Stopping the trade that experts fear could drive endangered bears to extinction means stopping demand for the "liquid gold" so prized as a traditional cure that it has fetched prices higher than gold, ounce-for-ounce, experts say.

"We need to stop buying," said Grace Gabriel, Asia Regional Director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, (IFAW).

"If we don't buy, they don't die".

Even with a new state-approved "free drip" method of extracting bile, China's incarcerated bears lead miserable, pain-wracked lives, said campaigner Jill Robinson, who says she won't rest until the 7,000 bears kept on China's farms are free.

"(It's) undeniably cruel, undeniably wrong, from start to finish," said Robinson, head of Animals Asia, at her bear rescue centre in southwest Sichuan Province, the home of China's iconic panda, which draw hordes of tourists each year.

"I mean no one's going to die from lack of bear bile".

Listed as vulnerable by the World Conservation Union since 1979, the bear's rarity does not protect them from the estimated 8 billion yuan (US$1 billion) domestic traditional Chinese medicine market which does not care about "bunnyhuggers" protests about cruelty, she said.

"(The authorities) know the death rate on their farms, they know the suffering it causes, they see the infections and cuts on those bears bodies".

"But still they let it continue because they're driven by the dollar rather than by a genuine desire to save lives," she added as she watched two rescued bears tussle on top of a log while others cooled off in a pool at the rescue centre.

BATTERY HEN BEARS

Covert photos and videos of the large, 400-pound black bears lying immobilised in tiny cages with stainless steel catheters protruding from their bellies provoked an international outcry when first leaked to the press in the 1990s.

Since then wildlife officials say farms have cleaned up. No new farm licenses have been issued since 1992, catheters were banned in favour of a "free-drip" method to drain bile straight from the caged bear's gall bladders in 1996, and farm numbers cut from over 480 in the 1990s to 78 in 2006.

Wang Weisheng, director of the state government's Wildlife Management Division, says outsiders may find it strange, but China has every right to domesticate wild animals such as bears to supply its medicine markets.

"If a facility is called a farm, it means that it is the legal right of the facility to sell its products, such as chicken farms etcetera," said Wang.

One bear in a farm saves hundreds in the wild by providing a steady flow of legal, farmed bile that meets demand so well that illegal poachers are cut out of the equation, Wang explained.

"Captive (farm) breeding is regarded as making an indirect contribution to (the bears') status by some experts," he said.

LOST BEARINGS

Shy and solitary, the black bears whose bile contains the magic ingredient - ursodeoxycholic acid -- have few fans compared to fellow Sichuan mammals, the pandas, said wildlife policy expert Peter J. Li.

"Because pandas are cute, the communist government started sending them as gifts ... International enthusiasm for pandas made them a star. The Chinese government cannot ignore them".

"But black bears. You have them everywhere, even in Europe," Li said. "To change the ancient, traditional attitude towards black bears as clumsy and stupid takes time."