A source of national pride

I’ve been working on a project looking at the consumption of bear bile in China for the past few years. The consumption of bear bile is mainly for traditional Chinese medicine, and it’s been used as a medicinal product as far back as 700 B.C. Traditional Chinese medicine is incredibly important in China, especially now. It’s being promoted more as a source of national pride. It’s very integral to lots of people’s idea of what their traditional culture is. Bear bile is an interesting example of a traditional medicine, because not only does it have this traditional use, but it also has proven medical effectiveness of treating various diseases. In the US and the UK, we use the active ingredient from bear bile, which is called ursodeoxycholic acid. We use this acid, too, in medicines here. We use it to treat liver disease, and it’s the only accepted treatment for some liver diseases in both the US and the UK.

Extraction from live bears

Photo by Jack Nevitt

In China, bear bile is used to treat liver disease and gallbladder issues, as well as eye problems. The source of bear bile changed quite recently. Historically, it only came from the gallbladders of wild bears. They would have been hunted in the wild, had their gallbladders removed and then that would be used to make the medicine. In the 1980s and early 90s, bear farms started to be introduced across Asia. These farms held large numbers of bears, sometimes thousands. These bears would be kept for a long time and have their bile drained, sometimes on a daily basis. So this is extraction from live bears, and this bile would then be used to make various different products for the medicinal industry. At one point, these products were also being used for other things that were not medicinal, like shampoo and toothpaste, but that has been phased out definitely in China now. In China, it’s a very interesting case, because you have a legal and an illegal trade. Farmed bile in China is legal, whereas any kind of wild hunted bears are illegal, because it’s illegal to hunt bears in China.

Preference for wild products?

It’s so interesting from a consumer motivation perspective, because you have these medicinal products that are incredibly ingrained in traditional culture, but also you have legal and illegal options. You have different product types. You have traditional-medicine doctors who may be prescribing these products. So, often when you are considering the motivations for products such as bear bile, you have to consider all of these different potential drivers of purchase. You have to think about why people are using these products, why people don’t choose to use a synthetic alternative and why people aren’t willing to switch from wild products to farmed products. That might be around a preference for wild products, the idea that the wild products may be more traditional or purer. All of these things can bring us to an understanding of consumer motivations and how consumer behaviour might be driving this market.

Understanding consumer motivation

When trying to understand consumer motivations in a complex market like the bear bile market in China, you have legal and illegal products, lots of different product forms, intermediaries who might be controlling demand for trade, doctors who might be prescribing or not prescribing these products and traditional and cultural knowledge that might be influencing consumer behaviour. The best way to do it is to use lots of different methods and try and triangulate this data to try to understand what consumers are doing and why. One of the things I’ve been doing is using various methods to look at what drives consumers to buy a bear bile product. We were using something called a “choice experiment”, which is a method borrowed from economics that presents consumers with different products and asks them to choose which product they would buy. They get certain information about these products. For example, we were interested whether price was more important than the wild or farmed source of the product. We would ask people if they would buy this product at this price if they could get it from this certain place, maybe from a doctor directly, or they would have to buy it somewhere informal, for example, online.

Interesting social influences

We found that people whose parents and grandparents have always used bile tend to be the ones who are more likely to use bile, and seek out wild bile, which suggests some quite interesting social influences on consumer behaviour. This is something that we might not always consider. We might think that a consumer will just buy the cheapest product, or the product that they prefer because they’ve used it before, but we need to be considering all these things that might be going on in the background as well. For bear bile in China, what’s interesting is that we’ve been talking to traditional-medicine practitioners and asking them what consumers want, and also what they do. These medical practitioners are saying that consumers don’t care about whether something is wild or farmed. They will come to them and say: I have a problem; I need something to fix this problem. Then they will take whatever they’re given. They don’t care whether it’s wild or farmed. That’s a very interesting part of the picture as well, because without that information from the practitioners, who are key to this whole trade and to the motivations of consumers, we’re not going to understand what’s happening there.

Incredibly controversial

Photo by leungchopan

Farming bears is something that has been happening in China and other countries in Asia for some time and is slowly being phased out in different places. One thing that’s important to consider is: what happens if these products are phased out? When farmed products disappear, what will consumers do? Will they instead turn back to wild products, which then could threaten wild bear populations, or will they just turn to another widely available, easy-to-find product that might be from plants, some other animal species or potentially synthetic products? When you think about consumer motivations and bear farming, you need to think about what will happen if it stops. Bear farming is incredibly controversial. The animal welfare implications of bear farming have been highlighted in multiple countries. In Vietnam, for example, bear farming is now illegal. There is no regulation on the bear farms and bears are living in awful conditions. There’s an important ethical question there about whether we should be farming bears for these purposes.

Increase or decrease demand?

In China, bear farming is legal. It is more highly regulated than in other countries. There is still criticism about welfare in some cases, but what’s interesting to think about in terms of having that legally available product is how the consumers react to it. From a conservation perspective, considering and acknowledging the importance of animal welfare, but just focusing on the conservation side of things, we don’t know whether introducing a legal product into a market, or introducing farmed bear bile into a market where there’s only ever been wild product, will increase or decrease demand for that wild product. That sounds like such a basic thing, but it’s something that’s unknown in lots of wildlife markets.

Consumer behaviour difficult to predict

In the case of bear bile, people have been debating this for a long time. So now that you can go to a local pharmacy, medicine market or your doctor and get a bear bile product prescribed to you, does that make you think it’s a legitimate product? If we then phase out the farmed product, will you start thinking that the wild product is legitimate because you used to use it? Will people who would never have used the wild product in the first place then start switching to that wild product if they can’t access farmed anymore? Do they think the farmed bile isn’t working and the wild product is more effective? So, there are questions around consumers and how they react to different products that are largely unanswered for lots of different markets, but for bear bile I think the complexity is huge. The market for bear bile has definitely expanded since farming came in. Whether those people would switch to wild products if farms disappeared is something that we don’t know. Most people would probably just keep going with the easy options of using synthetic products or something they can still get from their doctor. A small number would probably start using wild products again, but I think the biggest problem is that we just don’t know how people would behave, because consumer behaviour is difficult to predict.

A trans-disciplinary approach

It’s often attractive to think that there is a simple solution for illegal wildlife trade, something like banning all wildlife trade, which has been suggested a lot recently and is something people are drawn to. Because of its simplicity, it just sounds nice. Unfortunately, wildlife trade is incredibly complex. There are too many different species involved. There are too many different supply chains. There are so many different people and motivations for taking part in the wildlife trade that we need a trans-disciplinary approach. We need people who understand the economics of these markets. We need people who understand how policymakers think and how different policy interventions might affect consumer behaviour. We need social scientists who understand how to study consumer behaviour to try to make predictions about what people might do in the face of different policy changes. That’s something that conservation has been embracing recently, especially around illegal wildlife trade. There are more and more papers coming out. There is so much research now focusing on the social science of illegal wildlife trade and trying to bring in experts from different places to try to answer some of the questions that people can’t answer on their own. You need a team of lots of people with different skills and experiences to be able to answer those questions.

Our relationship with nature

Photo by Arief Budy Kusuma

What the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us is that we need to drastically re-evaluate our relationship with nature, with animals, whether wild animals being legally or illegally traded or domestic animals. The risk of zoonotic disease is clearly high from wild animals, and there are higher-and much lower-risk species, which can be traded or interacted with. Understanding the risk is what’s most important, and taking that kind of nuanced risk-based approach: understanding that there are complexities there, that certain species will be higher-risk than others, and putting measures in place using different interventions to try to reduce those risks. With this pandemic, we think about risks from wild animals that might be bringing these diseases in, but domesticated animals can often be host animals that transmit those diseases to people. It can be tempting to say that we should just end all wildlife trade or end all interaction with wildlife, and that is a lovely, simple idea – but in practice, it would not be feasible. It’s much more useful to take this nuanced approach and understand the complexities of what’s happening; understand that people, even if you ban something, will still be using wildlife. People will still be interacting with wildlife. People in certain countries may still be converting habitat and bringing themselves into close proximity with animals, which might pose a disease risk. Re-evaluating that relationship between us and nature, and wild animals and domesticated animals, is essential for moving forward and making sure that risks are minimised in the future.

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The bear bile trade and consumer behaviour towards wildlife products

Hinsley, A., & ‘t Sas-Rolfes, M. (2020). Wild assumptions? Questioning simplistic narratives about consumer preferences for wildlife products. People and Nature, 2(4), 972–979.

Challender, D., Hinsley, A., Veríssimo, D., et al. (2020). Coronavirus: why a blanket ban on wildlife trade would not be the right response. The Conversation.

Chinese medicine and our relationship to nature