[Review] Liz P.Y. Chee. Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China. Duke University Press, 2021. 288 pp. The COVID-19 pandemic has secured its place as a 21st century global public health disaster. It has killed more than 6.2 million and infected close to 500 million people worldwide (Worldometer). Acknowledging Wuhan’s wildlife market as the ground zero of the pandemic and the devastation caused by SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) 17 years earlier, China’s Communist authorities made the long overdue decision on February 24, 2020 and outlawed wildlife breeding and trade for the country’s exotic food market (National People’s Congress of China). This decision was commendable. Yet, breeding of wildlife for the exotic food market was only one of the five-piece captive farming operation that generated a revenue of $78 billion a year (Ma Jianzhang et al.). What the Chinese authorities have retained is captive breeding for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the thi
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The Contentious Use of Wild Animals in Traditional Chinese Medicine 15/07/2021
Dried plant and animal parts used in traditional Chinese medicines. Photo: Vberger/Wikimedia Commons
Liz P.Y. Chee vividly remembers the first time she visited a bear farm. It was 2009, and Chee, who was working for a Singapore-based animal welfare group, flew to Laos to tour a Chinese-owned facility. The animals Chee saw “were hardly recognisable as bears,” she later wrote, “because they had rubbed most of their fur off against the bars of the cages and had grown very long toenails through disuse of their feet.”
As at countless other bear farms across China and Southeast Asia, the bears there were being held for their bile. Bear bile – which is either “milked” through a catheter permanently inserted into the animals’ gall bladders or extracted by stabbing large needles into the animals’ abdomens – is popularly prescribed across the region to treat a host of ailments, inc