Burden of Beasts in China

The brown bear used to weigh as much as 900 pounds. He could easily chomp down 40 pounds of meat a day. Not anymore.

Since business at the private Yulin Zoo soured a few years ago, the omnivore is lucky to see any kind of food. Once a day, his keeper scrapes together leftover lunches from a nearby children’s martial arts school. When that’s not available, all the bear gets is porridge or cornmeal soup.

He has lost nearly half his body fat. He growls and pounces on any prospect of food that the occasional visitor tosses into his damp concrete cage -- a dry sunflower seed, a raw olive.

“We feed him whatever we can get, just like a pig,” said zoo manager Yang Yisheng.

Much has been made of China’s record on human rights. But less publicized is the country’s dismal performance on animal rights. As the communist nation reaps the financial benefits of capitalist economic reforms, captive animals have become victims of the mad dash to get rich quick.

From the proliferation of poorly managed private zoos to the horrors of legal bear-bile “farming,” entrepreneurs have reduced precious wildlife to disposable sources of cash. Without adequate animal welfare legislation and more public awareness, it’s likely more animals will be starved or worked to death.

“The big problem in China is there are no general animal protection laws like we have in the West,” said Victor Watkins, director of wildlife at the London-based World Society for the Protection of Animals. “There seems to be no regulation of the zoos, no real awareness and no concern for the welfare of animals.”

That’s not entirely true. China does have a law that forbids the poaching and hunting of endangered species. But it has no legislation to prevent cruelty and abuse against animals, including those that may be endangered.

Even if government officials want to help, they say their hands are tied.

“If you tell me animals are starving, I can’t do anything about it,” said Liu Song, an official responsible for zoos with the State Forestry Administration in Beijing, which is charged with managing wildlife. “There is no law that says we have to do anything about it.”

Under China’s government-controlled economy, the state offered cradle-to-grave welfare for captive wildlife, as it did for humans. There were only a handful of large zoos around the country. The animals’ well-being was relatively easy to guarantee. But that was before the anything-goes market reforms swept the country two decades ago.

Large national zoos in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai still command government funding and attention, but a growing number of private zoos do not. According to the Chinese Zoo Assn., at least 200 animal parks nationwide are cashing in on rising incomes and hearty appetites for family entertainment.

Motivated more by profit than the protection and preservation of wildlife, the safari parks and zoos are easy to open but difficult to monitor. Many poach or smuggle in endangered species, often killing or injuring the beasts in the process.

The park operators tend to underestimate the high cost of maintaining large animals and overestimate visitor attendance. Most have little management experience or veterinary training.

In addition, two agencies -- the Forestry Administration and the Construction Ministry -- share responsibility related to animals and parks. The overlap creates loopholes that make oversight difficult.

Unlike in the West, China lacks private foundations or nonprofit organizations capable of lending a helping hand. Much like ailing state-owned enterprises that spit out redundant workers, bankrupt zoos end up forcing wild animals to fend for themselves or perish.

A few months ago, wolves from a financially strapped zoo in the coastal city of Ningbo in eastern China escaped by chewing a hole in their rusted metal fence. According to one zookeeper, the animals had been starving. The wolves’ small meat ration often was stolen by staff members to feed their own families.

Within days, four wolves were caught, shot, poisoned or beaten to death. Zoo officials said they couldn’t afford tranquilizer guns needed to capture the beasts.

In 2000, aquarium operators in the central Chinese city of Chengdu fell behind on utility bills. The landlord shut off the power supply. At least 10 varieties of endangered marine species froze to death.

A private aquarium in Wenzhou on the eastern coast was in similar straits. Operators couldn’t afford central heating so they placed an exposed furnace on the steps of the indoor pool. An alligator came too close and is still recovering from burns on its tail.

“We made $150,000 in our first year,” said a manager, who gave only his surname, Chen. “We were the pride of Wenzhou. But now we can’t even afford electricity. The government won’t bail us out.”

Desperate zoo operators resort to sideshows and other gimmicks to keep the audiences coming. The lively Chinese media frequently offer tales of exotic animals, such as peacocks and tigers, forced to perform until they die from exhaustion.

Even more miserable are the Asiatic black bears, who are captured for their valuable internal fluids. As many as 7,000 of these endangered animals are believed to be held in government-sanctioned “farms,” where they live most of their lives in cages too small for them to stand up or turn around.

Workers, most of them lacking medical training, cut open the bears’ abdomens to insert tubes that allow the animals to be “milked” of bile twice a day. The fluid is used in products ranging from health tonics to shampoo. The process is so painful that bears often bang their heads against the tiny cage.

“Chinese people tend to regard animals as a form of natural resource, not living beings capable of feeling pain,” Zhang Li, acting director for China of the Massachusetts-based International Fund for Animal Welfare, said from his office in Beijing. “This is definitely bad for China’s reputation.”

But Liang Feng didn’t expect that his animals would suffer when he opened the nation’s first private zoo in 1994. The former private school administrator said that he had planned to start a learning center in Yulin but that the local government asked him to invest in a zoo instead to boost tourism.

It was fine when business thrived. During its first Chinese New Year’s Day, the Yulin Zoo brought in as much as $18,000 in ticket sales, a fortune for this small city in southern China’s impoverished Guangxi province.

“We had about 30,000 visitors that day,” Liang recalled. “There was a traffic jam on the road here, and we didn’t have enough ticket stubs for all the people that came.”

At the zoo’s prime, Liang housed more than 1,000 exotic animals, including monkeys, camels, birds and fish, even tigers, lions and an elephant. But tourism in the area never took off. As the initial burst of visitors trailed off, so did the cash flow.

“I thought the government would help us out,” Liang said. “I brought the first zoo to our area. I was making history.”

Seeing no subsidy from the state, the zoo dropped the admission price by 40%. It didn’t make much difference.

Desperate for visitors to the zoo, the staff began staging the feeding of trembling farm animals to carnivores. “We threw in live cows, sheep, horses, just to see how the tiger would react,” Liang said.

When that was not enough, they shoved the larger beasts together into one arena.

“We shouldn’t talk about this, but we were forced to make the tiger and the lion fight, just so we could make money,” Liang said. “They were so ferocious, we had to pry them apart with a log.”

Even that didn’t improve attendance.

Facing the threat of mass starvation among the animals, he returned some of them to the zoos from which they had been purchased. Many others embarked on a Dickensian life of toiling and sweat.

A 16-year-old tiger landed in a traveling animal show. The animal was so underfed and overworked by the new keepers that it was emaciated when it died, Liang said. Its remains immediately disappeared.

Unfortunately for these beasts, they often are worth more dead than alive. It is both illegal and difficult to hunt and sell wildlife. Only zoos can trade animals, offering small symbolic amounts for the exchange. But animal parts smuggled and sold on the black market can fetch high prices.

Since little accountability is required after an animal dies in captivity, some zoos secretly welcome the demise of a beast from an endangered species.

A zoo in the southern boomtown of Shenzhen reportedly ran a thriving underground business marinating dead tiger bones in its basement and selling them to visitors as snacks.

In the West, zoos can be sued for animal cruelty, but in China it is difficult to turn to the courts for legal remedy.

A controversial case this spring involved a college student who attacked five bears at the Beijing Zoo with sulfuric acid. One animal was blinded, and the others suffered severe burns. The attack prompted public outcries. But university officials, who normally are willing to expel students for such things as pregnancy, imposed a lesser form of punishment. Nor was it possible to press criminal charges against the offender because no law had been violated.

“Without new animal rights legislation we have very limited power to protest,” said Mang Ping, an animal rights activist in Beijing.

A controversy erupted this fall when a Beijing safari park donated more than a dozen animals to replenish the war-ravaged Kabul Zoo. International zoo communities protested the move, arguing that the Afghan facility was in no condition to care for the beasts.

“It shows their total ignorance,” said Watkins, of the World Society for the Protection of Animals, referring to the Chinese action. “It’s a disgrace.”

But as China’s stature rises in the world and the country prepares to host the 2008 Olympics and the 2010 World Exposition, advocates see an opportunity to draw attention to the plight of the nation’s animals.

“The Olympics is China’s pride. I’m afraid bear-bile farming is its shame,” said Jill Robinson, founder of Hong Kong-based Animals Asia Foundation, which runs a bear rescue program in China.

But can the animals wait that long?

At the Yulin Zoo, the remaining four bears and three monkeys cling to life with no improvement in sight. There’s no money to hire a vet.

One of the starving bears tried to run away and was stuffed into an even smaller cage. To prevent the monkeys from trying to flee, zookeepers hung heavy metal chains around their necks.

During the zoo’s decline, the staff watched a father bear clobber a newborn cub to death. The mother bear’s name is Lian, which means either lotus or pity.

“She really is a pity now,” Liang said recently, trekking up the ruins of his former empire, passing empty cages, overgrown weeds and a dry fish tank. A giant sea turtle that cost Liang more than $1,200 had scraped its belly on the bottom of the shallow pool and died of infection.

“It weighed more than 150 pounds. That’s as big as a grown man,” Liang said. “We stir-fried its liver. It filled three large plates.”