What are the alternatives?

According to many practitioners of Traditional Medicine there is no reason to use bear bile in treatments today because there are many cheaper alternatives.

"In addition, there has for a number of years been a synthetic form of UrsoDeoxyCholic Acid (UDCA), the active constituent in bear bile, that is cheap and considered equally effective.

 

Bears in the wild	Bears in bile farms
Have a home range of up to 1000 km2	Cannot stand up or turn around in their tiny cage which usually just measures 1 m high by 1 m wide by 2 m long
Are solitary creatures that prefer to avoid other bears until the mating season. They spend their days foraging for berries, looking for hives to eat honey, catching fish in streams, chasing other bears off their turf, mating during breeding season and training their cubs	Live with anxiety and stress, they are crammed in with many other bears, sometimes hundreds in large battery farms
Cubs live with their mothers for up to 2 years learning survival skills to cope with life in the wild.	Cubs suffer as a result of separation from their mothers. Some are forced to perform circus stunts until they are old enough to have their bile extracted. Mother bears are often killed during the capture of their cubs
Are shy and rarely aggressive unless they feel threatened or are under attack	Suffer serious physical and psychological problems such as aggression, rocking, weaving and banging against cage bars, as a result of fear, pain, stress and trauma caused by their confinement. These symptoms are commonly associated with mental illness and stress in humans
Never have to submit to invasive medical procedures	Suffer continuous pain and discomfort from a permanent wound in their abdomen where a catheter or needle is inserted to drain their bile
Can live to their fullest natural life span	40-60% of bears die from post-traumatic stress and infections as a result of catheterisation. Bears in farms also have a significantly shorter life span than bears in the wild
Have a varied diet of purely natural foods	Eat whatever bear farmers give them, often no more than table scraps
Hibernate in winter	Are unable to hibernate

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