Traditional Chinese medicine uses ingredients derived from many wildlife species, creating demand that drives illegal poaching and wildlife farm operations with significant welfare consequences.
Traditional medicine wildlife welfare spans a spectrum from severe individual welfare harms to population-level conservation impacts. Bear bile farming causes some of the most documented individual suffering in the wildlife trade: bears confined for years in cages that prevent all natural movement, subjected to painful extraction procedures, developing physical and psychological damage from confinement. Pangolins, the most trafficked mammal in the world, are both killed for scales and farmed in conditions that stress a species poorly adapted to captivity. The welfare and conservation case for transitioning TCM to synthetic and plant-based alternatives is strong and scientifically supported.