Hunting
competes with a little recognized adversary that brings with it a truly
misguided, exploitative, and destructive purpose in the name of well-being.
This adversary infringes on hunting in the way of the doors it opens for
illegal activities, blatant disregard for wild game life, and legal hunting
traditions. This adversary I speak of is Chinese Traditional medicine with
homeopathic remedies that in most cases are little more than Hoodoo spells
requiring the appropriate ingredient such as bear bile, deer musk, eye of newt,
and bird soup.
Let us take a closer inspection of the hunting and the homeopathic
divide. For the record I am not against all forms of Traditional Chinese
Medicine. I do not hate Chinese people either.
When I think
of homeopathic remedies, I can visualize my great grandmother slapping a frog on
a snake bite which she actually did. Did this help? Not necessarily if the
snake was non-poisonous but then there are your odds of dying and living given
circumstances that either favor you at the moment or don’t. This is the chance
you take when you put something in your system that you’re not so sure of. The idea for this decision is based
on everyone saying, "it will fix you right up", but those same bird chirpers aren’t
around when it ‘sends you to your grave’.
Homeopathic
remedies were always the go to for the poor because they could not afford
costly medical care or wanted a cure right now especially if you could get it
over the counter or out the yard. Mind you I am not attacking all Traditional
Chinese medicine. The section I speak of is the expensive, excessive nature of wild
game ‘specialty remedies’ that are limited in resources, murderous, legally
wrong, and exist as a falsehood in the name of taking advantage of a person’s
fear of disease and dying.
People do
not want to be sick but when you are sick you don’t want someone treating you
that could make you worse on bad advice or ingredients. When you go to the
doctor you could have ten symptoms that are in common with one hundred known
medical conditions. If you’re not sure what your diagnosis is a doctor will
treat you symptomatically until you either get better or worse. If you get
worse the doctor will change your patient plan to hopefully make you well
before you actually die on them. A doctor you can ask about their training. A
herbalist running a shop? I am not so sure besides if they are not providing a
doctor with comprehensive care strategies how do they know what concoction is
going to work for you or if you’re getting good care? This could be like
drive-thru doctoring. You don’t even know if there are regulations on the
handling of ‘medicines’ or if the person 'treating' you is competent, sane, or even educated.
China is known for its herbal shops, Traditional Chinese medicines and back-alley cure-alls that go back thousands of years. I wonder sometimes if all these wild animal body parts were actually in the Yellow Emperor's Inner Cannon or other books or are these additions more current as populations boomed, disease becoming more prevalent, or people fighting for all mighty Renminbi.
In regard to Traditional Chinese medicine that has been known to understand the concept of ying/yang as defined as balance in a system which is ironic because that portion of Traditional Chinese medicine that deals in stolen or poached wild animal body parts is harming the delicate balance of ecosystems everywhere.
China
happens to have a bad reputation as a country that procures wild animal body
parts/fluids from other countries illegally. Mass consumption of wild game
animal parts through homeopathic remedies in China demands and instigates
excessive illegal harvesting but resources are limited so outsourcing begins. This
outsourcing steals wild game that could go to hunting where it is legally used
as a meat source to supplement diet not to falsely treat diseased individuals. Any
amount that is procured will have a high price on the weight of product
depending on the specimen or species. This procured body part/fluids becomes a
luxury because the effort to acquire the product nickel and dimes the costs and
you would surely have to be financially well off to buy these black market
product. After reading a list of animal parts used for homeopathic remedy, I
wondered why people who partake of Traditional Chinese medicine believe they
can’t be human without some kind of animal miracle cure as assistance? Most
homeopathic treatments are based around a mystic idea of ingesting the life
force of the animal or what it represents in terms of power.
Here are some examples:
- Elephant skin for acne. (Have they not looked at elephant skin. It’s not baby smooth.)
- Monkey Head for headaches. (My understanding of Buddhism is to calm the monkey mind. Somehow I don’t think this is what they meant? Drugs available: Tylenol, Fuckitol, and Aleve.)
- Ox penis for virility. (I think its ironic when men eat this. I thought we had Viagra and Cialis?)
- Deer musk to rub on privates. (I have smelt that. Its rank. Nothing attractive about it.)
- Deer antlers for spiritual and physical powers. (I guess someone wants to be Harry Potter? People also use this for special occasion tonics for energy. I guess they haven’t heard of Vitamin B supplements yet. Stone Age Times for Sure.)
- Endangered Asian barred owls, hawks for soup to improve eyesight (You have got to be shitting me?)
- Endangered Imperial Eagle-feathers are rubbed on skin. (I guess osmosis really does work after all.)
- Snow leopards/Golden cats-tiger bone substitute in medicines.
It has
always been a held belief one should toy with, that if you believe in something
with strong evidence backing that belief to cause extreme and irreversible
damage then that belief should be done away with or changed. Think Slavery. There
is always a bad man but don’t discredit good people or their works.
There are
several articles online that point to such a problem that is well known throughout
the world. It is the illegal trade of bear bile. Briefly I will use bear as my
working example. I will use the term’ hunter’ as a unisex term.
Andrew E. Kramer
wrote a 2010 article in the New York Times entitled Russia-China Border,
Bear Paws Sell Best where Kramer reports bear paw and gall bladder, frogs,
tiger bones, deer musk, and spotted deer testicles were being shipped over the
border into China. Kramer also goes on to say in the article that the Siberian
population of Russian Brown bear is not affect. Was that true for 2013?
I found
another article dated 1 Aug 2012 in the Siberian Times citing a hunting expert
was brought in to assess if this bear graveyard (body count 17) was the result
of poaching. The review concluded cause of death was the result of snare
trapping. The differences in hunter versus poaching kills were in relation to
location of wound infliction on the body to distance. When a hunted by a
hunter, the bear was at liberty to walk or run off compromising the shot both
distance wise and body location. In the case of poaching, the bear’s capture
ensures a close range head shot. I almost assumed the meat was left intact as
the article stated only the paws, fat, bile, and skin were taken. When you
consider the hunter ideal of fair chase the bear has a running chance at
getting away to live another day before hitting the table as stew. The hunter
has a story to tell about the one to get away. A hunter doesn’t have to be
shamed of what he or she does. Poachers are nothing more than hit-and-run
bandits. Allegedly the illegal trade of wild bear parts was indeed getting more
prevalent.
At one point
the investigative reporter noted legal food was displayed in a butcher shop but
when asked about ‘wild animal specialty body parts’, the persons working there
directed them to sources that could provide such things. This behavior is
representative of how people don’t have a sense of right or wrong. Culture be
damned. People should be ashamed when they use their heritage and culture as a
modus operandi for destruction and harm. Worse yet is the morally bankrupt
people that provide illegal means as an option to procure wild animal body
parts/fluids when its globally considered wrong because of the sustainability
problem and damage it does to wild populations.
You could
think of it in terms of jellybeans. A teacher puts a jar of jellybeans in the
middle of class. She tells the class not to steal from her jar because she has
a limited supply of blue jellybeans which are her favorite. The teacher has
placed a small amount of blue jellybeans on the top. As a test, the teacher
walks down the hall, leaving her ten students to stare at this jar of special
jelly beans. All ten students decide it’s not worth getting caught so they don’t
steal the jelly beans. The teacher comes back to find none of the blue jelly
beans on top have been stolen. The bell rings. As the class leaves the teacher
steps outside to another classroom thinking the jelly beans are okay. When she
walks back to the class she looks in the jar to find the blue jelly beans and
more have been stolen.
Here the
teacher eluded the blue jelly beans were special making the class think they
were worth stealing even when she didn’t tell them why for certain. Once the thieves
got the idea to steal the jellybeans all they needed was time and opportunity.
What is so
special in the bile of a bear? Ursodeoxycholic acid.
After
reading about bear bile and how poachers steal it out of Russia or as they were
harvesting bear bile in farms in China I was vexed at the availability of a
drug sanctioned for treatment by the Food and Drug Administration that is
marketed as Actigall or URSO.
The primary disease it treats is
biliary cirrhosis which is an autoimmune disease where liver bile ducts are
damaged. Autoimmune basically means the body is attacking itself. Ursodeoxycholic
acid metabolisms the forms of cholesterol that cause gallstones. Since
pharmaceutical companies make this drug synthetically the treatment has a
consistent amount per pill for treatment unlike extracting the bile from a bear
where the consistency is different per bear. Here you have a ready available
option of synthetic pills for treatment that are probably not near the price of
having to buy actual bear bile. At this
point the choice between black market bear bile and synthetic bear bile pharmaceutical
tablet comes down to preference in the form of want not need. The need has been
met by a synthetic pill but homeopathic nitpickers ‘want’ the illegal gotten
gains of stolen bear bile contraband.
There is no real necessity to having
black market contraband. The black market can be equated to the relationship
between a drug dealer and a junkie. The person who sells is going to get quick
easy money until the honey hole dries up. The person buying it will have the seller’s
fingers up their nose until the product Is no longer available then magically,
they have a new replacement because of course as long as there is a gold vein
of money you can rest assured gold diggers are to be found.
My other idea on this
conundrum is when body parts/fluids are procured the transported between or
even across foreign countries that the transporter is maliciously exposing human
populations to disease. Once that animal body part lands in its final home in a
homeopathic shop where now the person processing it could possibly be exposed. Along with questionable handling practices,
selling Product X thereby spreads the potential to kill a lot of people through
human consumption or application. The only ingredient needed here is the right
piece of infected animal, the virus/germ/death bug and the ability for whatever lurks
there to jump ship to infect a population.
Where I
swing this back over the hunting fence is this: As a hunter how does this not
piss you off? A hunter legally goes out to hunt a bear and uses it for the sole
purpose of a food source and other utilities. The hunter is paying his/her hard
earned money for the legal privilege while some miscrit sneaks around stealing
anything that is not tied down. Hunters allocate time for wild game to flourish,
not take when and what they want without consideration. A hunted bear is not
suffering in a cage to be used like a Soda fountain where you go up with your
Big Gulp and fill’er up.
As hunters and
huntresses we should be activists on legislation that hinders poachers
acquiring what we should consider a ‘legal hunting food resource’ to one that
is nitpicky and wasteful based on requiring a certain body part or body fluid. Hunters
should be vigilant against black market fiends. For every bear that was killed
for a paw, or bile could be a healthy living specimen that can make other bears
to sustain a population. That healthy living bear could wonder of its own
accord until it is hunted by a hunter to feed his/her family without any
monetary gain.
The only gain is subsistence to the self which is perpetuated by
practices of give and take on the part of the hunter, conservationist and
others who strive to see the bear or any animal have the dignity at some kind
of life that isn’t disgraceful. This is the problem of homeopathic remedies
where wild animal body parts are required as ingredients. If synthetic options can be made to alleviate the harm to wildlife, why not accept that as an alternative to outdated practices especially if it does more harm than good. Here I would think one man's life isn't worth three bears when his endeavors are aberration to life itself even his.
Given the scientific world has made discoveries that utilize wild animals it has not continuously subjugated them well past cruelty when an alternative way has been found. Even sometimes activities have been stopped when unethical practices have been found out. Other countries need to recognize how valueable our wildlife is. Wildlife shouldn't be debased to no more than an object where it's worth is deemed only valuable on the scale of what we can get out of it willingly or not.
Erroneous beliefs,
phallic ideas of medicinal properties, personal distorted beliefs and fear
drive killing wild game to utilize only a portion of its carcass based on need
for product, fear, financial elitisms, and status. This is demonstrative of
true waste.
I have heard
the phrase here in the South, “Dumb as a cucumber.” I guess someone is eating a
lot of that too.
~Courtesy of the AOFH~
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