The cast of Downton Abbey come to the aid of Guangxi’s moon bears
Mrs Patmore, aka Lesley Nicol, with a little help from her Downton Abbey colleagues and a converted bile farmer, is on a mission to save China's captive moon bears, writes Simon Parry
Mrs Patmore's famously flustered features crumple as she watches a team of vets and nurses tend to a sick animal on a farm in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region where bears have, for years, been imprisoned in tiny cages and milked for their bile.
"This bear has had a terrible, terrible life," says Lesley Nicol. "All she has known is appalling betrayal from mankind, and it has all been for money - there is absolutely no point to it. Why she's not screaming and raging at us, I don't know. I feel totally ashamed."
About 9,600km from the refined manners of , the indignation of the actress who plays the kindly cook Mrs Patmore is very real - and the drama unfolding before her eyes is as brutal as the suffocating subtropical heat.
On a week's break from filming the fifth series of the hit television show, Nicol has travelled to the jagged limestone mountains near the China-Vietnam border to see the work of a Hong Kong charity whose mission it is to stop the bear-bile trade. She rolls up her sleeves in a makeshift field animal hospital at the farm, an hour's drive from the city of Nanning, and helps vets from Animals Asia carry out health checks on sick bears that have been subjected to excruciatingly painful bile extraction.
More than 10,000 Asiatic black bears - an endangered species known as moon bears for the cream-coloured crescents on their chests - have been confined in cages from birth in farms across China. In many cases, the cages are too small for them to even turn around in.
Crude catheters are jabbed into their abdomens every day to extract bile that sells for about 4,000 yuan (HK$5,000) a kilo and is prescribed by traditional medicine doctors as a cure for everything from haemorrhoids, sore throats and epilepsy to hangovers. Bear bile contains high levels of ursodeoxycholic acid, a substance that helps animals avoid problems with gallstones during hibernation, and is taken as medicine in a variety of forms - in teas, tonics and wines, as tablets face packs, toothpaste and shampoo.
