BANGKOK: Sixteen undernourished Asiatic black bear cubs have been found in a home in Laos capital Vientiane by a conservation charity, the largest rescue of the year.
Across Asia, thousands of the animals are kept as pets or farmed to extract their bile for use in costly traditional medicine.
"When we arrived at the house there were bear cubs everywhere," said Fatong Yang, animal manager with the charity. "Cubs this small are extremely vulnerable. In the wild their mothers would never leave them and we suspect the mothers were killed by poachers," Fatong said in a statement over the weekend.
Wildlife conservation charity Free the Bears said they found 17 cubs in a private home in Laos early last week, but that one of them had already died. One Laotian person has been taken into custody, the group said, while police continue to search for the owner of the property.
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