Let’s go and kill a bear …
Off Topic:- If you don’t live on Vancouver Island, British Colombia, and have no intention of visiting in the near future, please move along, I posted in the summer of 2008.
It was the intro to an item saying grizzly bears have migrated from the mainland to the island.
Why do I care? I live here and one of the reasons it’s such a great place is because of the mountains and clean, fresh air.
And the wild-life.
Grizzlies notwithstanding, black bears hold sway and they’re neighbours of ours, along with the families of deer which serenely munch the flowers in my wife’s carefully tended garden.
Last summer a young black bear decided a pinetree at the end of our back yard would be a great place to hang out and from our living room window, we could watch him watching us .
That kind of thing happens all the time. Very cool.
So why, since this is about bears, isn’t there a picture of one on the right? Why, instead, is there a shot of a hand holding a bloody bag?
One of the pages I check out when I’m looking for material is the US Department of Justice press site and today I saw ‘Member of the Cherokee Nation Sentenced to Prison for Transporting and Selling Bear Parts” in a DoJ headline.
I don’t know why the fact the guy belongs to the Cherokee nation was singled out. This kind of kind of thing happens all the time, particularly here in BC, with people from every race slaughtering black bears for body parts.
The item in the picture is a gall bladder and Clement Calhoun was sentenced in North Carolina to six months in jail for “illegally transporting and selling” 51 of them, said the DoJ.
Fifty-one gall bladders equals 51 bears, of course.
The organ is filled filled with bile, says veterinarian Anjum Andrabi, from whose Oasis web site I lifted the image.
The bladders are “much in demand” because of their use in Chinese medicine, says the caption.
One kilogram of bile powder costs $600 (US) in China, “while in Japan a whole gall bladder like the one in this picture can fetch up to $33,000 (US) per Kg,” it says.
“Increasing demand for bear gall bladders may threaten the black bear population within the United States,” says the DoJ.
And not only in the US.
“The conviction arose from a three-year anti-poaching investigation intended to document the unlawful take, purchase, sale and transport of ginseng and bear parts within and along the southern Appalachians by various individuals,” it adds.
Meanwhile, “The bear in these pictures was reported by local residents (in a hamlet along the city forest) to be a voracious carnivore having eaten many livestock and humans too, apart from destroying standing crops in their fields,” says Andrabi, adding:
“The competent authorities along with a paranoid public tried to capture the bear and somehow in the excitement (I don’t wish to give the exact reasons), the bear, a fully grown male, died.
“From the post-mortem no trace of any animal/human meal was found, all it had had were wild fruits.”
Jon Newton – p2pnet
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
please move along – Grizzly alert on Vancouver Island, July 26, 2008
DoJ – Member of the Cherokee Nation Sentenced to Prison for Transporting and Selling Bear Parts, January 13, 2010
Oasis – Man-Animal Conflict: This time a bear pays the price, March 13, 2009
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/feed
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
Related Articles
Del.Icio.Us this! | Digg this! | Reddit this! | Stumble this!
No comments yet