HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA--The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) today urged the leaders of Nova Scotia's political parties to ban the province's legal export of bear gall bladders. The province is the last in Canada to allow bear galls to be legally exported.

Conservation organizations have been attempting to end the legal export of bear galls across Canada for some two decades. This was due to concerns that the parts have led to increased illegal trade in galls as an aphrodisiac in traditional oriental medicines.

Nova Scotia's export of bear gall bladders has always been small, averaging around 100 galls per year and requiring a complex bureaucracy to monitor the trade as the galls were sealed in a box and provided the appropriate permits from the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

The trade in bear galls has been a major factor in the poaching of black bears across North America and the reason that they have received CITES protection.

Earlier this week, Canadians were given a harsh reminder that a strong market still exists for gall bladders when two Alberta bear researchers returned from Kamchatka bearing news that their entire research group of grizzlies had been killed, a gall bladder nailed to their cabin as a warning.

"I am dismayed that Nova Scotia would be the last province to act on this issue given that it is usually a leader on natural resources issues," IFAW Provincial Issues Coordinator Rob Sinclair said. "It is clearly time the province join the rest of Canada in recognizing that the legal trade in bear galls only helps spur the illegal trade."