HAPPENING NOW: An Animals Asia rescue team is in Vietnam’s Gia Lai province for an emergency rescue of bears caged for over a decade.

Follow the rescue live via our #PleikuBearRescue timeline

The rescue mission is the culmination of five years of pressure and negotiations – with the bears being rescued from three farms.

The team plan to spend today (Friday 11 November) freeing the bears from their cages and assessing their condition.

On Saturday 12, the team will begin the 1,200km journey to Animals Asia’s Vietnam Bear Rescue Centre in Vinh Phuc province, an hour from the capital Hanoi.

The team is expected to arrive at the sanctuary on Monday 14.

Animals Asia has been aware of these bears since 2011 when they were alerted to their plight by local Forest Protection Department officials. A promise was made by Animals Asia to take the bears whenever they could be released and years of pressure has lead to this moment.

Animals Asia’s Vietnam Director Tuan Bendixsen said:

“Rescuing bears from bile farms carries inherent risks and no two rescues are ever exactly the same. Each animal has suffered terribly and they react to that cruelty individually. The conditions on the farms too are never uniform. We receive what information we can from Forestry officials in advance, but we never truly know what we’re dealing with until we arrive on the scene.”

Animals Asia founder and CEO, Jill Robinson MBE said:

“The rescue team has a monumental amount of experience and will be ready for whatever faces them on the farms. The vet team will be ready to offer the bears the professional medical care they require, while the bear workers will work out the safest solution to free the bears from cages that were never designed to open.”

Bile farming has been illegal in Vietnam since 2007 and officially since then farms have not extracted bile. But with limited resources and with bile extraction difficult to prove, the practice continues, albeit on a gradually reducing scale.

Bile is used in traditional medicine with bears kept in tiny cages and facing regular, painful bile extractions.

Around 1,200 moon and sun bears are believed to be held on bile farms around Vietnam while more than 10,000 are thought to be suffering the same fate in China where the practice is still legal.

To date Animals Asia has rescued nearly 600 bears in Vietnam and China, mostly from the bear bile industry. Animals Asia continues to care for almost 400 bears at its sanctuaries in China and Vietnam.

READ MORE:

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Ending bear bile farming in Vietnam – village by village

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