Traditional medicine demand drives trafficking of bears, pangolins, rhinos, tigers, and many other species. Understanding the welfare implications of wildlife use in traditional medicine informs demand reduction advocacy.
Traditional medicine wildlife use welfare encompasses both the individual suffering of animals used in these systems and the population-level welfare of species reduced to functionally extinct populations by demand. Bear farming involves perhaps the most concentrated ongoing welfare abuse connected to traditional medicine: bears kept in crush cages for bile extraction over years to decades experience chronic pain, psychological suffering from severe confinement, and stress from repeated extraction procedures. The effectiveness argument is particularly relevant for advocacy: most scientific analysis finds no therapeutic benefit from traditional medicine wildlife products that synthetic or plant alternatives do not provide. Demand reduction that combines welfare arguments with efficacy skepticism and alternative provision has shown more success than supply-side approaches that simply raise prices.