About My Blog.

Welcome! This is "Catatonic Digressions."
Most readers don't understand my blog's title. It's an old inside joke from a forum long gone. I was going to change it, but since it's been "confusing" for so long, I decided to leave it. Don't worry about what it means, the content of the blog is what matters...or not

Unfortunately, my blog isn't what I set out for it to be. A sick woman in Orleans, MA began stalking me in 2007 on Myspace. Since that time, this woman obsessed over me to the point of having the police come to her home and threaten to confiscate her laptop. She is a racist and anti-Semite.I could no longer blog freely, knowing this nutbag was just going to take the photos I'd post and put them on a child exploitation website.

This site is only up for the information it has that others might need to know about. That information is about "Seal Shepherd" aka Michael McDade, Kat McAboy aka Marilyn McAboy and Veronika Hompo, a self-proclaimed Nazi.


I'm a real person. I'm real and I don't pretend to be someone I'm not. After years of putting up with online abuse by manipulative, pathological liars, attention whores or narcissists, I've had it. Don't bother me with pathetic drama. I have no time for these types of people and their need to absorb others' time and attention.

This blog is no longer used. I've retired it for the most part unless something very important comes up.

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Friday, April 18, 2014

Freedom! 130 Bears to Be Rescued From Chinese Bile Farm | TakePart



This article originally appeared on takeparthttp://www.takepart.com/article/2014/04/16/freedom-130-bears-be-rescued-chinese-bile-extraction-farm?cmpid=tpanimals-eml-2014-04-19-bears

Freedom! 130 Bears to Be Rescued From Chinese Bile Farm

The bears spend their lives in cramped cages being tapped for their bile, which is then dried and sold as a traditional medicine.



Bears to Be Rescued From Chinese Bile Farm
(Photo: Reuters)
 
John R. Platt covers the environment, technology, philanthropy, and more for ‘Scientific American,’ ‘Conservation,’ ‘Lion,’ and other publications.
More than 130 bears living in miserable conditions at a Chinese bile-extraction farm will soon get a significant lifestyle upgrade.
After a yearlong negotiation, Animals Asia Foundation has struck a deal to rescue all of the Asiatic black bears living at Flower World, a state-owned horticulture and landscaping company based in Nanning.
Next month the 28 sickest bears will be making a 745-mile journey to the organization's sanctuary in Chengdu. After that, the foundation plans to convert the Flower World farm into a sanctuary for the remaining bears, a process that will take two years and cost $5 million. That price will also cover the first three years of caring for the bears.
On bile farms, bears, mostly Asiatic brown bears but also sun bears and brown bears, spend most of their lives confined to small, rusty cages where their gall bladders are repeatedly tapped—sometimes up to three times a day—and drained of bile.
The bodily fluid is sold as a component of traditional Asian medicine. The bile doesn't have any real medicinal qualities, but that hasn’t stopped the vile practice. Up to 10,000 bears live on these farms, which can produce as much as 30 tons of powdered bile every year.
Flower World began breeding bears for the bile trade in 2004 but stopped extraction two years ago. "We now believe the bile-extraction process is very cruel,” said Yan Shaohong, Flower World’s general manager. He said the bears appear healthy, but many of them “have inner damage and inflammation, otherwise why do they require so many antibiotics?"


Jill Robinson, Animals Asia founder, praised Yan for his "moral courage" in standing up to the bear-bile trade. Many of the bears suffer from blindness, tooth problems, and "severe behavior" due to their confinement, she said. The 21 bears that had their bile extracted at Flower World will need surgery to remove their damaged gall bladders.
Public opposition to bear-bile farming is on the rise in China. "We understand through surveys and other feedback that the majority of people here do not want bear-bile farming to continue," Robinson said. "In that sense we are providing a sustainable model that shows how bile farms can be converted to sanctuaries and that there is true potential for bear farmers to lead by example in now creating peaceful havens for bile-farmed bears." 

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