Radio Australia Today Editorial

Jill Robinson: one woman for Moon Bears

25 February 2009

Jill Robinson is one of those special people who saw an injustice and did something about it.

She had heard about the practice of bear farming in China. This is where bears are farmed for their bile in a way that works like this. The wild moon bears are captured, put in tiny cages, have catheters inserted, unhygenically, into their abdomens, and their bile is extracted and sold.

Practitioners of traditional medicine in China use bear bile for a whole lot of stuff, and it works apparently.

But what they extract from the bears is not pure bear bile. It is infected, with traces of pus and cancer cells.

And to make it more tragic, the bile has been synthetically reproduced elsewhere, and the synthetic version is cheaper to produce and is just as efficacious.

So, Jill asks, why are people still doing this cruel practice to the Moon bears.

The answer is simple economics. People do it because they can make a living from it. Traditional practitioners are loathe to trust anything to come out of a laboratory. They want the real thing, no matter how contaminated it is. After all, they’re not the ones actually taking the stuff. People, often poverty-stricken and forgotten by the Chinese government, catch the bears simply to survive. That’s why Jill’s Animals Asia buys all the catchers’ equipment, and pays enough money for the catcher to be able to set up some other business. 

Jill has a motto of working with the Chinese authorities, not demonising them, a positive way that has reaped some success. Some members of the local authorities in China have come on side and have contributed money or land for her sanctuaries.

It doesn’t mean that the problem is being solved. Jill is in Australia right now with a petition, a huge petition. It has 110,000 names on it, names collected from visitors to zoos and aquaria across Australasia. In keeping with the positive theme of Jill’s diplomacy, the petition congratulates the Chinese government for its action so far in helping the Moon bears, and encourages them to go further.

Jill has been fighting the fight for ten years, and has seen many of the bears she loves die from tumours, malnutrition and abuse. They were simply too far gone to be saved. I have met Jill, and I can tell you that she is not a woman drained by it all. She knows that every bear she gets out of those cages is up against it to survive, but even if their lives are not long, they live out the last part of their time on earth in something like a bear’s paradise, looked after with plenty of food, friends and love.

She’s an inspiration to anyone who thinks there is nothing that one person can do. If Jill had decided that it would have been too hard and went to Acapulco for her holiday ten years ago instead of China, then many more bears would be suffering right now, and the world would be worse for it.

We’ll talk with Jill later today. Hope you can have a listen.

                                 – Phil