The case for keeping bears (and other wildlife) wild
By Ah Mun, Nay Zar Soe, Margaret Nyein Nyein Myint, Kassia Wordley, Nay Myo Shwe
Ko Aung loved bears.
In his home town of Taungoo, about 220 kilometres north of Yangon, he was well-known as “the bear man”, and had been keeping them for about eight years. By 2022, he had 16 in captivity. Ko Aung would demonstrate his affection for the bears in regular Facebook posts, showing pictures of him cuddling and sleeping together with the infant bears.
But as time passed, the cubs grew larger and larger. They became stronger; more aggressive. On the night of 7 April 2022, tragedy struck when two of Ko Aung’s beloved bears killed him whilst he was inside their cage. His dog had followed him inside, barking wildly in an attempt to protect Ko Aung. The dog was also attacked and killed.
No one dared to enter the cage to retrieve Ko Aung’s body, until ultimately members of the local armed forces had come to shoot both the bears.
Prior to this tragic event, Myanmar’s Forest Department had sent a letter to the Bago Divisional Forest Department notifying that Ko Aung’s breeding was not in line with the country’s Conservation of Biodiversity and Protected Area (CBPA) law of 2018, and instead requested that he provide a detailed plan and apply to become a legal breeder. If he did not want to do this, the Forest Department encouraged Ko Aung to release his bears back into their natural habitat, together with the help of experts. Instead, he temporarily shifted the bears to “Pioneer Mini Zoo”, located along the Yangon-Mandalay highway about 150 kilometres away. When attention on him had died down (a month or so later), he moved his two favourite bears back to his home.
Four lives were lost that day: Ko Aung, his dog, and two bears.
Sadly, this tragic and unnecessary loss of both human and animal life speaks to a wider problem in Myanmar and its neighbouring countries.
Ko Aung’s bears represented the two species found in Myanmar: the Sun bear (Helarctos malayanus) and the Asiatic black bear (Ursus thibetanus). Both species are listed as vulnerable on the IUCN’s red list of endangered species, with their numbers dropping by 30% in the last 30 years due to habitat loss as the forests they live in are cleared to make space for oil plantations.
But habitat loss alone is not the only factor responsible for this shocking decline: the illegal wildlife trade has played a significant role. Demand for bear parts, particularly the bile from their gall bladders, is driven by a belief that it holds medicinal qualities. Bear bile is often used in traditional Chinese medicine, as well as ordinary household products and cosmetics like shampoo and toothpaste. This has led to the species being farmed in countries including China and Viet Nam, however poaching of wild bears continues to take place. Most poachers consume the less valuable parts and sell the remaining parts (including gall bladders, meat and paws), whereas others trap bears for sale. This has created a, mostly illegal, marketplace of infant bears for captive breeding in Myanmar.
In addition to the demand for bears (and other species) and their parts, a growing popularity of exotic pets globally is perpetuating the illegal wildlife trade and is now widely recognised as a key factor in driving some species towards extinction. In 2021, for instance, in depth consumer research revealed that the sense of Iyashi (mental healing properties) and Kawaii (cuteness) are the most significant underlying motivations for owning exotic pets. The study called for consumer behaviour change through targeted communications and social mobilization.
This growing trend and the continued existence of a demand for illegal wildlife trade products for traditional medicine has, in recent years, proliferated in a new realm: online.
Take Myanmar as an example. A report by WWF in 2021 showed that trade here in protected wild animals and their body parts via Facebook rose by 74% in 2021, compared to the previous year. Historically this illegal trade had been carried out in face to face interactions, but amid lockdowns, travel restrictions and wet market closures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, wildlife traders shifted their business online.
Among those advertised included six species listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List, such as Sunda pangolins (Manis javanica), Chinese pangolins (Manis pentadactyla) and Asian giant tortoises (Manouria emys). Other traded species included elephants, bears (which can be seen photographed wearing small dog harnesses), gibbons, parrots, parakeets and hornbills. Besides pets, listings advertised wildlife items for use as jewelry, ingredients for traditional medicines, meat for consumption, and live animals for commercial breeding.
The scale of the online trade is of major concern in terms of its impact on biodiversity; the risk it poses to human safety in terms of attack-risk; and in terms of risks to public health from disease transfer: handling wildlife increases the potential exposure of humans to zoonotic diseases. This is one of the reasons that Myanmar’s CBPA law exists and bears are among the species listed on the country’s “completely protected” wildlife species list from 2021.
Beyond Myanmar’s borders, illegal wildlife trade is a serious international crime estimated to be the fourth largest transnational illegal trade behind drugs, people smuggling and counterfeiting. International laws and conventions, such as CITES, exist to regulate trade to ensure it both legal and sustainable WWF was among those who lobbied for an international Convention on wildlife trade since the 1960s and has played an important role since CITES entered into force in 1975, providing technical and scientific support to many priority species and issues, including bears.
Today, Asiatic black bears and sun bears are listed as Appendix I on the CITES convention, meaning that commercial international trade is strictly prohibited, with non-commercial trade (e.g. for conservation purposes) only permitted on a case-by-case basis. But treaties alone are not enough to stem the flow of species being traded illegally within and between countries: in 2018 an investigation in Thailand found more than 1,500 listings of live animals for sale on Facebook.
TRAFFIC, which monitors such activity and produced the report, stated that many of the species, despite having international protection under CITES, were not native to the country; Thailand’s CITES legislation only protects native species and so trade in these non-native species was unregulated. In another example, in March 2022, two asiatic black bear cubs were seized in West Bengal, India. They were suspected to have been smuggled from Bangladesh.
From the immediate risks to public safety, as seen in Ko Aung’s tragic story, to the threat of driving species to extinction; to the risk of instigating and perpetuating the spread of zoonotic diseases; the message is clear: we need to ramp up efforts to conserve wildlife in the wild.
References
Brenna, L. (20 February 2017). Rare sun bear caught on camera in Myanmar. LifeGate. Retrieved 20 July 2022, from https://www.lifegate.com/sun-bear-myanmar-video
Nijman, V., Oo, H., & Shwe, N. M. (January 2017). Assessing the Illegal Bear Trade in Myanmar Through Conversations With Poachers: Topology, Perceptions, and Trade Links to China. HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF WILDLIFE. 10.1080/10871209.2017.1263768
Shepherd, C. R. (2007). The trade in bear parts from Myanmar: an illustration of the ineffectiveness of enforcement of international wildlife trade regulations (January 2008 ed., Vol. 1). Springer Science+Business Media. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-007-9228-9
Williamson, D. F. (2002). In the Black: Status, Management, and Trade of the American Black Bear (Ursus Americanus) in North America. TRAFFIC North America, World Wildlife Fund.
