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Consuming exotic animals
By Denis D. Gray
April 26, 2004
Tachileik — Furry bear paws lie next to neatly arranged skins of jungle cats,
skulls of monkeys and horns of mountain goats. The parts of vanishing species
from Southeast Asia's forests are laid out for Chinese buyers seeking sex
boosters, cures for cancer and exotic food.
"Very strong. It can fight with a tiger, so it's good for sex," the vendor
says, pointing to a pair of wild buffalo horns priced at $125 and explaining
that in powder form they'll surely enhance virility because of the animal's
power.
A sizable quantity of wildlife is felled to supply dealers in this scruffy town
on the Thai-Burmese border. But Tachileik is just one node of a trade network
that funnels fauna and flora from across the region to satisfy a seemingly
insatiable demand in China.
There, millions of people still believe that a rhino horn prevents convulsions,
pickled turtle flippers increase longevity and fresh snake blood makes for a
potent aphrodisiac. And with China's growing affluence, more can afford exotic
wildlife dishes once served only at banquets of the elite.
Having strained China's domestic supply, the network's tentacles are extending
to scoop up pangolins in Indonesia, snakes from Vietnam, dendrobium orchids in
Laos and the few remaining tigers and bears in Burma.
"The biggest problem facing wildlife in Southeast Asia is its domestic
consumption in China. The Chinese are vacuuming it up," said Steven Galster,
who heads the conservation group WildAid Asia.
Disappearing species
Despite efforts by the Chinese government to curb the trade, ecologists agree
the current harvest is unsustainable and inevitably will lead to the
eradication of species.
"It doesn't look good. We are at the stage where a lot of species are on the
edge. There haven't been a lot of extinctions, but there will be soon," said
James Compton, who heads the Southeast Asian office of Traffic, an
international treaty agency that monitors trade in wildlife.
Because much of the trade is illegal and often conducted in remote areas, it's
difficult to come up with hard numbers. But Mr. Compton and others offer some
indications of its scale and range:
• Researchers have a far better chance of finding rare turtles in the markets
of Shanghai or Guangzhou than the wilds of Southeast Asia, where more than half
the species is listed as endangered.
As much as 10,000 tons of freshwater turtles are annually traded in the region
for use in food and traditional medicine, creating what the experts call an
"Asian turtle crisis."
In Laos, villagers who a decade ago could sell a golden turtle, the blood of
which is said to cure cancer, for $100 now get $1,000.
"If a Chinese industrialist has a tumor, he'll offer anything," said Roland
Eve, who directs the World Wide Fund for Nature in Laos.
• The tiny seahorse is classified as vulnerable worldwide, chiefly because in
dried form it is used in Chinese traditional medicine to treat asthma, heart
disease, impotence and other ills.
Project Seahorse, a conservation group, estimates that 20 million of the
creatures are taken each year in the South China Sea and elsewhere, with 95
percent ending up in Chinese apothecaries.
• Having decimated the pangolin populations in Laos, Thailand, Burma and China,
smugglers now seek the scaly anteater in Malaysia and Indonesia. In the first
eight months of 2003, about 10,000 animals smuggled from the Indonesian
archipelago were seized in southern Thailand.
Selling for $45 a pound in Shanghai, pangolin meat is regarded as highly
nutritious, while its scales are prescribed for ailments ranging from skin
diseases to lack of milk in breast-feeding mothers.
The region's pangolins, snakes and freshwater turtles are now the most
intensely sought-after species, having eclipsed the trade in tiger bone, rhino
horn and bear gall bladder because of the decimation of the latter species and
tougher policing of the smuggling of those parts.
Smuggling routes
The harvesters of wildlife in Southeast Asia generally are poor villagers and
fishermen who sell to local markets or small-time dealers, who pass the
products into the well-established, sophisticated trade networks crisscrossing
the region.
The big-time operators, say WildAid and Traffic, often employ the same routes
used for smuggling drugs, people or weapons, seeking passages where corruption
is rife and law enforcement lax. Authorities have nabbed shipments of drugs
stuffed into dead animals and of frozen shrimp with iced pangolin or snakes
layered beneath them.
The routes are sometimes long and circuitous. A wildlife shipment from Sumatra
in Indonesia might pass through Malaysian-Chinese middlemen in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia, who bribe airport officials and fly the cargo by private plane to
Vientiane, Laos. It can then be trucked to Vietnam and finally to China through
thriving Vietnamese-Chinese wildlife ventures. Singapore and Thailand also are
important transit countries.
En route, documents are forged or altered to comply with the U.N. Convention on
International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which most countries in the
region, including China, have signed.
Some documents falsely list the source of flora and fauna to farms to get
around trade in species proscribed under CITES, although these actually might
have originated in the wild or been "laundered" through enterprises that breed
musk deer, bears, tigers and other endangered species. On farms in China,
thousands of live bears are "milked" for their bile, said to fight liver
disease, through steel catheters implanted in their gall bladders.
Although enforcement efforts have been stepped up in recent years, Mr. Compton
of Traffic said far more manpower and funds are needed, especially after trade
liberalization in the region and the proliferation of air and road links with
China.
"Everyone has been biting around the edges, catching the poor villager or
trader — the little guys — while the big shipments go free. It's just like the
early days of the war on drugs," said Mr. Galster of WildAid Asia.
Fighting tradition
But as in the drug war, conservationists say, strikes against suppliers must be
complemented by education to lessen demand.
"When the buying stops, the killing can, too," is the theme of a widely shown
WildAid television spot featuring Asian and international celebrities such as
kung fu actor Jackie Chan. Peter Benchley, author of the best-selling novel
"Jaws," urges people to shun shark's fin soup.
In China, the world's No. 1 consumer of wildlife, the government has begun
trying to curb the trade. It pledged in 1999 to secure sustainable trade in
wild plants and animals and has banned use of internationally protected
species.
Last year, in the face of SARS, thought to have sprung from civet cats in
southern China's wildlife markets, officials clamped curbs on the eating of
wildlife and initiated the "Spring Thunderstorm" campaign to go after illegal
traders. Early in 2004, authorities made the largest wildlife haul in modern
Chinese history, seizing the skins of 31 Bengal tigers, 581 Asian leopards and
778 otters worth more than $1.2 million.
"I think the Chinese government is trying to do something about it, but it is
not easy. This is such a part of traditional culture," said Qin Liyi, an
officer with the World Conservation Union office in Beijing.
It is also a multibillion-dollar industry, built on consumer beliefs arising
from 3,000 years of traditional Chinese medicine.
The complex, comprehensive approach to health includes the use of more than
11,000 plants and 1,500 animals, and some of its tenets, such as a holistic
approach to well-being, have won praise worldwide.
But many of the animal parts used for medicines or tonics have been shown
scientifically to have no efficacy. However, Mr. Qin notes, this doesn't
convince people, especially among the older generation, whose faith in the
ancient remedies approaches religious fervor.
The Chinese, especially Cantonese in the south, are not yet weaned from "ye
wei" — "wild taste" — the belief that exotic fare endows them with added social
status and the traits of the animal consumed, such as bravery, long life or
sexual prowess.
Conservationists are updating an age-old adage about such omnivorous eating
habits: "The Cantonese will eat anything with legs except a table and anything
with wings except an airplane."
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2-17-2004
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