Everyone who lives above the hospital was kept awake last night by banging and clanking and dreams of escaped bears... There are no escaped bears, but a couple of them moved their cages off the blocks and all around the room in the night. One of them, (Sepp) his cage is so crap I expect he just puts his feet through the bottom and walks around.

I was cleaning bear rooms whilst the first health check (on skinny Twiglet) took place, but Phill let me sneak in and do a quick exam while he was on the table. He has snare marks around his neck and has lost one hind leg from the stifle down. The other stifle wouldn't extend but the tarsus is over-extended. He weighs 60kg and has a big frame, we estimate he's at least 110kg underweight. He's pretty much skeletal when you feel under the fur.

Surprisingly, his anaesthetic was fairly stable, he even stood up in his new transport cage afterwards, in all the space and deep straw bed. He was left on a drip for as long as possible because we think he's got renal failure. It's fairly iffy.

They ex-lapped Big boy, there's some effusion but mostly it's gas in his gut, so he's on restricted food and it's looking more hopeful for him. Here's a photo of him in his new big cage:

S210, now named Chelsey, is collecting food bowls, she has four in her cage now and won't give them back.

We're told there are only 10 bears coming now, and we're all waiting outside with our brand new white white quarantine wellies on.

When the truck turns up covered in a tarpaulin none of us think there can be 10 bears on it - surely they wouldn't fit – but it turns out there are twelve. Their cages are mostly bent wire, ridiculously small and particularly unstable. We're not sure if these are their farm cages or if they've been loaded into these just for transport, but there are a couple of bears that look really bad. The faces of the Chinese and foreign staff as they were unloaded...

The bears are carefully moved off the truck and into the bear rooms. Most of them eat really well, fruit and grain and drink drink drink.

Two of them we think are blind, and three are missing limbs. There is a thin thin bear who is vomiting everything up and can only be given electrolytes every hour, and an enormous bloated bear in a fantastically unstable cage that we've nicknamed "Big boy", who we're worried may have peritonitis.

Mostly I looked after bears S210 and S212. 212 tries to grab you, and can get her arms all the way through the bars. 210 has lovely big paws and eats everything you give her.

They'd normally stay in their little cages until they've settled and the vets think they can withstand a GA and healthcheck, but since a few of these are really sick and the cages are ludicrously unsafe I think we're starting to knock them out tomorrow, check them, do any emergency surgery and move them to our "transport cages", where they'll live for about three months until they're moved to proper dens and gradually allowed outside.

(I'm told when they're let out you can usually tell the difference between the wild-caught and the captive-bred; the wild-caught tend to go "wow, GRASS" and the captives go "holy CRAP whatisallthatgreenstuffI'mnotgoingoutthereyoucan'tmakeme"...)

This is the thin thin bear, his name at the moment is Twiglet:

This is the smallest, we called her Bluebelle, she is blind and a bit scared but loves apple and pear smoothies:

Animals Asia (www.animalsasia.org) is a relatively small charity dedicated to ending bear bile farming, and runs Chengdu Bear Rescue Centre, where I am now.

Bear bile is used in traditional Chinese medicine as a cooling medicine, for fevers and liver problems and suchlike. They used to hunt bears and take the gall bladder, but this (together with habitat loss) decimated the wild population, so in the 80s they came up with farming bears for their bile.

Mostly they use Asiatic black bears (moon bears), sometimes sun bears and grizzlys.

Farming involves creating a hole from the gall bladder to the skin. Stainless steel or latex catheters are used, and sometimes the latex ones are run under the skin to exit on the thigh to make collection easier. Some bears wear permanent metal jackets housing a bag to collect the bile, and are anaesthetised (usually with ketamine) every month or so to empty it. The only legal method now is the "free drip", where a fistula is created so that bile can exit through the skin. Some Chinese pro-farming papers describe this as a sphincter mechanism "like the anus", but, no, it's just a hole. They have to be "milked" by placing a tube into the hole once or twice a day or the hole closes over. There are a number of "fake free drips" where the catheters are very short and hidden.

The surgeries are not aseptic, no pain relief is given, and they usually have to be performed repeatedly to open up a hole that has closed. The survival rates for the surgeries aren't properly documented but preliminary studies suggest they're pretty abysmal, something like 65-75%.

The bears are kept in very small cages, sometimes crush cages all the time, and often kept hungry to stimulate bile production.

(Franzi's old cage.)

Seeing the state of them is kind of upsetting. Many have arthritis and limb deformities because of the cramped conditions. Many of them display stereotypy and rock backwards and forwards, bite the cage bars until their teeth wear down or self-mutilate. Sometimes they've been declawed or had teeth pulled out. The poor nutrition causes an array of problems. The gall bladder areas are always a huge mess. In fact, the state the bile is in, with infections and white blood cells, I'm not at all sure it's a safe product to market for human consumption. There's also a high rate of liver cancers, abscesses, peritonitis from leaking bile...

(bear arriving at the centre)

None of this has stopped people poaching wild bears, of course. The farms stimulated demand, the entire gall bladders are worth more than ever and most farms supplement their captive-bred bears with illegally-snared wild bears (many of them admit it openly if asked, and a fair number of bears have snare scars or are missing limbs).

Chengdu Bear Rescue has permission from the government here in Sichuan province to acquire 500 bears. Sichuan province is not giving out any more licenses, so the charity buys bears at market price from farmers who are shutting down their farms. They rehabilitate them slowly and keep them in a rather impressive zoo-like setting, in carefully chosen groups with outdoor and indoor enclosures and a massive environmental enrichment program to keep

them from getting bored and stereotyping.

(Stardust and Mandela playing, that's Claudia watching them.)

There are an estimated 7000 farmed bears in Asia at the moment. The Chinese government is rather touchy about the subject since the EU roundly condemned bear farming this year.

The active compound in the bile, ursodeoxycholic acid, can be synthesised relatively easily without using any bears at all.

(his name is Stardust)

I will now confusingly back-date my blog entries to the days I wrote them on.

Working today... nice relaxed day actually, spent a bit of time walking the dogs. Then I went down and convinced Lajana to eat kiwi and jelly and coconut milk.

Lajana is a bear with a liver tumour, we're just keeping her alive so long as she's active and happy, but she's started to be inappetent... There seems to be a higher incidence of liver tumours in bears that've been farmed.

Lajana looking cute:

Hua Hua the beautiful, who I am really getting quite fond of:

Day off! Walked into Longqiao (local town) with Wendy, and managed to get a tuktuk halfway there, the driver squeezed us in with another passenger and refused to take any payment.

They're repairing the bridge so everything came to a chaotic stop, but we got there eventually. Wendy bought fruit and speakers and sensible things. I bought a red money envelope and some bells. In the market there was a cage with a kitten and a pigeon in it. Many chickens, and meat hanging on hooks. When the children get out of school (a new-looking, rather grand building up the road) they follow us around saying "Hallo" and "nicetomeechou" and giggling shyly.

I'm told Longqiao means Dragon Bridge, which is a pretty big name for a two-street town.

I hardly speak any Chinese, it is really quite impressive how you can get home by saying Hei Xiong (black bear) over and over again to rickshaw drivers and smiling... The hand-signs for numbers are a godsend.

I saw a man picking up a dog by its ears today.

Potato mud in the canteen today! This is cause for rejoicing.

Also: there are new bears arranged to arrive on Tuesday! Hopefully. AAF buy them off farmers at market price, and sometimes they try and hold out for more money and the bears don't get here. The Sichuan government isn't giving out any more bear farm licences, and the number of farms is decreasing, but they're also getting bigger as they buy the bears off farmers who are shutting down.

I'm trying to teach myself Mandarin from the signs on the way to Chengdu. It's like not being able to read, it's quite interesting.