Bear Kills Cub & Self in Chinese Bile Farm

From Asia One about a witness’s account at a bear farm: “A person…claimed that a mother bear broke out [of] its cage when it heard its cub howl in fear before a worker punctured its stomach to milk the bile…Unable to free the cub from its restraints, the mother hugged the cub and eventually strangled it. It then dropped the cub and ran head-first into a wall, killing itself.” Apparently, the bile of bears is used in medicines to treat “high fever, liver ailments, and sore eyes.” When I read this first I seriously thought I would vomit. I actually prayed that this would just be some bizarre, awful urban legend because I just didn’t want to think that humans could be so horrible and disrespectful to a living being. And still, what’s maybe even more disheartening is that people reading this will focus on the “strange Chinese and their strange medicines,” instead of realizing there are occurrences of animal cruelty that happen in similar ways all around us, but for us, it’s our food.