Asian black bear
Ursus thibetanus
— Where the name comes from
Ursus is the Latin for bear; thibetanus points to Tibet, although the species ranges far beyond. The English name, moon bear, comes from the white crescent it carries on its chest — a mark that in Japanese and Korean tradition has made it a figure of stories and of mountains. It is the bear of the moon, and no name is more exact for an animal seen almost only at night.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Carnivores
- Habitat
- Deciduous and montane forest, from 1,000 to 3,500 metres
- Range
- From Iran and the Himalaya to China, Korea, Japan and Taiwan
- Size
- 120–190 cm long, 60–200 kg
- Diet
- Omnivore — acorns, fruit, insects, honey, occasionally meat
- Lifespan
- 25–30 years
— Characteristics
- 01
It is the most arboreal of bears: it builds platforms of broken branches on which it eats and rests.
- 02
It walks on its hind legs alone more often than other bears, sometimes for tens of metres.
- 03
The white crescent on the chest differs in every individual, like a fingerprint.
— What sets it apart
Its bile contains ursodeoxycholic acid, a substance genuinely active on the bile ducts, and that has been its condemnation: for decades thousands of bears have been kept in cramped cages with permanent catheters in the gall bladder, on farms dedicated to extraction. The molecule has long been synthesised in the laboratory and costs less, but the practice has outlived its own necessity. It is a case in which pharmacology had already solved the problem, and the suffering continued out of habit and out of market.
