Initially, bile was collected from wild bears which were killed and the gall and its contents cut from the body. In the early 1980s, methods of extracting bile from live bears were developed in North Korea and farming of bile bears began. This rapidly spread to China and other regions. Bile bear farms were started to reduce hunting of wild bears, with the hope that if bear farms raised a self-sustaining population of productive animals, poachers would have little motivation to capture or kill bears in the wild.