CONTROVERSY

The practice of extracting bear bile can be traced back to ancient times when it was thought to have curative powers for eye and liver ailments.

For more than 3,000 years, bears have been hunted in Asia for their gallbladders and the valuable bile within. Only in the 1980s, after rampant hunting greatly reduced their numbers, did countries like China and the Republic of Korea take steps to ban bear hunting.

Yet not all people oppose the bear bile industry.

"After three decades of development, China's bear breeding and bile-extracting technologies have changed profoundly. We can carry out painless operations in bile extraction now," said Liu Bofeng, a senior engineer with the Fujian Provincial Wildlife Protection Center.

"A captive black bear can produce the same amount of bile as 220 wild bears that would have been hunted and killed," Liu said.

"In addition, there is still no better substitute for bear bile in traditional Chinese medicine," he said.

However, animal welfare groups claim bile extraction is a cruel process and often causes fatal liver cancer or organ failure.

"There are no diseases that cannot be cured unless with bear bile," said Zhang Xiaohai, an executive at the Animals Asia Foundation (AAF), a non-governmental organization based in Hong Kong.

He said the efficacy of bear bile in traditional Chinese medicine was clearing heat, detoxification, clearing the liver and improving vision, and those medicinal values could be replicated with substitutes.

Zhang said the AAF had appealed to Fujian's securities regulator to block the listing.

"Bear farming is a cruel and unnecessary industry that causes both physical and psychological suffering to thousands of bears caged in farms across the country," said an AAF statement.

"To extract bile, bears are subjected to crude surgery that leaves permanent wounds in the abdominal wall and in their gall bladders.

"Both the wounds and the repeated act of bile extraction result in significant illness and suffering for the bears and resultant contaminants in the bile produced.

"Our strongly-held view is that a bear bile company's application to be listed on the Stock Exchange should not be approved," the statement said.

Zhang said the AAF had no objection to the listing of a legal company, but legality did not mean it was ethical.

"If Guizhentang's listing is finally approved, I am afraid it will send the wrong signal to the public: an inhumane industry like bear bile extraction is not banned, but encouraged through listing approval," he said.