Bears are kidnapped from the wild in the most brutal way to be kept in tiny, like coffin, cages for the rest of their short lives.
They then 'milked' each day for their gall bile. These animals endure the most appalling levels of cruelty and neglect. The Humans stuff a tube to the bear's gall bladder, with a tap attached. Every fortnight the bile is extracted by means of this tap.
Adult bears are dying slowly from bile extraction, whilst cubs too immature to produce adequate quantities of bile are slaughtered for their whole gall bladders and paws.

Bear bile was obtained by killing wild bears and removing their gall bladders. As wild bears became increasingly rare, bile became prohibitively expensive for most Chinese. However, in the 1980's Chinese farmers imported a technique developed in North Korea for extracting bile from captive bears without killing them - The cages and the tap.

There are two methods of bile extraction, in the first; bears undergo major abdominal surgery to remove bile from their gall bladders every three month. The bears usually suffer 4 such 'operations' before dying from infection and pain.
Another method entitles the extraction of bile with the assistance

of an ultrasound machine, catheter, and medicinal pump. The bears are drugged. Restrained with ropes and have their abdomens repeatedly jabbed with four inch needled until the gall bladder is found. It causes a dangerous leakage of bile into the body and the bears slowly die from Peritonitis. A large number of bears die soon after this 'operation' - they may be the lucky ones. The bears that survive are 'milked' twice a day for bile - an excruciating procedure that causes the bears to moan; they bang their head against the cage or even chew their paws.

Many organizations are criticizing that act; they say this "surgery" performed by farmers without any veterinary knowledge and without anesthetize. Is that really matters?
Of course, if those bears were surgically by a veterinary and were anesthetized, it was better, but this is not the issue. Better is not enough, this and all exploitation of animals need to be stopped. Better condition, anesthetize, and health care are not what animals need, they need to be left alone.

Those bears cry out, claws widely and go into spasms through this torture.
Do you really think they will compromise for health care and anesthetized, while they spend their lives in small cages? I am pretty sure they won't.

"...cages are suspended above the ground, with bears having to suffer a constant stream of bile seeping from their stomachs, where an open wound allowed workers to inserts a tube or piece of metal to 'tap' the bile."

The bears are confined for their entire lives in cages so small that they cannot even turn around. Muscles waste away, become arthritic, and they are constantly in agony from a metal catheter that is implanted through their abdomen into their gall bladder, usually carried out by a farmer. "...the bears have wounds and scars from the cage bars. Some bears have bile continuously seeping from open wounds."

In some cages, sticks are poked in, to further restrict the bear's movements. Others are in cages that are raised above the floor so that they constantly forced to lie on their stomachs, allowing the catheter to protrude through the cage bottom, thus facilitating access to the bile.
These bears are usually only allowed to stretch one paw through the cage to grab handfuls of porridge, which is often the sole constituent of their diet. They rarely given water and rely on this gruel for both sustenance and fluid intake. The animal can survive up to 25 years in this wretched state.

It is getting worse. Like every other exploitation industry, it's getting bigger. The number of bears being imprisoned for their bile has increased by 28 percent in three years. According to these officials, there are now 9,000 bears in those sick prisons. And of course it is getting more industrialized.
While the number of bears has increased, the number of farms has decreased, which means that those bears are increasingly concentrate in large-scale factory farms.
Chinese Government is encouraging the business and plans to increase the "farming" five times over, to 40,000 BEARS. This trade is worth millions of dollars a year to the Asian nation.

Those bears suffer from range of physical disabilities. Broken and worn down teeth from bar biting, deliberately declared paws, missing limbs as result of capture in the wild by leghold trap (see Fur), painful in growing nails and cracked pads, scars from the cage bars some two to three feet length, and chronic infection. Those bears suffer from mental problems as well, from their years of pain and cage confinement; they got through an unforgettable trauma.
Many bears' wounds are infected and their catheters rusty. The bears are in very high stress, and suffer for enormous pain in confinements. New mothers even eat their own babies. Some eat even their own body parts!

"...one bear was seen with massive burns across her back, her teeth and claws cut back, a pus infected abdomen and mental state which caused her to continuously convulse..."

Some organizations have worked hard to pressure the Chinese government to end this cruelty and promote alternatives, such as bile from pigs and cows - animals that are "already slaughtered for food."
What the hell they were thinking? This will only get those cows and pigs in a worse situation. They trade suffer with suffer.

Every part of the bear has been used in traditinal Chinese medicine: fat, meat, hair, genitalia, bones, but most of all his gall bladder, which is shipped all over the world. The bear is the only mammal whose gall produces significant amounts of Urodeoxycholic Acid (UCDA), the active agent in bear bile is believed to reduce fever and inflammation, protect the liver, improve eyesight, and break down gallstones. Since the advent of bear farming, the uses of bile have expanded into non-traditionally medicinal uses such as bear bile shampoo, eye-drops, wine, tea, and products such as wine and tonics.

The madness is endless, as an eyewitness describes one restaurant: "…the carcasses of whole bears floating in glass tanks filled with fermenting wine and have filmed cages in restaurants containing distressed and dying adults and cubs awaiting their fate."