Share offer fuels animal cruelty claims

Company throws open the gates of its bear park to take sting out of attacks

Allegations of animal cruelty have been leveled against a drugs company that makes medicine from bear bile, after it made an application for an initial public offering.

Guizhentang Pharmaceutical, in Fujian province, extracts the bile from captive bears to make traditional Chinese medicine. Founded in 2000, it is among 220 whose applications await approval by the Growth Enterprise Board, the China Securities Regulatory Commission said.

The company's move, reportedly aimed at financing expansion of its bear farm and production, drew a public outcry similar to one last year when it failed in an attempt to get public listing.

In a survey of fund managers by the Securities Times of Shenzhen, the findings of which were published on Feb 28, more than half of the respondents said they would not bid for the company's stocks in its roadshow.

Forty-three fund managers took part in the survey, conducted nationwide.

Among the reasons advanced for steering clear of the shares was that the process of extracting bile from living bears is cruel and immoral.

"The opposition to the company's fundraising brings the entire traditional Chinese medicine industry into question," said Qiu Shuhua, founder of Guizhentang, in an interview with China Central Television.

"If I had foreseen the controversy over inflicting pain I would never have even thought about the share issue," she said, tears in her eyes.

Qiu said the method used to extract bile is legal and replaced one in which bears were killed.

The company's website says it can collect bile in several seconds "without causing the bears pain".

Eager to bolster its case, on Feb 22 Guizhentang opened the door of its bear farm, where more than 600 bears are kept, to journalists.

More than 150 reporters from various media outlets visited the farm, on the outskirts of Hui'an county in Fujian province.

A China Daily reporter saw about 60 bears in a zoo-like outdoor park. A staff member said they were all less than 3 years old.

After they turn 3, the company said, they would undergo an operation in which a tube would be inserted into their gall bladder. Bile would be drained in what the company said would be a painless process.

Reporters were allowed to visit one of the nine houses in which adult bears are kept for captive breeding, and witnessed how workers extract bile from them.

The bear first entered an iron cage little bigger than itself to eat food served at one end. A worker quickly sterilized a wound on the bear's belly with an alcohol-dipped cotton ball and inserted a slim 11-centimeter drainage tube.

As the bear bile flowed through the iron tube into a container, the bear continued to eat.

Although some reporters said the bears showed no apparent pain, there were queries about whether the bears should be anesthetized, and whether the media event was a sanitized version of what normally occurs.

Animals Asia Foundation, a non-government charitable foundation in Hong Kong, said the drips used were not safe, and that they "bring no less trauma to bears physically and psychologically".

Bear bile has been used in traditional medicine in China and elsewhere in Asia, vaunted among other things for cleansing the liver and improving vision.

By 2006 China had 68 registered bear farms where about 7,000 black bears were kept for bile extraction, the State Forestry Administration says.

The number of farms increased to 98 last year, according to a foundation survey, said to be located in 11 provinces, including Jilin and Heilongjiang in the northeast and, Sichuan and Yunnan in the southwest.

In its drive to end bear farming in China, the foundation has rescued 277 black bears from farms in the past 10 years. By January, 111 of the rescued bears had died, the foundation said, 38 percent of them of liver cancer.

The foundation said there are dangers to humans in using bear bile.

"Consuming bear bile poses a significant risk to human health, because the bile was extracted from a long-time wound, where the tissue is sensitive and has many diseases," said Zhang Xiaohai, external affairs director of the foundation.

"If the IPO is successful it would be a huge hit to the animal protection campaign, and would be irresponsible for future shareholders of the company, because the industry has no future."

On Feb 14 more than 70 public figures, including lawyers, TV hosts, actors and animal rights advocates, signed a petition opposing the company's application for public listing.

Medical experts have been looking at substitutes for bear bile.

"Years of research showed that we can produce drugs with substitutes that have the same properties as the drugs with bear bile," said Jiang Qi, former vice-president of Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, where a team started researching artificial bear bile in 1983.

After hundreds of clinical trials in four hospitals in Shanghai and Shenyang, Liaoning province, authorities granted a patent in 2006 for the composition and method of making artificial bear bile.

But products using it have yet to be nationally approved for mass production.

It is estimated that bear bile is used in 123 traditional Chinese medicines, and 183 pharmaceutical companies use bear bile powder in medicines.

Pei Su, executive director of ACTAsia for Animals, a registered charity in Britain, told China Daily that the marketing of traditional Chinese medicine overseas may be hurt if the authorities fail to stop cruelty to animals in making medicines.

(China Daily 03/02/2012 page3)