"What The Fuck, China?!" or "Bear Commits Murder/Suicide To Escape Torture"

[Seil]

So I was watching Two Best Friends playing Revengening, and Matt tells this story about the Chinese puncturing the stomachs of bears and letting them bleed out. I thought that was a little far-fetched. I thought that was a little too Bond villain. So I looked it up, and apparently China is "milking" bears for their bile, which is said to have a whole lot of health benefits. What the fuck, China?

*Note - feel free to look at the linked stories, where you'll see a lot of fucking depressed bears with tubes coming out of their stomachs.

In a secretly shot video, a Chinese farmer holds up a bag of yellowish bile he has just extracted from a caged bear.

"Some Westerners say this is cruel - but I think the bears are making a contribution to mankind," says the grinning man.

Animal welfare groups have recently stepped up their campaign to end the practice of milking bears for their bile, still legal in China.

They say the animals suffer enormous physical and psychological pain.

But bear bile has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for hundreds of years and it is not proving easy to change habits formed over generations.

Pharmaceutical companies that farm bears are also fighting back to protect their industry, in a public relations battle to win hearts and minds.

Bear bile is a digestive fluid produced in the liver and stored in the gall bladder.

It is valued in traditional Chinese medicine because it is supposed to fight fever, cleanse the liver and improve vision.

Made into a powder, it sells for at least 130 yuan ($21; £13) a gram

So apparently the Chinese are into this, but the bears sure aren't:

It has been reported that the mother and cub were being kept in tiny cages known as 'crush cages' which restricted their movement, on a farm in a remote part of North-West of China, according to website Asia One.

One witness told Reminbao.com that the mother bear broke out of its cage when it heard her cub in distress before a worker punctured its stomach to milk the bile.

The mother bear rushed to its cub and hugged it until it eventually strangled it before running head-first into a wall, killing itself.

According to Singapore Seen, the witness, who has not been named, said: 'When a worker wanted to open up her cub’s stomach, the mother bear broke open the cage and went after the cub.

'After failing to release the chained cub, she hugged the cub.

'Then, the mother bear killed the cub to save it from a life of hell.'

Bears can be farmed for their bile for around 20 years, before they stop producing it and are killed.