Warning: Some readers may find this content upsetting
I’ve been to many travel conferences, roadshows and events in my time and listened to hundreds of presentations. Nothing comes close to the emotional roller coaster I experienced listening to Jill Robinson, writes Jon Underwood.
There was barely a dry eye in the house as Jill threw up pictures of bears in cages, cruelly tortured for the bile in their abdomen which is said to have healing powers.
It was hard to look at the screen and many often looked away (including yours truly) as one confronting image after another flashed up.
Here is just one of the stories that Jill (pictured below) told.
“My story began in 1993 when I was working with the International Fund for Animal Welfare. One day I got a call from a friend of mine, who’s a journalist, and he just said, ‘Jill, you have to go and see what I’ve just seen, a bear bile farm in southern China’.
“We joined a group of Japanese and Taiwanese tourists and we went to the farm where the bear farmer and his wife were trying to sell the bear bile to the tourists in their shop.
“We knew the bears were being kept in a basement so we snuck away from the tourists. We found some steps down to a dark basement and we came across what I still today call my own living hell.
“As I was walking around that room, I heard these strange popping vocalisations and the closer that I got to the 32 cages in that basement room, the louder and more frantic these popping vocalisations became.
“I realised in great shame for my species that this was the very first lesson that I was learning from these animals…and that was the lesson of fear, because the closer that I was going to their cage, they couldn’t tell the difference between myself and the farmers that were hurting them and extracting their bile from their abdomens.
“I was just walking around in absolute shock. As you can imagine it was a dank, dark place that I can still smell even today. These animals had been kept there for decades.
“As I was walking around, I must have backed too closely into a cage because I could feel something touching my shoulder. I turned around to see this female moon bear stretching her paw through the bars of the cage.
“I reached out my hand and together we just touched, claw to finger, and I can still feel the touch of her claw on my finger. And I knew then that everything was going to change in my life from that second on.
“I knew too that I would never see that bear again and I never did, but I gave her a name of Hong, which means ‘bear’ in Cantonese. I left that farm knowing that things were going to change.
“Since that day, because of that one bear, Animals Asia has rescued 699 bears from the bear bile farming industry in China.”
The organisation now operates world-class bear sanctuaries in Chengdu, China, and Tam Dao in Vietnam where bears are rehabilitated and cared for. Work on a second rescue facility in Vietnam has commenced in Bach Ma.
“That’s what we’re working on now. We’re building our second sanctuary. It’s a huge project. We’ve already finished phase one, but we need to finish phase two. We’ve already got some funds to start that, but by gosh, we need a lot of money.”
Animals Asia has received some high-profile celebrity support, including Olivia Newton-John, Ricky Gervais, Joaquin Phoenix and Dr Jane Goodall. They also received a boost at the conference with Travellers Choice officially adopting a rescued moon bear in their sanctuary in northern Vietnam.
Travellers Choice’s connection with Animals Asia was forged earlier this year when a group of members on an Adventure World-hosted tour of Vietnam visited the Tam Dao Sanctuary – an experience Managing Director Christian Hunter says was deeply affecting.
Animals Asia rescued Bong Bong (Vietnamese for ‘bubbles’) – a bear Travellers Choice has now adopted – from a bear bile farm in 2015 and she is now one of 192 bears thriving at the sanctuary.
“Consumers are becoming more sustainably focussed and many are choosing to travel in alignment with their own personal values and beliefs,” said Hunter, urging TC members to become more actively involved in the conversation around sustainability and look for ways they can make a positive contribution.
Animals Asia has now set themselves a goal of ending bear bile farming in Vietnam by 2026. Encouragingly, the Vietnamese Government has made bile farming illegal and is closing the last of these farms. There are just over 100 bile farms left, with around 300 bears to rescue.
“Let’s not forget, if it feels wrong, if it looks wrong with animals involved, it inevitably is going to be wrong,” added Jill.
“The very last bear that we rescue in China and in Vietnam is going to be given the name of Hong in memory of the bear that began it all and in honour of the bear that I left behind.”
No bear left behind.
