This galling tale of animal cruelty is hard to bear
Bear bile shampoo, anyone? How about some bear bile toothpaste? Got a nippy tummy? Sore throat? Cancer? Bear bile powder, that’s what you need. Bears About the House (BBC Two) wasn’t a completely harrowing watch – more than 50 per cent of it was made up of an adorable sun bear cub called Mary rampaging around a house, chewing furniture – but the footage of the bear bile farms in Laos made your stomach churn. Enormous, hulking bears, trapped in cages no bigger than they were, holes pierced into their abdomen so that bile could be drained from their gall bladder to be used in “traditional” Asian medicine. On average, the bears would be in those cages for eight years. And then they would die.
Conservationist Giles Clark, who you may remember a couple of years back taking in an orphaned jaguar cub, was positively shaking with anger when he found the above products – all illegal – openly on sale in a Laos cornershop. He was in southeast Asia to help the charity Free the Bears, along with the Laos government, expand a bear sanctuary, as the country set about tackling the chronic illegal animal trade. It is estimated that 10,000 bears are kept in captivity in the region. Five-month-old Mary was destined for a gruesome lifetime on a bile farm before she was rescued.
The gimmick here was that Clark was taking in another wildly unsuitable baby pet – in this case, Mary – in order to suckle it back to health and freedom. Though in reality, he too was a guest, at the home of Free the Bears chief executive, Matt Hunt, who had taken Mary in when her mother was killed by poachers. Together, they fattened her up, helped her gain confidence and slowly reintroduced her to a normal life. “She’s just having a really nice time being a bear,” said Clark, beaming like a proud parent.
Quite rightly, seeing as Clark was spending 12 months on this operation, his wife, Kathryn, flew out to help. She was there, we were told, “to learn what it is like for a bear trapped in a farm”, which briefly raised the alarming idea that she would be stuck in a tiny cage and have her gall bladder drained. Thankfully that was not the case, though I did feel for Kathryn, having come all that way, as her husband only had eyes for Mary. It would have been instructive to have more input from the local people, those who ran the sanctuary for instance, but this was still a salutary reminder that, at a time when humans are under threat from
‘People think I don’t like cats, but that’s not true,” said Paul O’grady, who could have pulled the other one. O’grady, who spends so much time at the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home they could start charging him rent (or at least give him a wage), was back in south London in For the Love of Dogs: Back in Business (ITV). Back in March, as the country went into lockdown, the animal shelter was forced to close its doors to the public for the first time since it opened in 1860. This meant 160 dogs – and, play along Paul, cats – had to be rehomed immediately. They couldn’t get them out the door quick enough. It was raining cats and dogs.
Mainly dogs. O’grady, even shorn of his Lily Savage persona and get-up, is an effortlessly charismatic presence, the sort of person who you’d love to spend a gossipy evening with, provided he didn’t turn his acerbic gaze on you. He’s the black-sheep uncle who your mother tells you not to talk to at weddings and funerals, but there you are, several Pernods down, having a whale of a time. At Battersea he’s in his element, shuffling around the shelter, tickling pooches and sticking puppies in his coat. It’s hard to know if he’s a help or a hindrance to the staff, butting in during meetings and picking over the dogs as if the shelter were an Argos catalogue. Either way, he must liven up another day of litter trays and inoculations.
It’s a pleasant show, though it does tend to drag, as O’grady ruffles yet another dog’s fur and tuts at how it was abandoned by owners who had no idea what caring for a dog involved. His love for the dogs is in every fibre of his being. In this episode, they carted him off to the moggies too, which helped a bit with the entertainment. O’grady might protest that he’s fine with cats, but when he switches from canine to feline, a light goes out. His nose wrinkles, he picks his way down the corridors more gingerly, he looks, ahem, neutered. You’re a dog man, Paul, there’s no shame in that.
Bears About the House ★★★★
Paul O’grady’s For the Love of Dogs: Back in Business ★★★