by Ted Williams
In 2022 Senator John Kennedy introduced the Bear Poaching Elimination Act to protect American bears from poachers supplying Asian markets with gallbladders (for mostly quack elixirs) and paws (for soup).
If poaching depletes Louisiana’s black bears, they could be re-listed under the Endangered Species Act with adverse impacts to industries employing Louisianians.
But despite widespread bipartisan support, Kennedy’s valiant effort was squashed by groups, led by the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies and the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation, that claim to defend hunters but fail to explain why they imagine hunters want their game depleted by poachers. Kennedy’s bill followed similar legislation repeatedly introduced during the last quarter century and repeatedly squashed by the same outfits.
“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. “But many are super conservative, so any restriction on use or sale of wildlife parts is viewed as an attack.”
In 1999 Kennedy’s Republican colleague Senator Mitch McConnell, warned that bear poaching “is destined to become worse.” He was right. “Poaching rings targeting the extraction of bear gallbladders have been uncovered in U.S. national parks,” writes Wayne Pacelle, President and founder of Animal Wellness Action and Center for a Humane Economy.
The booming U.S. black market encourages exploitation of already imperiled Asiatic black bears, sun bears and sloth bears. As these Asian species dwindle, pressure on North American bears mounts.
A patchwork of varying state laws enables poaching. The Lacey Act outlaws interstate transport of illegally taken wildlife, but enforcement is difficult. 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 the legal bear-parts trade on a state-by-state basis … has failed, and has actually facilitated the illegal trade,” reports Michigan University’s Animal and Legal and Historical Center.
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 from attorney and former USFWS special agent Ed Newcomer: “Usually located near these bear farms are restaurants specializing in bear paw soup. In some Asian cultures, particularly Vietnam and Korea, bear paw soup is considered a delicacy and is most valued when extremely fresh. 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. It doesn’t need paws because it can’t turn around in its cramped cage.”
A few bears (maybe .02 percent) 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.”
Mounting outrage about U.S. bear poaching and the abuse it encourages and sustains in Asia provides allies for Senator Kennedy.
Vermont, Oklahoma, Kentucky and West Virginia have recently joined 33 other states in outlawing trade in bear parts. The climate is right to finally replace the patchwork of state laws with a national bill to ban all imports and exports of bear parts.
Senator Kennedy, we need your leadership again.
Ted Williams is a lifelong hunter, freelance journalist and former information officer for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.