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‘Libearty’, the first international campaign to protect the bears of
the world, was launched in London this week. The charity behind the campaign,
the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), says that five of
the world’s eight species of bears are endangered, with all but the American
black bear and the polar bear in decline.

Illicit trade in parts of bears is a major threat to Asian bears. Less
than a million bears around the world now possess the gall bladders sought
by more than a billion consumers in Asia. The trade in bear gall bladders,
‘one of the most coveted medicines in the entire Oriental pharmacopoeia’,
is having an impact on bear populations that is ‘at least equal’ to that
of habitat destruction, says Christopher Servheen, a zoologist at the University
of Montana and co-chair of the World Conservation Union’s specialist group
on bears.

The trade makes bears worth far more dead than alive. ‘The sum of saleable
parts – gall bladder, paws, hide, claws and meat – can make a dead bear
worth $10 000 in Japan or much more in South Korea,’ say Servheen and Judy
Mills in a report on the trade published by Traffic USA and the World Wildlife
Fund in Washington DC.

Bears outside Asia now also have a price on their heads. ‘Increasingly,
dead bears are being discovered in North America and what was the Soviet
Union with just their gall bladders cut out,’ says Mills.

All but the Soviet brown bear and the American black bear are listed
by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. But enforcement
is hampered by the impossibility of distinguishing the gall bladder of one
bear species from another. ‘Traders questioned by the authorities can always
say the parts came from unprotected North American black bears,’ says Servheen.

At next week’s CITES meeting in Kyoto, Japan, Denmark will propose closing
this loophole by listing all bears under Appendix II of the CITES agreement.
But two major consumers of bear parts, Taiwan and South Korea, are not party
to CITES.

Servheen and Mills also hope that more sophisticated tests will be developed
to distinguish the species. ‘We want DNA work done on each bear species,
and we are now procuring the necessary samples,’ says Servheen. Genetics
laboratories at the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Ashland, Oregon,
and the University of Utah have agreed to create DNA fingerprints from the
gall bladders.

The ultimate irony, perhaps, is that there is no need to kill bears
to obtain the active ingredient favoured by traditional medicine. Japanese
chemists synthesised the compound, ursodeoxycholic acid, in the 1950s. ‘It
is cheap and pure but devotees of traditional medicine don’t want it,’ says
Mills. ‘For most people, things that are more expensive are also more precious.’

The researchers hope to chip away at consumer confidence by publicising
their studies of the amount of ursodeoxycholic acid in bear gall bladders.
‘The amount can vary from 0 to 33 per cent,’ says Mills, ‘so it seems to
be a very unreliable ingredient.’ There are also lots of fakes on the market,
she says. They hope that spreading the word might discourage consumers.
‘The only solutions are really long-term,’ she says, ‘showing what this
trade is doing to bears, and how unreliable the medicine is.’

The WSPA’s ‘Libearty’ campaign also highlights the plight of ‘dancing
bears’ in parts of Europe, and the organisation is setting up a sanctuary
in Greece for rescued bears. The WSPA has also published an expose of Japanese
‘bear parks’ where thousands of tourists come to watch underfed bears, crowded
into concrete compounds or pits, fight over food or mates. The basic problem
with the parks, say the authors of the report, Wim de Kok and Jonathan Pearce,
is the public’s desire to see animals fighting or begging for food. ‘The
more inhumane the parks are, the more popular they are. For this reason
they are inherently cruel,’ they say. The parks also slaughter surplus bears
and sell their meat, pelts and gall bladders.

The WSPA has written to the Japanese prime minister, claiming that the
parks contravene national laws. The report concludes: ‘Efforts must be made
to teach the Japanese public that the conditions in which the bears are
exhibited are unnatural and inhumane.’