Andean bears are poached mercilessly for a silly reason

Andean, or spectacled, bears are South America’s only bear species, but they may not be around in large numbers for much longer.

The bears are being driven closer to extinction for the silliest of reasons: quackery.

These mid-sized, short-faced mountain bears, which sport distinctive light-colored markings on their face, inhabit parts of northern and western Latin America, including Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Peru. Yet throughout their range they are facing not only habitat loss but a clear and present danger too in the form of poachers.

Many locals hunt the animals in the belief that a potion that contains a bit of the bear’s penis bone works magic as a “sex potion.” The concoction, called Seven Roots, is made by traditional healers who mix white rum with seven types of tree bark, honey and pollen. Shamans also add a snake’s head and parts of a male bear’s baculum, or penis bone, to the mixture.

The potion is believed by many locals to have aphrodisiac and invigorative properties. “If you have sexual impotence, you should scrape a part of the bear’s penis bone and place it in the drink,” a woman who sells the traditional tonic in the city of Chachapoyas in Peru told National Geographic. “However,” she adds, “if you want to possess this animal’s strength, you need to put in whole bones.”

Local men with erectile disfunction would be much better off with Viagra or other medical stimulants, but age-old beliefs in shamanic cures continue to persist. It is that the bears that end up suffering the consequences of such atavistic notions. They are routinely shot on sight across the Andes.

The animals are listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) because their number has fallen to somewhere between 13,000 and 18,000. In Peru, only about 5,000 of them remain in the wild.

And nor is it only their penis bones that shamans seek for their concoctions. These traditional healers also seek to stock up on fat from the bears. They use it in “bear butter,” which is believed to relieve muscle pain, fix broken bones and cure colds, among other benefits.

Beliefs in the medicinal benefits of animal parts aren’t restricted to Latin America, of course. Across much of Southeast Asia, for instance, sun bears and Asiatic black bears continue to be hunted because of a persisting belief in countries such as Laos and Vietnam that their bile and other parts can cure a variety of diseases.