After Quang Ninh police found ‘undocumented’ bears and a quantity of bear bile at a bear farm near Ha Long City, seven people were detained for questioning on October 1.

Our infiltration of the bear farms comes to nothing

Nguyen Huu Tuoc, director of Quang Ninh Province Police, told Tuoi Tre newspaper that provincial and local Ha Long police staked out a Dai Yen Commune bear farm for several days before raiding the facility.

The bear farm is just off the main road, several kilometers east of the main Ha Long Bay tourism complex.

The farm owners could not produce valid documentation for 20 of the 81 bears found in captivity there. Police seized more than 200 bottles of gall bile as well as equipment used to tap the bears’ gall bladders.

Five workers at the farm and two South Koreans visiting at the time of the raid were brought to the local police station for questioning. It is not clear whether they have been charged with a crime.

Bear farms in Quang Ninh Province often extract bile directly from the bears’ gall bladders in front of tourists, and then sell them the fluid via Korean middlemen. Practitioners of Chinese medicine say bear-bile is a natural remedy for many ailments including fever and gall stones.

Following media exposes of the bear bile trade, operators of the ‘farms’ are cautious about who visits and only allow Chinese and South Korean tourists, according to local media reports.

Until now, though newspapers have reported on the illegal bile trade for years, local officials said they have yet to find concrete evidence of commercial transactions.

After a similar bust by Forest Protection police two years ago, bear farm owners were given only minor administrative penalties and allowed to legalize the status of unregistered bears. This is the first time the regular police have taken an initiative.

VietNamNet /Tuoi Tre