Animals Asia's Vietnam Bear Rescue Centre faces eviction from its site at Tam Dao National Park following an aggressive campaign against it by park director Mr Do Dinh Tien, who we believe would profit personally by its removal. The centre is home to 104 bears rescued from the bear bile trade.
Hear the story from Jill Robinson, Founder and CEO of Animals Asia
Animals Asia has received information that just days after the eviction notice was issued, the director of Tam Dao National Park, Mr Tien, submitted a proposal to create his own wildlife park in the area of the park where our sanctuary now stands. Mr Tien was instrumental in having the land declared of national defence significance and is responsible for the eviction notice issued to Animals Asia and the bears. Read more
We need your help to convince the Vietnamese Prime Minister to honour his government's agreement with Animals Asia and stop the eviction of our Bear Rescue Centre from Tam Dao National Park.
Write a letter to the PM
Meet the residents at Animals Asia's sanctuary in Tam Dao National Park. These bears have been rescued from a life of torture on bear bile farms.
Read their stories and learn why a relocation would be devastating to their physical and mental welfare
Animals Asia's Vietnam rescue centre and over 100 bears are facing eviction from Tam Dao National Park after an aggressive campaignby the park director, Do Dinh Tien.
The devastating news came on 5 October 2012 when we were told that the Ministry of Defence – after lobbying by Mr Tien – had declared our sanctuary land an area of national defence significance and issued an eviction notice against us.
Animals Asia, which is working to end bear bile farming in China and Vietnam, is using all legal means to fight the eviction.
The eviction would see 104 bears that have been rescued from the terrible bile industry put back into cages while we relocate to another province and build a new sanctuary.
This would mean severe physical and mental distress for the bears, many of whom have shocking disabilities from years of abuse on bile farms – including blindness, chronic arthritis and missing limbs.
The eviction would also see 77 sanctuary employees out of work, most of them local Vietnamese living in the Tam Dao area where jobs are scarce. Most would be unable to move to a new sanctuary in another province, so years of training and experience would be wasted. The local economy depends on the centre as well, indirectly employing hundreds in food delivery and other services.
The eviction would also mean huge financial losses for Animals Asia. Since getting the go-ahead from the government to build the sanctuary, we have invested more than US$2 million in construction and spent a further US$2.3 million in operational costs.
We believe the park director, Do Dinh Tien, lobbied the Ministry of Defence to evict Animals Asia, so he can hand the land to Truong Giang Tam Dao Joint Stock Company, which his daughter part-owns. The company had previously indicated it wanted to build commercial property on the site, including a tourist park and hotels.
The eviction comes despite a 2005 agreement that Animals Asia signed with the Vietnam government to build a sanctuary on 12 hectares of land in Chat Dau Valley, in Tam Dao National Park, 70km north of Hanoi.
It is the only rescue centre in Vietnam dedicated solely to rescuing bears, and in 2010 it was awarded the prestigious Carole Noon Award for Sanctuary Excellence by the Global Federation of Animal Sanctuaries.
Mr Tien has been pressuring Animals Asia to relinquish the land since April 2011 and lobbying the Vietnamese authorities to force us to move out. But following significant media attention and intervention by local embassies, international organisations and European Ministers, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development intervened to issue a directive on 26 April ordering Mr Tien to allocate the land to our sanctuary in line with our original agreement with the government.
He then tried to convince the Ministry of Agriculture to order a halt to further building at the sanctuary on the grounds that our operation was polluting the local environment and damaging the health of the local community. Nothing could be further from the truth. Thanks to corporate funding, our Vietnam rescue centre has a world-class environmentally friendly wastewater treatment system that is so advanced it turns the polluted river water running through the sanctuary into water safe enough for humans to drink. An exhaustive investigation by the Vinh Phuc Environmental Department cleared our bear centre of all allegations.
Failing this, Mr Tien then turned to the Ministry of Defence, persuading them to issue an order on 9 July halting further construction at our sanctuary. On 5 October, we learned that the July order had been revised to a full eviction on the grounds that the land under question had been declared an area of national defence significance.
We believe the real motive behind Mr Tien's move was to force us out to make way for the Truong Giang Tam Dao Joint Stock Company to go ahead with its plans for a commercial development on the land. Mr Tien's daughter is one of four founding members of the company and holds 10 per cent of its shares.
The claim that the land in question is an area of national defence significance is doubtful, given that the centre has been in operation since 2005 and that the Chat Dau Valley, where it is located, has been used for tourism and other private purposes since the park opened in 1996.
Mr Tien's grab for the land was further confirmed when we learned that on 17 July, just eight days after the Ministry of Defence ordered a halt to our construction, he submitted a proposal to build his own wildlife park in the same area. In fact, it seems likely that he intends simply to take over our sanctuary and all the facilities we've built and paid for with donors' money.
We believe that if our bear centre is forced to move, the land will be reclassified as no longer of national defence significance, allowing the Truong Giang Joint Stock Company to take it over for their own private development. The company has previously applied to build hotels and a tourist development on the land.
Currently 104 bears are living at the rescue centre, being rehabilitated after years of trauma from being locked up in small cages and painfully drained of their bile. The eviction would force these bears to return to cages to be relocated, which would have a major negative impact on their mental and physical wellbeing.
These bears have suffered tremendously on bile farms. Many have chronic ailments requiring regular medication and highly specialised care. They need dedicated round-the-clock veterinary care to repair the physical damage inflicted on them, and they need carers who fully understand their needs. Bears rescued from the farms are usually terrified of humans and only learn to trust again because of the dedicated efforts of the Animals Asia team.
Around 2,400 bears – mainly moon bears, but also sun bears and brown bears – are kept on bile farms in Vietnam. The bears are milked regularly for their bile, which is used in traditional medicine and also sold as a cure-all for everything from haemorrhoids to hangovers.
On the farms they are imprisoned in stark metal cages their entire lives, which could be in excess of 25 years, though most die young because of their horrendous treatment. To extract their bile, the farmers drug the bears and use an ultrasound machine to locate the gall bladder; their abdomens are then repeatedly jabbed with 4-inch unsterilised needles until the gall bladder is pierced and the bile is pumped out of the bear’s body. The process is excruciatingly painful, causing the bears to moan in agony.
The bears’ gall bladders are severely damaged from being jabbed repeatedly every few weeks and the process leads to the dangerous leakage of bile into the body. In some cases, the result of this leakage is a slow, agonising death from peritonitis. The wounds from the unsterilised needles cause massive and painful abscesses and the bears suffer severe joint and muscle ailments from their inability to move freely. Their physical pain is compounded with the mental stress that this horrific situation causes and many bears end up psychologically damaged.
Bile taken from bears killed in the wild has been used in traditional Asian medicine for over 3,000 years and is said to be effective in treating a range of liver and eye-related diseases. The active ingredient is ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA), which is found to be more abundant in bears than in any other mammal and particularly abundant in moon bears.
In the early eighties, Korea developed farms, soon adopted by China, in an effort to commercialise the production of bile to satisfy the local demand for the tonic. The practice subsequently spread to Vietnam in the early nineties.
Many bears on Vietnam farms today are caught in the wild, either in Vietnam or neighbouring countries such as Laos, Cambodia and China. They are captured using leg-hold traps – metal contraptions that brutally trap and hold the bears in an agonising grip, all while fully conscious. Often the trap severs the bear’s limbs.
More common is the capture of cubs. Often the mother is killed and her cubs stolen and smuggled onto farms.
A driving force behind the poaching of bears is the continuing demand for bear bile from within Vietnam and also from South Korean tourists who are encouraged to visit a bear bile farm and buy some freshly extracted bear bile to take home. Due to a lack of law enforcement resources, bears continue to be hunted across the country for their meat and body parts and they are still captured for the bile farming industry, which is itself illegal under Vietnamese law.
Animals Asia has been working in Vietnam since 1999 to end bear bile farming. To achieve our goal, we focus on five key areas:
Our world-class bear rescue centre in Tam Dao, Vietnam provide the bears with comfortable dens and semi-natural enclosures where they are able to recover in safety and spend the remaining years of their lives in the company of other bears. To date, around 110 bears have been received into the care of our Vietnam sanctuary.
During their rehabilitation at the rescue centres, the bears’ behaviour and well-being are closely monitored by our bear teams through regular health checks and daily observations. This not only ensures that the bears receive the best care possible, but also enables our staff to gather vital scientific evidence on the physical and psychological effects of bile extraction. Reports and papers published by our teams have helped to raise the profile of the moon bear within the scientific community and to increase public awareness of the terrible cruelty involved in the bear bile farming industry.
Our sanctuaries also provide direct employment for 77 Vietnamese people in areas such as bear care, horticulture, food preparation and security. Several hundred local people are employed indirectly through services and construction.
Our Healing without Harm campaign targets practitioners of traditional medicine, independent pharmacists and pharmacy chains. We also work with pathologists and liver specialists to gather evidence on the implications for human health of consuming contaminated bile from diseased farm bears.
We regularly attend conferences to engage with doctors and encourage them to sign a pledge not to prescribe bear bile, and to advocate the alternatives. We also conduct surveys among doctors to determine attitudes to bear bile and find out how many have prescribed it in the past.
As much demand for bear bile comes from South Korea, we work with travel agencies and animal welfare groups to raise awareness among tourists that taking bear bile bought in Vietnam back to South Korea is illegal. We also work with law enforcement authorities at key tourist sites to inform visitors that it is illegal to pay for bile to be extracted at a bear farm.
We work with government authorities and conservation groups to track the sale of bile and bear parts within China and Vietnam and monitor the illegal export of these products.
Our field officers visit traditional medicine shops, pharmacies and hospitals in both countries, gathering vital information on the distribution of bear products and the fluctuations in demand and price. We work with local and national authorities to run awareness-raising campaigns on the existing laws regarding buying and exporting bear bile, and to encourage and assist with the enforcement of these laws.
We engage with the media in Vietnam, as well as internationally, to ensure wide coverage of the cruelty of the bear bile industry – and committed celebrities help us to bring this message to the public. The internet and social media have become vital means of reaching the public, enabling us to galvanise support.
Our senior staff lobby political, business, legal and cultural leaders in Hanoi, gathering support for the bears’ cause. We also engage support from celebrities, scientific experts and other influential individuals.
We stay aware of the changing dynamics of Vietnam’s political and policy-making environments. This is essential to ensure we pursue the best avenues for building a consensus towards an end to bear bile farming. Our work involves much behind-the-scenes activity to build relationships and establish dialogues with a variety of official departments, groups and individuals who can assist in bringing bear bile farming to an end.
We also work with local and national authorities to run awareness-raising campaigns on the existing laws on buying and exporting bear bile, and to encourage and assist with enforcement of these laws.
Animals Asia is devoted to ending the barbaric practice of bear bile farming and improving the welfare of animals in China and Vietnam. We promote compassion and respect for all animals and work to bring about long-term change.
The Animals Asia team has been rescuing bears since 1994 and is the only organisation with a bear sanctuary in China. Our founder and CEO, Jill Robinson MBE, Dr.med.vet. h.c., is widely recognised as the world’s leading expert on the cruel bear bile industry, having campaigned against it since 1993.
Our work focuses on three major programmes: End Bear Bile Farming, Cat and Dog Welfare and Zoos and Safari Parks.
Animals Asia works to end the barbaric bear bile trade, which sees over 10,000 bears – mainly moon bears but also sun bears and brown bears – kept on bile farms in China, and around 2,400 in Vietnam.
Animals Asia works to end the trade in dogs and cats for food in China, and lobbies to improve the welfare of companion animals and promote humane population management.
Animals Asia campaigns for an end to abusive animal practices in zoos and safari parks in China, and works closely with governing authorities to improve animal management and increase awareness of the welfare needs of captive animals.
Animals Asia is a registered charity with bear sanctuaries in China and Vietnam, headquarters in Hong Kong, and offices in Australia, China, Germany, Italy, the UK, US and Vietnam. We have over 300 staff worldwide, with around 250 based in China and Vietnam, almost 30 in our Hong Kong headquarters and over 20 across our other offices.
