The government is cracking down on the sale of products containing bear parts in traditional Chinese medicine shops and planning tougher punishments for offenders, the Wildlife Department said today.

The move is in response to a report by the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) that revealed seventy-eight percent of traditional Chinese medicine shops in five major cities in Malaysia were selling bear bile in the form of powder, flakes or crystals.

Apart from carrying out spot checks on these shops laws will be tightened, fines raised five-fold and jail terms doubled, the department's acting director of enforcement, Khairiah Mohd Shariff, told AFP .

Under the present Wildlife Protection Act 1972, penalties can only be imposed on people trading in specific animal parts such as bear gall bladders, bile and skin.

"If the parts have been mixed with other properties, the product will then be classified as a drug or medicine and we cannot enforce the penalties," she said.

New legislation will include mixed medicines.

Tougher punishments

"As it is now, the existing Act is not a deterrent to the offenders, and we want to impose tougher punishments in line with regional legislation," she said.

"At present, for the trading of such parts, the maximum sentences are a RM5,000 fine or three-year jail term or both," she added.

Khairiah said most bear bile in Malaysia was imported from China.

The WSPA report said it was concerned with the inhumane treatment of bears farmed in China, where the animals are "milked" for their bile from open wounds, a process causing intense pain.

The trading of animal parts is illegal under the Convention for the International Trade in Endangered Species to which Malaysia is a signatory. AFP