| 1 | Chinese medicine is the culprit |
Brown bears face poaching threats from numerous angles these days, but many are branches of the same tree: the never-ending wackiness of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Rhino tusks and South African lion bones are wildly popular remedies in China, and now, bear gall bladders are earning a killing.
These gall bladders contain bile, which is manufactured by the liver, and according to TCM, bear bile can treat over 100 bodily ailments, including epilepsy, muscle pain, bruises, sore throats, poisoning and much more. Bear bile is rich in a compound called ursodeoxycholic acid, but demand is now dangerously high, not just in China, but Thailand, Vietnam and Korea as well.
The skin, paws, claws and teeth are also highly demanded – bear paw stew is a cultural speciality in China, selling for $750 a bowl. Some Chinese companies have advertised bear shampoo, and before the march of vaccines in early 2021, the Chinese government was promoting bear bile as a coronavirus remedy.
China is notorious for its house of horror bear farms, where Asiatic black bears and endangered sun bears are kept in unimaginably tiny cages. 3 times a day, a large needle plunges into their body and drains their gall bladder. As you could imagine, brown bears are much harder to imprison (good on them), but in China, wild bear bile is often viewed as the “real deal”, more powerful than the farmed equivalent. Consequently, wild brown bears are a poacher’s picnic.
| 2 | Kamchatka: hunting ground zero |
A large percentage of the poaching action takes place in one peninsula in eastern Russia – Kamchatka, a 300 mile long wildlife haven which is home to 29 active volcanoes and a unique subspecies called the Kamchatka brown bear. In the days of the Soviet Union, poaching was severely punished, and better, this was enforceable, because Kamchatka was a military operations hub which was off limits to normal civilians.
When communism collapsed in 1991, however, the economy plunged into chaos. When former soldiers returned home, with no prospect of work, they took up guns to feed their families. Even today, Kamchatka is far less developed than Moscow, riddled with grey Soviet-era tower blocks and poorly paved roads. When interviewed under anonymity, many Kamchatka poachers justify themselves with the same disproven line that only big-time poachers are a threat to bears. The problem is that these small timers add up to hundreds.
Today, 500-1500 brown bears are poached in Kamchatka annually, mainly to satisfy Asian markets. The WWF estimates that in spring 2007, 100 brown bears were poached in the South Kamchatka Sanctuary alone. Kamchatka is a no brainer for poachers because the vast landscape makes it easy to avoid their pursuers, who are normally underpaid park rangers without the expert training of Yellowstone Park or Katmai. The ultimate goal of poachers is to escape the park and slip across the Chinese border, or sell to middlemen who deal directly with gall bladder enthusiasts.
| 3 | Tales from Kamchatka |
One tragedy took place in 2000, when a bear was radio-collared and released in Kamchatka. It was perfect – he would enjoy his freedom while providing scientists with months of bear data. Instead, he was killed after travelling just 40 miles, sliced open for his gallbladder.
Corruption is a big problem in Kamchatka. In September 1997, the famous bear enthusiast Charlie Russel (author of Grizzly Heart) rented a Kolb ultralight aircraft to fly over the South Kamchatka Sanctuary. On the snow-covered ground below, he quickly recognised the snowmobile tracks of poachers, before spotting a Soviet ATV vehicle in the distance. In a move some would call reckless, he flew closer and confronted 20 Russian hunters, but was shocked to find that Valery Golovin, director of the Sanctuary, was among them! Golovin pled insanity at his trial, blaming his presence on the longest blackout of all time. However, he was stripped of his post and fined $9.3 million. The poachers that day were carrying multiple sheep skins and bear skins.
Sometimes, the poachers do slip up. In 2007, two poachers were detained by WWF Russia in south Kamchatka, having brutally slain a mother bear and her three cubs. These villains were armed with three rifles and 85 bullets, and in their cargo were 12 bear paws, a bear skin with head and paws intact, and bear fat. Ranger Shurunov was particularly enraged, as he had watched the mother playing with her cubs just days earlier.
| 4 | The situation today |
As of 2021, poaching has fallen slightly in Kamchatka, and sanctuary officials claim that ranger training has massively improved. But poachers are still being caught red handed across Russia. In December 2017, the police stopped a minibus attempting to cross the Russian border with China. Inside were 468 bear paws coming from at least 117 slaughtered brown bears, alongside 32 elk lips.
Had he cleared the border, the driver would have profited to the tune of $26,000. At first, he pretended that his cargo was meat, but failed to provide any documents.
This is only the smuggler that was caught. By June 2018, the FSB of Russia was calling for urgent protection for brown bears. Far from the image of Russian motorcyclists riding around St Petersburg with bears in their sidecars, bear numbers were plummeting rapidly, from 225,000 in 2015 to 143,000 in 2017. They argued that the species could be gone within 5 years – unthinkable for Russia. The FSB proposed a new 10 year jail sentence for smuggling bear body parts and a 12 year sentence for smuggling as part of a gang.
Officials from TransBaikal (the region directly north of China) reported that in 2016 and 2017, they had confiscated 189 bear paws, 54 bear claws, and 2kg worth of dried bear bile, mostly heading to the Chinese medicine market.
| 5 | Salmon snatchers |
Naturally, with all the wildlife in Siberia, the poachers don’t just stick to bears. In the July and August breeding season, Kamchatka is estimated to host over a quarter of the world’s salmon, with 11 different species.
Like in Alaska, the salmon swim upstream to the mountainous riverbeds where they were first born, dodging the paws of hungry bears, and now, greedy poachers. Kamchatka has a regular fishing quota as well, but poachers far exceed this, particularly for caviar, which can sell for £20 a kilo.
Sometimes, poachers collect all the salmon they can with a giant net, before slicing them open, removing the eggs, and chucking hundreds of dead fish back into the river. Then they’ll salt the caviar, hide it in a tank in a prearranged forest location, and wait for a truck or helicopter to show up and remove the cargo.
Another favourite trick is to dig holes in the ice like a polar bear. The salmon poachers operate not as individuals, but professional gangs, complete with 4 by 4 jeeps, boats, and green fatigues. It’s estimated that a Kamchatka salmon poacher makes 10 times more money than a legal fishing employee. Politicians and police are said to be secretly in on the craze.
The problem for bears is simple: salmon is their trusted dietary staple. Without it, they may fail to fatten up for hibernation and die in their dens, or their cubs may not survive.
| 6 | Bear paws hidden in cars |
Just like Microsoft Windows and Apple’s formerly neverending stream of iTech, smugglers are pushing the envelope with their newest technology. In August 2015, some poachers were foiled after sticking 18 bear paws to the underside of a train! They were attempting to enter China, where they would peel them off the carriage after disembarking.
Whether they were caught wasn’t reported, but the attempt was no surprise to customs official Vyacheslav Tsyrempilov: “In the last three months… A total of 31 bear paws have been detained, with a total weight of 40 kilograms,”. It followed another railway episode back in June where 6 bear paws were found hidden in a timber carriage.
A couple of years earlier, two Russian men were detained near the Mongolian border on May 22nd 2013. Customs official Yang Xu noticed that the driver looked “intense and suspicious”, checking his watch repeatedly on the CCTV footage. He ordered an X-ray of the car, which revealed 213 brown bear paws stashed away in its tyres.
Fellow customs official Zhang Xiaohai told the media that bear paw smuggling had risen sharply since 2011, which wasn’t surprising given that the haul was worth an estimated $460,000. He was surprised at the catch because May wasn’t usually peak season for paw smuggling, due to the warmer weather which makes preservation harder. Later, it was speculated that the Russian smugglers would receive the death penalty, at which point the whole world started crying.
| 7 | Pakistan and India |
Away from Russia, one of the most heavily poached subspecies in the world is the Himalayan brown bear. It once numbered 10,000, but has now fallen to just a few 100 individuals in Pakistan, India, Nepal and China. According to the wildlife monitoring network TRAFFIC India, poaching is a massive culprit. The same superstitious beliefs about bear bile and paws persist, as do economic incentives to export to the bile-obsessed Chinese market.
For a while, rangers believed that the bear’s mountainous nature kept it far from civilisation, but professional poaching squads are now basing their operations at high altitudes. Typically, one Indian or Pakistani local will spend days in the wilderness scouting out the bear, before sending a coded message to the kill squad. Then the body parts will be passed to middlemen in local villages, who smuggle them into China.
In some places the Himalayan brown bear has recovered, such as Desoi National Park, which recovered from just 17 bears in 1993 to 54 bears in 2009. In 2014 though, the subspecies was officially placed in the critically endangered ICUN category. 2015 was a quiet year for Indian bear killings, but in 2016, authorities confiscated 9 shipments of gall bladders, followed by 9 in the first 5 months of 2017 alone. The poaching continues today, as in 2020, investigators were told by villagers in Skardu (a hub for passing K2 mountaineers) that bear bile medicines were often sold in nearby Pakistani villagers.
| 8 | Are American poachers a problem? |
Grizzly poaching is almost non-existent in North America. The protected areas like Yellowstone Park and Katmai are just too well monitored, as are the customs posts. An organised gang with jeeps and boats would never survive more than a few weeks in Canada or Alaska.
Demand is still plentiful, as a survey in 2007 found that 50% of speciality Asian stores in Boston stocked bear bile medicines. However, most of these are from black bear poachings, not grizzlies, which exist in 40 of the American states. Occasionally, an organised gang will be shut down, including a “huge network” in Canada back in June 2018, which had exported hundreds of black bear gall bladders to China since 2015.
Grizzly poachings are occasionally reported, including a north Montana grizzly which was left dead by a roadside in October 2020. Its GPS collar was cut from its neck, a clear sign of a cover up, and 1 month later, a male grizzly was illegally slaughtered in Idaho. The authorities offered a 10,000 dollar reward for information, but overall, it’s estimated that only 8 grizzlies were killed in legitimate poaching incidents from 1983 to 2002.
The same can’t be said for America’s old enemy Iran though. Their native Syrian brown bear subspecies is seriously endangered, as the skins sell for a hefty $2000 in local marketplaces. With a crippled economy due to international sanctions, and livestock which bears commonly terrorise anyway, this is too much for impoverished villagers to resist. Population data is scare with this desert bear – there could be hundreds left, or only dozens.
| 9 | Bulgaria |
The country of Bulgaria, south of Romania and directly north of Greece, is home to a healthy 500-700 brown bears, which belong to the Eurasian brown bear subspecies. They’re neatly divided into two populations, in the Balkan mountains of central Bulgaria (100-200 bears) and the Rhodopes mountains of Bulgaria’s south (300-500).
Compared to other European countries, poaching is a serious problem here. Back in 2009, a police patrol was lucky to stumble upon a bear ensnared in a poacher’s trap, near the Shipka pass of central Bulgaria. Thankfully, the two poachers were caught red-handed, and the bear was anaesthetised and released back into the wild. The poachers were caught with a Cherokee jeep, rifles, bullets, steel ropes, and a blue police light – these bad guys were professionals. It’s amazing that the police made it out alive.
2012 saw a similar incident, this time in the Rhodope Mountains. A young bear cub was caught in a painful poacher’s trap, and had to be freed under anaesthetic. Rangers watched from a safe distance while the cub reunited with its mother.
The situation is dire today. While Italy’s brown bears have swelled to 80 from only 40 in 2010, Bulgaria’s have halved. In 2020, it was estimated that 100 brown bears are killed per year. The poachers are aided in their evil quest by the abundance of old forest roads in Bulgaria, which make the bears easy to find, and easy to shoot from the comfort of vehicles.
| 10 | Grizzly man vs poachers |
Where would a bear article be without mentioning Timothy Treadwell? The famous Grizzly Man, who spent 13 summers in Alaska before being eaten in 2003, was constantly ranting about his mission to stop poachers: “it’s just the bears, the poachers, and me”. Supposedly, the poachers carried machine guns, and the lazy government anti-poaching squad only flew over the park twice per year in a distant helicopter.
The problem, according to rangers, was that poachers hadn’t been seen in Katmai National Park for 20 years. The poacher army was a figment of Treadwell’s increasingly bizarre imagination.
In one incident, Timothy Treadwell snapped a picture of a supposed poacher walking past a lake wielding a shotgun. However, this was actually his friend Joe Allen, a park ranger.
Patagonia Inc. printed thousands of fundraising brochures bearing the mislabelled photograph, before hastily destroying every copy when Katmai Park pilot Tom Walters rang up to explain. Treadwell was forced to apologise, saying that the picture was for visual effect only.
But in August 2004, just 11 months after his death, the unthinkable happened: 3 bears were found dead inside Katmai with their paws cut off. The authorities offered a $10,000 reward for information, mentioning that grizzly paws can sell at between $30 and $300 on the black market. Was Treadwell right all along? He always claimed that his mere presence deterred poachers, but elsewhere, he told tales of stumbling across bear poacher campsites, which is kind of contradictory. It’s all part of the Timothy Treadwell myth.
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