History
Until about 30 years ago, the only way to acquire bear bile was by killing a wild animal and removing its gall bladder. This organ itself is a popular ingredient in Chinese medicine. In the early 1980s, bear farms began appearing in North Korea, before spreading to China, where the practice gained popularity, and south into Vietnam.
Read more about this topic: Bile Bear
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“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
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“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)