Animal Welfare a 'Matter of Conscience'

A wildlife activist talks about the state of conservation policy in China.

2012.02.28
gracegegabriel-305.jpg Grace Ge Gabriel speaks with Jill Ku at RFA, Feb. 24, 2012.
RFA

Grace Ge Gabriel is the Asia director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). She tells Jill Ku of RFA's Mandarin service about the recent outcry over the farming of live bears for bile extraction, the very issue that inspired her to work for IFAW in the first place:

Recently the topic of taking bile from live bears has become hotly debated in China. The recent debate began because a company that was engaged in taking bile—a product which actually has very little to do with traditional Chinese medicine—from live bears wanted to list on the stock exchange. This provoked large numbers of ordinary people in China to reconsider the issue of bear bile farming and also a mood of protest.

Ever since the 1980s and the 1990s, the voices raised against the practice of bear bile farming have been getting louder and louder. Not only have the companies failed to change their practices—which are so cruel to animals—because of it, but they are even trying to get their products listed on stock markets, so the chorus of protest has been very fierce. There are a large number of companies farming bear bile, and this is connected to certain loopholes and gaps in Chinese legislation and government policies.

China currently has no law forbidding cruelty to animals. So in cases where you have the large-scale exploitation of animals by companies for economic gain, in which the animals are subjected to cruelty and suffering, there is no law to rely on. What's more, Chinese law allows for the exploitation and use of wild animals, coupled with the fact that there is no law forbidding cruelty to animals. All of this has made the bear bile farms extremely savage. They say that bear bile has been traditionally used in Chinese medicine, but in fact if you look at Chinese prescriptions, very few of them—only three percent—have any animal components at all.

A lot of these companies are trumpeting the ancient benefits and efficacy of animal-based medicines and bear bile in order to further their own economic interests. Actually, their actions have given traditional Chinese medicine—this treasure of Chinese culture—a bad name. Internationally, if you mention traditional Chinese medicine to people, they only know that it contains wild animal parts. Nobody really knows that only a tiny proportion of it contains animal ingredients. The proportion of ingredients it uses from endangered species is even smaller than that.

Increased awareness

I think that this year, I certainly felt that the level of awareness of animal conservation issues had already got very high on the Internet, on microblog sites, and I found this extremely encouraging. At last year's parliamentary sessions there were ... a lot of motions and bills relating to the protection of wild animals tabled for discussion. For example, there were bills forbidding the harvesting of bile from live bears, and bills forbidding the trade in shark fin. There are also bills forbidding the raising and sale of tigers, and those forbidding the import of sea lions from Canada. Last year, [TV presenter] Jing Yidan even tabled a bill at the National People's Congress saying it is time—there is a need for a law forbidding cruelty to animals ... These voices, together with the growing calls from the public, show that awareness of the need to care for and protect animals is growing all the time. [They] will prompt the government to fill any gaps between our legislation and those of other laws around the world.

In the past 20 years or so there have been a lot of achievements we could talk about in wildlife conservation. The Tibetan antelope, for example ... is facing the same sorts of threats as many of the other animals like tigers, or elephants and so on. It's because there is a market that people hunt them. The Tibetan antelope is a creature native to China and the market for its [fur] is in high-spending Western economies. When it is hunted in China, its fur is smuggled out to India, woven into textiles and sold to Western consumers on the luxury goods market.

Now a lot of countries in Europe and Africa which have rich wildlife resources are finding that they are being hunted and sold to satisfy a demand in China for banned endangered species products. This will require a concerted international effort to address, because it's only when the business has been cut off that the killing will stop.

On the Tibetan antelope, we worked together to insert a clause into international trade agreements that require countries where markets exist to take steps to eliminate them, the countries where the wool is spun to start using substitutes, and for the authorities in China to crack down on the hunting of Tibetan antelope. Turning it around, we can say that the huge market for ivory in China has had a direct impact on the very existence of wild elephants in Africa ... and yet this is an illegal market, and part of an international crime scenario.

The vast majority of the bear bile on the market in China now comes from bear bile farms that are linked to pharmaceutical manufacturers, and yet the vast majority of bear bile products now available aren't even used in traditional Chinese medicine. For example, you can buy bear bile drinks, bear bile tea and bear bile liquor. None of this can be described as medicine. And it's not a tonic, either. Bear bile isn't even sold as a tonifying substance.

Law enforcement

Last week I was at a conference in Thailand run by Interpol, at an environmental crimes panel that addressed the question of endangered species. Most of those present were law enforcers from around the world. So we hope that law enforcement personnel will now take crimes against wild animals a bit more seriously. We have found through our investigations that a lot of crime involving wild animals is also linked to criminal activities around drugs and arms.

Asia is the biggest market for wild animal products, which is contributing to the rapid disappearance of animals in the wild. While many of the countries are still developing, they already have laws against animal cruelty in place. And it's not just to protect the animals themselves, but they have an effect on its habitat and on ecological conservation. Animal welfare laws don't only benefit animals. A much more important side effect is that animal welfare laws are for people. They are an indicator of the moral level of humanity. And as societies develop, then the attitude of societies as a whole to the treatment of animals is an indicator of how civilized they are.

At the beginning of the 1990s ... the Guangdong authorities closed two bear bile farms and gave the bears to IFAW to take care of. The bears were being kept in Panyu, and I went there [as a television reporter] to film them. And when I saw the state the bears were in when they were freed from those farms, I knew I had to tell even more Chinese people about this situation so they would understand it and oppose bile extraction from live bears, and oppose this sort of cruelty against animals. And that's what set me on the road to the protection of wild animals.

Even though this road has been a difficult one ... when I look at some of the debate we've had this year, I really think the eyes of more and more people are being opened, and people increasingly have opinions about such matters. They won't stand idly by while people torture animals and they won't buy their bear bile products. This isn't really a matter for debate; more a matter of conscience, which doesn't require debate.

I have loved animals ever since I was a kid. I thought that if I did a job that combined what I love with my work, then it would be easier ... And I decided that I wanted to change from being a spectator of animal protection to being an active participant.

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