by Jennifer Molidor

Our thanks to the ALDF Blog, where this post was originally published on July 2, 2013. Molidor is ALDF’s Staff Writer.

Having been an animal lover all my life, studying biological anthropology in college, and spending as much of my time in the wilderness as possible, I was a keen witness to the emotional sentience and intelligence of animals. But I discovered I had no idea the depravity and cruelty humans perpetrate upon human and nonhuman animals. It was learning about bear-bile farms that really broke me.

Bear bile farm---courtesy ALDF Blog.

A post written by Mark Bekoff, titled “Bear Kills Son and Herself on a Chinese Bear Farm” pierced my heart to its core. A mother bear trapped at a bile farm could hear her baby suffering the extraction of his bile. Unable to stand his pain, or even the idea of it, she broke through the grates, smothered him, and intentionally rammed her own head into a wall until she died.

For the past month, the Animal Book Club has been featuring Barbara J. King’s excellent new book “How Animals Grieve.” In Chapter 11 (“Animal Suicide?”), Barbara considers the horrors of bile farms. She quotes Else Poulsen’s Smiling Bears, to explain:

Each bear lies down, permanently, in a coffin-shaped, wire mesh crate for his entire life—years—able to move only one arm so that he can reach out for food… Without proper anesthetic, drugged only half unconscious, the bear is tied down by ropes, and a metal catheter, which eventually rusts, is permanently stuck through his abdomen into his gall bladder.

Unable to move, bears often lose their minds, smack their heads on the bars, and suffer long, excruciating, unimaginable pain before death, which must come far, far too slowly. Possibly 10,000 or more bears are suffering at bile farms across Asia, where bile is extracted for supposed medicinal purposes, and used in face cream and toothpaste.

Barbara’s book considers instances like these, and our interpretation of the mother bear’s actions.

Do animals kill themselves? And if they do, is grief ever the probable motivation?

She avoids the easy conclusions of anthropomorphizing animals as well as negating the emotional complexity of animals. Elephants who experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a striking example–where the horrors of poaching and war disrupt the normal patterns of elephant behavior. Jane Goodall showed us baby chimpanzees who lose their mothers can die of broken hearts. I have always been similarly struck by silverback male gorillas—vegetarian males who are the great protectors of those they love. The stories that haunt me are those in which poachers, who hunt gorillas merely to butcher the silverback’s hands and teeth, shoot silverbacks again and again–because only death will stop a male gorilla from protecting his family. He keeps charging in defense until his life is taken. Humans do terrible things to each other–is it really so difficult to understand that animals suffer as we do for love?

Are we the only animals who love? Who suffer? Who would break through walls to protect our children? Who experience confinement and pain as an unbearable torture not preferable to death? What can we learn about the psychological damage we do animals in even well-intentioned zoos, by understanding, through compassion and empathy, the real lives of love, grief, and suffering present in animals?

Moon bear enjoying his freedom---courtesy ALDF Blog.

As Barbara writes, “We bring about conditions in the wild and captivity that lead animals to feel a sort of self-grief, and at times to feel empathy for others’ suffering. Whatever caused that mother bear on the Chinese bile farm to run into a wall, in the end, it was human behavior—human greed twinned with an insensitivity to animal suffering—that murdered her.” How much are we contributing to animal suffering, if not bears on bile farms, maybe animals closer to home? From factory farms, to zoos, to theme parks, to animal testing, to rodeos, just what are we doing to animals who share the ability to love and to grieve?