Dec 2001 Volume 82 Number 1 "serving the protectors"
Saving True Victims
By Brett Williams

The horror - and extent - of animal cruelty abroad appalled an SA policewoman in the mid-1990s. Since then, she has travelled afar, and given all her recent years’ spare time to help end that cruelty. Now, she plans to leave Australia to give brutalized animals her full-time commitment.

As she investigates unspeakable cruelty wreaked upon Chinese moon bears, Constable Lyn White’s heart breaks. But, when she stares into their sad, empty eyes, she cannot respond with emotion. She has no choice but to remain composed, and conduct herself in a calm, ordered manner.

She knows that, in the bears’ interests, she cannot, as a woman on foreign soil, take an all-guns-blazing approach.

Her goal - on which she has to stay focussed - is, after all, the defenceless creatures’ rescue and ultimate freedom. And, in pursuit of that end, she must sometimes even become “emotionless”.

The moon bears - or Asiatic black bears - for which she crusades, have, since the early 1980s, become the tragic victims of bear farming in Asia. Most farmed bears suffer the agony of continual confinement in small, rusty cages. But their worst misery comes when their gall bladders are “tapped” with surgically implanted stainless steel tubes.

Through these callously convenient means, law-breaking farmers carry on the barbarous practice of milking the bears of their gall bladders’ bile. Some bears endure this procedure as often as twice a day.

Bear bile - claimed to be an effective treatment for high temperature, liver complaints and eye problems - has a centuries-long history of use in traditional oriental medicine. So bile remains regrettably high in demand throughout Asia, and proves lucrative for those involved in its trade.

White - in her battle to save the bears - works in Asia as an intelligence gatherer and lobbyist with the Hong Kong-based Animals Asia Foundation. She forms part of the foundation’s seven-member team, led by world-renowned AAF founder and director, Jill Robinson.

For the past five years, however, White has had to cram two lives into one. Back in Australia, she has continued to live and work - as an SA police officer - in the picturesque Adelaide Hills.

She last came home in November after two months’ work in Vietnam, where bear farming has grown dramatically since mid-1999. That trip was her tenth to Asia in three years.

White’s first interest in the moon bears’ plight began with a 1995 magazine article. “I can remember opening to a page with a photograph of a bear in a cage,” she says. “The cage was so tiny. I couldn’t believe that such cruelty could exist.

“From that moment, I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try to do something to assist.”

True to her rare sense of obligation, White spent the next two years tirelessly researching moon bears and their plight in Asia. She became sufficiently expert to lecture on the subject, and worked to raise support for the bears.

White never even saw a bear until 1997, when she first travelled to China. There, at an AAF sanctuary in Pan Yu, her eyes filled with tears as she watched rescued bears swim in a pool and lie sleeping in the sun.

“I was immensely moved,” she says. “When Jill called them, you could just see the parting of grass in the sanctuary as these big, rollicking animals came towards her. They recognized her as the woman who had given them their freedom.”

But those bears’ pleasure in their new lives belied their earlier suffering. Through sheer human barbarity, some had gone insane. The oldest one had been confined and mistreated for 13 years.

White’s investigative role lies at the core of her work. Only with gathered intelligence on bile milking can the AAF win government support to stop the practice. So, while she poses as a “dumb tourist” in live animal markets or on secret bear farms, she documents and photographs all the horror before her.

She thinks of bear farming as “the greatest animal welfare tragedy the world has seen”. She would sometimes simply love to confiscate the anguished animals but, of course, refrains. White, 38, understands well the folly of over-stepping the mark.

“You cannot in any way be threatening,” she says. “By doing that, we’d put a spotlight on ourselves, and wreck our ability to work on these issues. While we’re still able freely to find out exactly what is going on - without (locals) feeling under threat - it stops the whole thing from going underground.

“We don’t want those bears to disappear so that no one can ever find them again. We need them to stay where they are for the time being, while we negotiate with governments to act on their laws - and bring in stronger laws.

“And, the more intelligence you gather, the more ammunition you have to negotiate at government level.

“We like to work within communities to solve problems. We’re not there to criticize. You’ve got to change generations of thinking.”

But, at the same time, White likens illegal trade in wildlife and its products to drug dealing. Moreover, the dangers she has faced on the job seem to vindicate her assessment. By pure chance, she once found a Vietnam restaurant carrying on a brisk trade in bear bile. She watched as a waiter casually injected diners’ glasses of wine with bile from “an enormous syringe”.

To find the source of the restaurant’s supply, she played the dumb but inquisitive tourist who wanted to know more. She cleverly won an invitation to a bear farm just outside Hanoi.

White returned the next day with a Vietnamese interpreter, with whom she was “loaded” onto a minibus. She had a mobile telephone she could not use, no radio contact and no back-up. Even with no idea where - and how - the intended journey might end, she continued her self-assigned mission.

“I knew we were going through the streets of Hanoi,” she remembers, “and a couple of motorbikes started following us. We ended up at a house on the outskirts of Hanoi and, out the back, were four bears in cages.

“It was quite tragic - the bear the extraction was performed on was obviously recently caught. He had a stump for a paw, and it was still bloody at the end. He was just wrapped in wire and tied up.

“I had a video camera with me but couldn’t risk getting it out. I didn’t want to wreck the opportunity of watching the procedure, from the first moment to the last. Then I could document it, and put in a report.”

Of the greatest heartbreak to White is the misery of bear cubs. They, too, suffer at the hands of their bile-dealing captors.

On one investigation, White followed two Vietnamese dealers through a hole in a wall from which they had just removed sheets of corrugated iron.

Beyond the wall lay a trapdoor, under which the dealers had stowed several cubs. Before White even saw them, she recognized their cry of distress - a sorrowful, high-pitched hum.

“There were two baby sun bears only a few months old, and a baby Asiatic black bear,” she remembers. “The sun bears, they thought, were the higher risk to be found in possession of, so they asked me to leave fairly quickly after that.

“Whenever you start threatening someone’s livelihood through your presence, there’s always an element of risk involved. And, we are, at times, putting ourselves in positions where others perceive us as a threat.”

White’s work also takes her into live animal markets. There, traders deliberately break live dears’ legs, so that all but the animals’ heads fit into sacks used to display them for sale. Live rabbits are plunged into boiling water and skinned. And traders present countless endangered species for sale.

Through the days’ heat, humidity and trade, animals battle flies and endure without water. White describes them as only “10 per cent alive”.

  

Her first trip to such a market was in the city of Guangzhou, China. She did not know - even as a cop of then 15 years’ experience - if she would cope. Robinson accompanied her, and warned: “Just keep smiling.”

Says White of the experience: “It absolutely sickened me. We were there on an investigation, and there was no way I was going to be able to do anything to help. But you realize you’re there to do a job.”

And, for that job, White has sacrificed her own time and money, as well as her long-service leave and last three years’ annual leave from SAPOL. Her passion for animal welfare is near palpable. To save an animal, she is prepared to take “any risk”.

In small but significant ways, she compensates for the animals to which she cannot show affection in Asia. “When I come home,” she says, “my dogs get loved more than they could ever possibly be loved anywhere.”

But, in a job that could crush any animal lover’s spirit, what drives her to continue?

“It has been hard at times,” she says. “There are days that you just want to sit and look at the ocean, and not think about anything. But, once you’ve come face to face with crying cubs or a distressed calf, you feel a level of responsibility - and that never leaves you.

“I see them very much as true victims. They aren’t able to ask for help, and they can’t cry out when they’re in pain. They can’t ring 000, and they can’t stand up in a courtroom to tell their side of the story. Literally, they need someone to speak on their behalf.”

In a long-awaited breakthrough, the AAF recently won 500 bears’ freedom from farms in Sichuan. The foundation negotiated the farms’ closure with the Sichuan provincial government, and has already taken in 62 of the bears.

Before she last returned to Australia, White saw many of those 62 arrive on trucks at the AAF rescue centre in Chengdu. In some bears, she saw anger. Others showed their beaten spirits through lifeless eyes.

For infections, hernias and the removal of implants, they all needed operations. For muscle wastage, and to learn simply to walk again, each bear would need physiotherapy.

“When you offer them a piece of banana or biscuit through the bars of their cages,” says White, “they gently purse their lips and take it from you. They recognize kind treatment.

“Knowing that we can now give them a life of freedom - to make up for the most horrendous life imaginable - is, as Jill would say, food for the soul.”

Unwavering in her goal to help bring bear farming to an end, White will this month return to Asia for a further 12 months’ work. In another sacrifice, she is taking a year’s leave without pay from SAPOL.

She will continue negotiations with the Vietnamese government to “see where we can move forward together”. First on her agenda is the future of six cubs, currently confined to cages on a Vietnamese island.

Through the next 12 months, she will return to Australia only once or twice to brief the media on AAF progress.

She cannot envisage any time when she will not be working in animals’ interests. And her single status allows her the freedom to continue what she calls her “on-going journey that I cherish”.

“The work’s not going to go away,” she says, “especially in Asia. All of us know that all we may be doing is moving a rock from a path, so the next person who comes along has one less rock to move. It’s as simple as that.”

PASAweb   Index & Search   Top of Page   Comments   Email to Editor

The Police Journal Online is an official publication of the Police Association of South Australia and is published monthly. Editors of kindred publications can seek permission from the Editor to re-publish any Police Journal Online article. Copyright 2001  The Police Association of South Australia sustance