Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company  
The Boston Globe
April 10, 2002, Wednesday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. B1

LENGTH: 1156 words

HEADLINE: MAINE SPLIT OVER BEAR TRADE MEASURE IN CONGRESS MAY BAN SALE OF PARTS

BYLINE: By Sam Smith, Globe Correspondent

BODY:
BANGOR - In Tom Stevens's basement workshop sits a large chest freezer with a controversial payload: about 50 bear gallbladders, in organic shades of green, yellow, and maroon, wrapped individually in plastic bags.

Bear gallbladders are a staple of traditional Asian medicine, and Stevens, a burly fur trader in sweatpants, has been selling them since Maine legalized the trade in 1985. He pays about $12 an ounce to the hunters, guides, and meat cutters who supply them (they average about 3.5 ounces), and sells them for a modest profit to about 25 primarily Korean customers.

   "I want to utilize everything on the animal," he said. "They're harvested - so why, if something has a use, why wouldn't you use it?"

Four other states have a legal trade in bear parts - Vermont, New York, Idaho, and Wyoming - but Maine supplies at least half of the 3,000 to 4,000 bear gallbladders legally sold nationally.

That figure could soon fall. This week in Washington, a House-Senate conference committee is haggling over whether to include the Bear Protection Act as a provision in this year's federal farm bill. If passed, the act would outlaw the import, export, and interstate trade in bear viscera.

Many animal rights activists say the act is crucial to ending bear poaching and stopping the black market sale of bear parts. But it has an unlikely opponent in the World Wildlife Fund, the 40-year-old conservation organization with the familiar panda bear logo.

"I'm not convinced of any conservation benefits of [the Bear Protection Act]," said Craig Hoover, deputy director of Traffic North America, the wildlife-trade monitoring arm of the WWF. He said the black bear, with a population of approximately 900,000 in the United States and Canada, is a conservation success story - and that a new law would stretch an already taxed US Fish and Wildlife Service.

"They can't fulfill the responsibilities they have now, much less additional ones," Hoover said.

Traditional Asian medicine has long relied on animal parts, including some from endangered species, like rhino horn and tiger bone. The bile salts of bear gall bladders are used to treat everything from convulsions to sprains and hemorrhoids, and are often touted as aphrodisiacs. A synthetic form of bear bile is used in Western medicine to treat gallstones.

As the population of endangered bears in Asia has declined, the market has turned to black bears in North America, which are considered inferior to the Asian variety in their medicinal qualities but are legal to hunt. It is unknown how many bear gallbladders are exported illegally, but it is thought that most of them end up in US cities with large Asian populations.

In Maine, their sale was outlawed in 1980, then reinstated in 1985. Since then, bear gallbladders have become a lively side business for traders like Stevens. While about 90 percent of his business is selling leather and fur, he says he sells about 300 to 400 galls a year.

"It's a small part of my business, but if the bear gall went away, I'd notice it," he said.

A gallbladder is removed in the field, in a two- to three-minute process. It is cut and tied off, to avoid leaking bile, and peeled away from the liver, which it hugs tightly. Stevens buys the galls frozen, thaws them out, checks their quality - making sure they are tied off properly, cutting off any liver that may still be attached - and refreezes them. He says he throws away about 10 percent of the galls because they don't meet his standards.

"That's how I keep my customer base," he said. "They know I sell a quality product."

Stevens advertises his gallbladders once a year in The Maine Sportsman magazine, more to entice sellers than buyers, who he says have remained basically the same since he started. Most of his purchases are made during the fall bear season. Each is registered in a Maine hide dealer's log, noting the seller's name, license number, and signature.

Once a registered buyer like Stevens sells a gall, state tracking ends. Nonetheless, Maine wildlife officials estimate the vast majority of gallbladders leave the state, some illegally to destinations like Boston's Chinatown, where they are sold on the black market.

Initially authored as a free-standing bill, sponsored by Senator Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, the Bear Protection Act was attached to the Senate version of the 2002 farm bill, which passed in February. The House version does not include it. The bill is currently in a conference committee, which is meeting this week.

Proponents of the act say it will help stop a large portion of the illegal trade: bear galls bought purportedly for New York, for instance, but smuggled to an illegal destination such as Boston. They also say there is a value to simply reducing the trade in bear parts - the less trade allowed in the United States, they say, the less likely parts from endangered Asian bears can be camouflaged as American bear parts.

Among Maine wildlife managers, attitudes are split. Craig McLaughlin, the state's bear biologist, concedes that some gallbladders are bought and sold illegally, but says the bear population is healthy. Maine has about 23,000 black bears, up from 18,000 in 1990.

Terry Hunter, a sergeant investigator with the Maine Warden Service, is in favor of outlawing the bear parts trade because at times, he says, Maine has been "a clearinghouse" for gall bladders harvested illegally in other states and Canada. But with the price of galls dropping over the past five years, the trade has slowed, and he is not seeing as much illegal activity.

"Eight, 10 years ago, back in the boom of the trade" he said, "they were killing bears just for the gall."

Hunter said one bust in 1990 involved an Air Force pilot flying gallbladders from Loring Air Force base in northern Maine to Korea and selling them for $10,000 apiece.

Other states have seen major poaching problems. In Oregon in 1998, authorities broke up a poaching ring that, it was estimated, had been killing 50 to 100 bears a year and selling their gall bladders, often leaving the bears' carcasses in the woods. In 1999, in the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia, a band of 25 hunters was arrested for harvesting bear gall bladders.

Right now, poachers can make only about $50 for a gallbladder, authorities say. While poaching isn't a major concern in Maine, Hunter fears that if the Bear Protection Act becomes law the price will rise, and with it the incentive for poaching.

"I'm torn," he said. "I hate the trade, but if it's outlawed, there's going to be a lot more poaching."

Kevin Adams, the head of law enforcement at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, is also concerned, but for a different reason. "Without additional resources," he said, "we will have to stop doing something else to enforce the Bear Protection Act. And just what would the American public say that something else is?"

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, 1. Five states now offer a legal market for bear parts. Above, a black bear staring at an animal control officer in Lunenburg. / GLOBE STAFF FILE PHOTO / MARK WILSON 2. Tom Stevens, who sells bear gallbladders, displaying two of the organs in plastic bags at his home in Maine. Stevens also sells animal hides and furs. / GLOBE PHOTO / MICHAEL C. YORK

LOAD-DATE: April 10, 2002