawk gallbladder and paws.
“Trying to regulate legal bear-parts trade on a state-by-state basis … has failed, and has actually facilitated illegal trade,” reports Michigan University’s Animal and Legal and Historical Center.
Since 1999 national bills to close the loophole with a ban on illegal traffic in American bears have been repeatedly introduced by Republicans and Democrats, repeatedly co-sponsored by Republicans and Democrats, and repeatedly shouted down by groups led by the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies and the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation. These groups claim to defend hunters but fail to explain why they imagine hunters want their game depleted by poachers.
“You’d think that hunting groups would support this kind of legislation,” declares Michael Sutton, former special agent for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and past president of the California Fish and Game Commission.
The booming U.S. black market encourages the exploitation of already imperiled Asiatic black bears, sun bears and sloth bears.
In 2022, the China-based market research firm QY Research estimated that the Chinese market for bear bile powder was worth nearly $62 million — almost 97 percent of the global market. And its value is expected to increase. According to the report, China sold 44.68 tons of bear bile powder in 2021.
In China alone, an estimated 20,000 bears suffer in bile farms. Bile harvest is hideously inhumane. Cubs are bred in captivity or seized from the wild after captors have eliminated the danger of protective mothers by killing them.
Cubs are jammed into cages so small they can’t stand, then semi-starved to encourage bile production. Gallbladders of some bears are regularly cut open for bile harvest. Other bears are surgically implanted with catheters that rust internally. Still others get thick needles jabbed into their gallbladders multiple times a day.
Bile farmers don’t administer anesthesia, so they extract any teeth and claws not broken off by the animals biting and clawing at steel bars that imprison them. Victims exhibit psychological distress such as swaying and rocking. Lucky ones die from infections or self-mutilation. Unlucky ones endure the torture for decades.
This is from attorney and former USFWS special agent Ed Newcomer: “Usually located near these bear farms are restaurants specializing in bear paw soup. When a customer orders bear paw soup at one of these restaurants an employee goes across to the ‘bear farm,’ uses tongs to reach through a bear’s small cage and grab hold of one of the bear’s paws. The paw is forcefully pulled through the cage bars, traumatically chopped off and the stump cauterized. A bear is good for four bowls of soup.”
A few bears get rescued from bile farms by Animals Asia, Wildlife SOS, Four Paws, and International Animal Rescue.
“Many rescued bears are permanently handicapped by grotesquely short and bowed legs that had nowhere to go as the bear grew,” says Newcomer. “And most, if not all, bears who survive these farms are missing at least one paw.”
The pro-hunting states of Vermont, Oklahoma, Kentucky and West Virginia have recently joined 33 other states in outlawing trade in bear parts. But states alone are not equipped to deal with global trafficking of animal parts. We need a national law to complement the valuable state laws.
Senators Sullivan and Murkowski: Bears and law-abiding bear hunters need your help. Please protect both by backing or sponsoring legislation to impose an import, export, and interstate ban on traffic in bear parts.
Ted Williams is a lifelong hunter, freelance journalist and former information officer for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.
