Moon Bear Rising artist Eric Bueschel with his daughter Anastasia. The original is being sent to U.K. recording artist Maria Daines after prints are made to benefit Animals Asia to give her a HUGE thank you for writing the song Andrew, which has drawn massive attention to the plight of the Moon Bears!



Eric Buechel (1958 -)

Born in Passaic, New Jersey, Eric Buechel began his studies with his father, a talented artist from Koblez, Germany. He attended DuCret School of Art in Plainfield, NJ after winning a scholarship from the NJ Art Directors Club in 1977. During this time Buechel would make many trips into Manhattan's museums. While studying in DuCret Buechel meet Dr. Furman J. Finck, a portrait painter for several official presidential portrait painting. Under Finck's tutelage and visits to Finck's Manhattan studio Buechel learned a technique using wolf carbon pencil to draw incredibly detail portraits rivaling the detail of the photographic realism of Chuck Close.

The artist that most influenced Buechel's early work was the Renaissance artist Albrecht DÃrer. The influence of this great master would leave a mark on his work for years to come. Emphasizing strong line and a compact arrangement in his composition.

Later Buechel worked in New Jersey and Manhattan as an illustrator and art director. He later opens his advertising agency which specialized in medical and aerospace illustrations. In 1990 Buechel formed a computer-recycling computer in a warehouse in Belleville, New Jersey. While discovering ways to reclaim components and raw materials from discarded electronics Buechel pioneered a recycling process of recycling cathode ray tubes. In 1994 Senator Lautenburg nominated Buechel for the NJ Science and Technology Award for developing these recycling processes.

In 2001 Eric Buechel's Company, Advanced Recovery Inc., was chosen to help reclaim and salvage computers at the Trade Center Attack. The clean up would take a little over a year and completed on time and under budget. And in 2003 the company was sold and Buechel began painting again after a 12-year absence and moved to Crossville, Tennessee.

Today Buechel's work can be found in private collections throughout the USA and Japan. His paintings sell for as high as $30,000.00 and his popular charcoal drawing termed Gothic Expressionism, sell in the range of $5,000.00 each.

Eric Buechel (1958 -)

Born in Passaic, New Jersey, Eric Buechel began his studies with his father, a talented artist from Koblez, Germany. He attended DuCret School of Art in Plainfield, NJ after winning a scholarship from the NJ Art Directors Club in 1977. During this time Buechel would make many trips into Manhattan's museums. While studying in DuCret Buechel meet Dr. Furman J. Finck, a portrait painter for several official presidential portrait painting. Under Finck's tutelage and visits to Finck’s Manhattan studio Buechel learned a technique using wolf carbon pencil to draw incredibly detail portraits rivaling the detail of the photographic realism of Chuck Close.

The artist that most influenced Buechel's early work was the Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. The influence of this great master would leave a mark on his work for years to come. Emphasizing strong line and a compact arrangement in his composition.

Later Buechel worked in New Jersey and Manhattan as an illustrator and art director. He later opens his our advertising agency which specialized in medical and aerospace illustrations. In 1990 Buechel formed a computer-recycling computer in a warehouse in Belleville, New Jersey. While discovering ways to reclaim components and raw materials from discarded electronics Buechel pioneered a recycling process of recycling cathode ray tubes. In 1994 Senator Lautenburg nominated Buechel for the NJ Science and Technology Award for developing these recycling processes.

In 2001 Eric Buechel's Company, Advanced Recovery Inc., was chosen to help reclaim and salvage computers at the Trade Center Attack. The clean up would take a little over a year and completed on time and under budget. And in 2003 the company was sold and Buechel began painting again after a 12-year absence and moved to Crossville, Tennessee.

Today Buechel's work can be found in private collections throughout the USA and Japan. His paintings sell for as high as $30,000.00 and his popular charcoal drawing termed Gothic Expressionism, sell in the range of $5,000.00 each.Eric Buechel (1958 -)

Born in Passaic, New Jersey, Eric Buechel began his studies with his father, a talented artist from Koblez, Germany. He attended DuCret School of Art in Plainfield, NJ after winning a scholarship from the NJ Art Directors Club in 1977. During this time Buechel would make many trips into Manhattan's museums. While studying in DuCret Buechel meet Dr. Furman J. Finck, a portrait painter for several official presidential portrait painting. Under Finck's tutelage and visits to Finck's Manhattan studio Buechel learned a technique using wolf carbon pencil to draw incredibly detail portraits rivaling the detail of the photographic realism of Chuck Close.

The artist that most influenced Buechel's early work was the Renaissance artist Albrecht DÃrer. The influence of this great master would leave a mark on his work for years to come. Emphasizing strong line and a compact arrangement in his composition.

Later Buechel worked in New Jersey and Manhattan as an illustrator and art director. He later opens his advertising agency which specialized in medical and aerospace illustrations. In 1990 Buechel formed a computer-recycling computer in a warehouse in Belleville, New Jersey. While discovering ways to reclaim components and raw materials from discarded electronics Buechel pioneered a recycling process of recycling cathode ray tubes. In 1994 Senator Lautenburg nominated Buechel for the NJ Science and Technology Award for developing these recycling processes.

In 2001 Eric Buechel's Company, Advanced Recovery Inc., was chosen to help reclaim and salvage computers at the Trade Center Attack. The clean up would take a little over a year and completed on time and under budget. And in 2003 the company was sold and Buechel began painting again after a 12-year absence and moved to Crossville, Tennessee.

Today Buechel's work can be found in private collections throughout the USA and Japan. His paintings sell for as high as $30,000.00 and his popular charcoal drawing termed Gothic Expressionism, sell in the range of $5,000.00 each.

In no particular order and ANYTHING is subject to change, (dont freak if we move you to one of the next CD's but this one is tight! AND we have 2 more CD's on the way so dont sweat it if you are not listed here and you submitted!!!!!!!! If we have room we have one more in mind maybe 2! Or you may make CD 2 or 3!

Plight of the Moon Bear
Jill Robinson, Founder, Animals Asia
Living on Earth Interview
June 2004

STEVE: It's Living on Earth. I'm Steve Curwood. In the forests and mountains of East Asia, the Asiatic Black Bear is a much admired and sought-after species. Human fascination with these creatures date back centuries, in ancient engravings and sculptures.

JILL: Hello, it's a pleasure to be here.

STEVE: So, the China Bear Rescue Project has been a labor of love for you for, what, more than five years?

JILL: Oh goodness, since 1993 actually, yeah.

STEVE: And you've done quite a bit, but for those of us who don't know your work, who are just catching up to what you're trying to do, perhaps you could tell us about the first time you first heard of this bear farming in China.

JILL: Right, I'll never forget it, actually. In fact, I'd heard a little about bear farming almost from when I'd arrived in Hong Kong from about 1985. But I think I never really believed in my mind that something so barbaric could be happening, and it was always something on the back burner while I was working on other issues in Asia, investigating dog and cat markets and wild animal trades, etc. etc.

STEVE: Like what? What did it sound like?

JILL: Just popping, pop, pop, pop. And each time I got closer towards the cage, it became louder and more frantic. And as the image produced itself in front of my eyes, I saw these Asiatic black bears in cages so small they could hardly move. And this popping vocalization, it's a nervous vocalization when a bear is either deeply unhappy or deeply stressed. And it's usually anticipating something bad that is going to happen to the animal, and that is, as I say, the first sound and first bit of information that I ever got from one of these bears was that my presence was causing an enormous fear.

STEVE: The bear was saying, "Help."

JILL: Well, the bear was really, I think, believing that I was there to take its bile. Because any presence of a human being that ever happened to it in its years on a bear farm, whenever a human was there, something very unpleasant was about to happen.

STEVE: Now, someone listening to us talking about bear farming might think that we're talking about breeding bears. This has nothing to do with that.

JILL: It's nothing at all with breeding bears. It's a horribly barbaric and very cruel practice. China's actually been farming bears since the early 1980s. In fact, they began it as what they termed as a responsible initiative to save wild bears from being taken for their whole gall bladders, which were then being used in the traditional Chinese medicine industry. And they took bears and placed them in tiny wire cages, again, so small they could hardly move, and began implanting catheters deep inside their gall bladders, from which they could then milk bile on a daily basis. And they figured that that was a humane way of treating a wild species by simply keeping it alive and being able to use its body fluids.

STEVE: So, I want to go back with you for a moment to this bear farm where you saw the bears in cages. The cages were about the size of the bear, and what else did you see?

JILL: Well, it's what we're seeing today. I mean, we've started the rescue and we're getting dozens and dozens of bears coming into our rescue center. But I actually won't forget that first time that I ever saw my first bear on a bear farm. They'd grown into the cage bars, so that meant that they had scars running three to four feet in length across their bodies. They had teeth that had been deliberately cut back by the farmer to the gums, so it was exposing the pulp. They had paws that had been deliberately de-clawed, and I don't mean just trimming the claws, I mean cutting the end digits off of the fingertips of their paws so that those claws will never grow back again. And this is to take away their defenses and make them easier to milk. They had urine and fecal burns across their bodies where they couldn't obviously groom properly. They had head wounds from where they'd consistently banged their heads against the bars of the cage because they had literally gone cage crazy. They were completely frustrated, and stereotypic bears, stereotypic animals. And last, and definitely not least, they had gaping infected holes in the middle of their abdomens.

STEVE: So you saw these bears. Then, what did you do next?

JILL: Well, just at one point, as I was walking around the farm, I must have stepped back in horror, and I felt something touch my shoulder, and it was a female bear, with her paws stretched through the bars of the cage. And I did something very stupid, in retrospect. I work with bears, I've been working with them now for 10 years and I wouldn't do something so silly today. But her paw was there, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to touch it and to take her paw. And rather than ripping my arm from my shoulder as she had every right to do, she didn't. She just rhythmically squeezed my fingers. And if ever any of us get a message in life, that was a pretty significant one for me. We never saved her, and it's a source of great sadness to me. But she lives on, she lives on in all the other bears we save on the farms, and as I say, she's become our unknown ambassador. And we gave her the name of Hong, and her memory will live on.

STEVE: Hong means…?

JILL: Hong means bear in Cantonese.

STEVE: Let's step back a little bit. I guess the use of bear bile, that is, the liver bile from a bear, goes back into history of Chinese medicine what, thousands of years?

JILL: It does, it goes back approximately 3,000 years. And bear bile is termed as a cold medicine used to treat heat-related illnesses such as high fevers and high temperatures, red and sore eyes and chronic liver complaints. I should also say, actually, that there has been such a great belief in Chinese pharmacopeia about the use of bear bile that it actually behooved myself to be finding out more information. And what I did find with very great shock, is that the essential acid in bear bile, UDCA, or ursodeoxycholic acid, it works. Please, let's not make any mistake about this, bear bile does work.

STEVE: To fix colds?

JILL: Actually, what it is being, could be used to great effect is, it actually rejuvenates brain cells that would otherwise die. So I think people are very excited that this UDCA could be used for Huntington's, Parkinson's, and ostensibly for Alzheimer's disease. But please let me emphasize that this acid, this UDCA, could very easily and very cheaply be synthesized in a lab without using bears. You do not need a bear to be synthesizing this UDCA.

STEVE: So, what products, medicinal or otherwise, contain bear bile?

JILL: You'll find a lot across the board. Basically, for liver complaints, chronic liver complaints, for healing eyes, if you've got red or sore eyes. Funny enough, in hemorrhoid preparations. Actually, almost beyond belief, you can find hangover cures, bear bile sodas, teas and wines and tonics. This is obviously a market where it's beginning to die down in many aspects but there is a sort of overstock of bear bile, if you will, and a lot of the farmers are using it in non-essential medicines. They're just trying to flog it any way they can, basically.

STEVE: Talk to me about the economics of this, Jill. You say that people started farming bears, that is, milking their bile instead of killing them. What kind of money do people make if they go into this business?

JILL: Well, in the early '80s it was a boom industry. Thousands and thousands of dollars could be made from this by the bear farmers every month. It was more money than they'd ever dreamed of. Even today, whole gall bladders can be worth anything up to ten thousand U.S. dollars on the black market. It's a big industry. But in China itself, it seems to be that there's a lessening now of demand. It seems that farmers have now passed that boom period. And again, Chinese people are very pragmatic. There are a lot of herbs out there on the market that do the job just as well.

STEVE: How big has this business been?

JILL: Huge, it's been huge. Massive.

STEVE: What's huge?

JILL: When I first exposed this industry in the early 1990s, there were some 10,000 bears kept on 500 farms across the country. Today it's less but it's still significant, and there's probably about 7,000 bears kept on about 200 bear farms in the country.

STEVE: Hmmm, now all this bile from the bears, used in China?

JILL: (laughs) Officially, it has to be used only in China but, of course, you go into any other Asian country, or you go into traditional medicine consumers or Asian communities outside of China in the international community, of course you're going to find illegal bear bile abundantly.

STEVE: There are a lot of Chinese medicine practitioners in the San Francisco area. If I were to go walking in that neighborhood, would I be able to find some bear bile?

JILL: I'm sure in some of them you would be able to. I have to say a lot of other Chinese medicine doctors, practitioners and sellers are becoming, or are very ethical, and are refusing to sell endangered species and products that they shouldn't being selling. So we're finding this more and more, that we're actually getting a lot more support now within the traditional medicine community themselves, which is very, very reassuring to us.

STEVE: Talk to me about these synthetic substitutes for bear bile. Where do you find them, and how effective are they?

JILL: Well, again, they can be packaged. You just find them over the counter now. Synthetic UDCA. There are a variety of different names. There's one that springs to mind called Actigall. It can be produced for pennies, for nothing. And what I have to say, while having seen those bears on our surgery table whose bile has been used in this industry, I would say that the synthetic version is a lot, lot cleaner. I couldn't begin to tell you what we are seeing when those bears are laid out, and the mess that we are seeing in their bodies, and what on earth is their bile actually doing to the end consumer. Basically it's full of pus, what we're seeing.

STEVE: I have to wonder if it's even possible to consider having these bears go back into the wild. It can't happen, they have to stay in rehabilitation for the rest of their days?

JILL: They do, I'm afraid, yeah. But mainly that is because, although we can get them physically and mentally fit again, the problem is that they've become too habituated to the human species. They rely on people for food, they always have at the farms. So, if you let them loose, I know the problem you're getting with American black bears, you know, a fed bear is a dead bear. You're going to get these bears going into urban areas and, you know, obviously after food. So we have to keep them for life, and this is one expensive program, let me tell you.

STEVE: What's involved with rehabilitating them?

JILL: Well, they come in, we settle them down, we prioritize them for surgery. They are facing weeks and weeks of medical and veterinary care. They have to be nourished and given enough nutrition, and re-hydrated. In fact, they're very de-hydrated, too. They're probably half their body weight. They have severe muscle atrophy, as well, where obviously they've never had any physical exercise in the cage. So they have to be built up and prepared for major abdominal surgery, which can last anything from three to seven hours to repair the damage. And, again, what we find when we go into those bears' bodies, is beyond belief. You find old swabs that have been left behind from the previous surgery, you find massive abscesses, you find adhesions where various organs have adhesed to each other, the gallbladder and liver, for example. A catalog of abuse, a catalog of injuries needs to be sorted out before they're anywhere near being released into a rehab area.

STEVE: And bears love honey, of course.

JILL: And bears get honey. Only the other week I was out there in the honey hives saucing wild honey for these bears so that we can make their medicines taste better, so we can enrich the rehab area where they are, lay trails of honey. Give them, again, these bears need to have their busy, intelligent minds kept busy.

STEVE: Jill, what's your next rescue operation going to be?

JILL: This summer, we have another 90-plus bears coming into our rescue center from a very big farm that is closing down. In fact, it's one of the first farms that we saw in 1999, and that farmer has phoned us of his own bet, and asked us if we would help him close his farm because in his own words, bear farming is going nowhere. That is music to our ears.

STEVE: Jill Robinson is the founder and CEO of Animals Asia Foundation. Jill, thanks so much for taking this time with me today.

JILL: It's been a pleasure, Steve, thank you very much.

..> ..>

..> ..> The next 18 months for Animals Asia and the bears is the most crucial time of all. In China we are working against the clock before August 2008 to bring home the message that the forthcoming "Green" and environmentally friendly Olympic Games in Beijing means nothing to 7000 endangered Moon Bears currently rotting away on the farms. 219 bears have thanked their lucky stars that they have been rescued from a living hell. Still thousands remain and our work must drive home the message that people in China and across the world are united in calling for bear farming to end, knowing too that the Chinese Government will need help to reach that goal. Animal Planet one hour special begins screening We are thrilled to say that "Moon Bears – Journey to Freedom", directed by dear friend of Animals Asia, Libby Halliday, is premiering in Australia, New Zealand and Japan in mid February; Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and the rest of Asia on 11'th March and UK and Europe as of June 2007. Do tune in! It gives a stunning insight into the trials and tribulations of working in China whilst bringing the beauty and magic of our wonderful rescued bears ever closer. We never forget that we could not be making this journey without the help of each and everyone of you! Bear number 219 has just arrived "home" Just last Thursday, 15th February, Animals Asia became the proud parents of a brand new bear. His background originated from being found by local Tibetan people in the Spring of 2004 when he was a scrap of a thing weighing only 10kgs in weight, and his mother found dead. "Xiao Hei" (Little Black) was then raised by the Sichuan Army who began to walk him around on a lead in an attempt to train him like a dog. Unfortunately for them, the cub had other ideas and the army personnel soon realised that the little scrap they took over was now developing into a mature adult male - with attitude. Now relegated to a largish cage, and fed well, the kind army personnel realised that the bear could be happier and better cared for if he came to our sanctuary in Chengdu. Although he is not a farmed bear, there is always the possibility that he could have ended up on a bear farm. Regardless of what could have been, there is general agreement in the team that he is without a doubt one of the most handsome bears we have ever seen. We are now contacting potential sponsors on the waiting list for our new three year old to be given his first proper name. Professor Dick White operates on Quantock Quantock originally arrived at the Sanctuary in November 2003 with a hernia and a mass of abscesses in his abdomen as a result of the appalling free drip method of bile extraction. Such was the damage, that Quantock's wound continued to open every now and then, which prevented this large and mischievous bear from doing the one thing he loved best of all - playing with his friends. Just this week Quantock once again lay on the surgery table, where he had a "wound under tension" closed in a number of layers by Professor Dick White, renowned Specialist in Small Animal Surgery and Veterinary Oncology, from the UK. Now, it's all a case of fingers crossed over the next 6 weeks which is the crucial time for the healing process to complete. A big lad, Quantock will also need to lose some weight as, according to AAF Vet Dr. Cath Williams who assisted Professor White, this will also significantly improve the chances of lasting results. Thank you Professor Dick White – it was such a pleasure to have you, Christine and Jenny on site! Tsao Zhi Rong - Shanghai's leading sculptor is immortalizing our beloved Andrew Mr. Tsao, famous across China for his incredible sculptures of Chairman Mao, is in the midst of sculpting an altogether different leader – Andrew. Three legged Andrew was our first rescued Moon Bear who we lost to the ravages of liver cancer just one year ago. Mr. Tsao was asked by a Chinese artist friend of AAF if he would use his amazing talent to bring our beloved boy back to life, so that everyone who visits our Centre will always remember him. He very generously agreed to do the work for free, and is now working on a 9 foot statue of Andrew! Andrew will stand in all his glory at the entrance of our Rescue Centre! We will keep you updated on progress. Peanut – life (and the view) are good! Little Peanut, whose name many of you will recognize as the tiny cub who was rescued with his Mum from a defunct zoo, thus avoiding any likelihood that he would be sold to a bear farm, was recently spotted surveying the sanctuary from the top of his climbing frame!! The other farmed bears that arrived during the filming of the documentary, have all undergone surgery to remove their damaged gall bladders and are gently recuperating. When well enough they will be integrated together. Your help has never been more crucial than now Every penny sent to our China Bear Rescue has been spent on the physical rescue of bears and the development of a safe and beautiful sanctuary, on the creation of public education programmes, employment of over 140 Chinese staff, and on research and science which highlights the gross physical and mental impacts to a caged and farmed bear. Still this is not enough, and we must continue pushing forward until we see that final decision from the Central Government who MUST acknowledge the shocking reality of this medieval cruelty, the abundance of herbal alternatives and the fact that no-one is gong to die for the lack of bile. Our new Veterinary Paper will also be out soon which will horrify anyone who reads the reality of this grotesque industry and the ultimate fate of 7000 bears still wasting away on the farms. These prisoners are always in our hearts and we will never stop until our job is done and the bears are free. Thank you for staying with us as our thousand mile journey continues. Bear hugs, Jill P.S. Construction of the first phase of the Vietnam Bear Rescue Centre is underway, when complete we will begin the rescue of the first 50 of 200 farmed bears!