Subscribe to one of our news e-mail lists . The agreement comes following international pressure to ban the practice used to obtain the bear's bile.
Activists say farming bears is unnecessary and barbaric.
In the farms, bears with catheters surgically implanted into their gall bladders are confined in restraining cages so that bile can be extracted. But the surgery to insert the implants is crude and unsanitary and many of the bears die as a result. The animals that survive spend the rest of their lives suffering a confined existence in tiny wire crates, where they cannot even stretch, enduring painful daily extraction of their bile. It is a lucrative practice for the farmers. It is used for by Chinese to treat a variety of maladies, such as fever, liver illnesses and sore eyes.