BEIJING, Jan. 13 -- Illegal raising of bears or extracting their bile in a cruel manner will face severe punishments, a senior wildlife official said yesterday in Beijing.

    But approved bear farms will continue to exist in China for the time being, as painlessly-extracted bile is crucial for medical purposes, he said, adding that farming has vastly helped prevent poaching.

    "Before we find good alternatives for bear bile, we do not have a timetable to eliminate the practice (extracting bile from the gallbladder of farmed bears)," Wang Wei, deputy chief of the Department of Wildlife Conservation under the State Forestry Administration, told a press conference.

    It was organized by the State Council Information Office in response to foreign media's concerns about bile extraction and other animal-welfare issues.

    Bear bile, considered an indispensable ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine, is used in 123 drugs and has an efficacy not matched by any other substitute, Wang said.

    As a result, a host of patients rely on bile-containing medicines for treatment. "So we must consider both the needs of medical treatment and the protection of wild bears, and find a win-win solution," Wang said.

    Bear farms for extracting bile were set up in the mid-80s as a way to stop hunting of the endangered and protected animals in China, Wang said.

    He cited statistics as saying one bear in a farm prevents 220 being killed in the wild for their bile.

    When bile-extraction technology was introduced to China, some used surgically-implanted metal tubes, causing tremendous pain to the animals, Wang said.

    "That was a practice we are opposed to," he said, adding it happened before China's Wildlife Protection Law was enacted in 1988.

    Since then, China has been using advanced techniques, such as tubes made of bear tissue, to make the process painless.

    In addition to capping production of bile powder, illegal or substandard farms have been shut down, reducing the number of farms from at least 480 in the early 1990s to 68 fully regulated ones, where about 7,000 bears live in a suitable environment.

    "The cruel farming practice has basically been abolished," Wang said.

    But he said some organizations or individuals are still using old videos or photos or illegal farms to exaggerate the current situation.

    "This distorts the facts and misleads donors into providing money," he said.

    Other issues addressed by officials at the press conference:

    Skinning animals: Cases of animals such as dogs and cats skinned alive is sporadic in some areas, Yu Fachang, a division director of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, said.

    Shark fin: Yu said Chinese consumers are being advised to change their dietary habits and eat as few fins as possible.

    Li Yanliang, an official with the Ministry of Agriculture, said China strictly adheres to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna, and has not violated the ban on fishing of whale shark, basking shark or great white shark listed in the convention.

    Dog killing: Guo Weimin, chief of the news department of the State Council Information Office, refuted some recent foreign media reports of public dog-killing campaigns in Guangzhou of South China and some other cities.

    Since illegally-raised or abandoned dogs were attacking at least two people a day in Guangzhou posing a rabies threat local authorities last year conducted a one-month campaign in September to protect people's lives, Guo said.

    (Source: China Daily)