Endangered Species in TCM

[GeneChing]

More on this to come... ;)

19 bears rescued from bear bile farm in Vietnam (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/22/AR2010012200890.html)
By MARGIE MASON
The Associated Press
Friday, January 22, 2010; 10:56 AM

TAN UYEN, Vietnam -- The three tractor-trailer containers sat in a row, divided with metal partitions into 19 tiny, sweltering cells.

Massive claws and furry black noses poked between the iron bars: 19 rare Asiatic moon bears awaiting their next gall bladder milking. Their bile is a coveted traditional medicine ingredient used to treat everything from hemorrhoids to epilepsy.

Some paced nervously inside the cages, panting and foaming at the mouth with wild bloodshot eyes. Others laid in their urine and feces, resting on the cool concrete floor. They devoured the bananas and chunks of watermelon - including the rinds - offered to them, a welcome treat from their usual diet of rice gruel.

The bears were found at an illegal Taiwanese-owned operation in southern Vietnam. On Friday, four days after being hoisted onto tractor trailers and driven 1,240 miles (2,000 kilometers) north, they reached a new home with grass and tire swings at a rescue center about two hours outside of Hanoi, the capital.

The newly rescued bears - two of them missing limbs and one blind - were sedated and removed one-by-one from their tiny cages Friday at Tam Dao National Park. They are joining 29 bears already at the rescue center.

Ultrasound tests found evidence of thickened gall bladders, a telltale sign of milking, said Animals Asia veterinarian Heather Bacon. She said some may need to have the organ removed because of extensive damage.

Many of the black bears, some standing 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall on their hind legs and weighing 330 pounds (150 kilograms), have been caged since being snatched from the wild as cubs up to seven years ago, said Tuan Bendixsen of Animals Asia Foundation in Vietnam, which rescued the bears this week.

Bear bile has been used for thousands of years in Asia to treat fevers, pain, inflammation and many other ailments. In the 1980s, China began promoting bear farms as a way to discourage poaching. The bears were housed in small cages, and the green bitter fluid was sucked from their gall bladders using crude catheters, sometimes creating pus-filled abscesses or internal bile leakage. Many bears die slowly from infections or liver ailments, including cancer.

The idea caught on in Vietnam and elsewhere as demand grew alongside the region's increasing wealth. Bear bile products are also illegally smuggled into Chinatowns worldwide. An informal survey by the World Society for the Protection of Animals found 75 percent of stores visited in Japan selling bear bile products, followed by 42 percent in South Korea. In the U.S. and Canada, it was about 15 percent.

Bear bile harvesting remains legal in China, where the government says 7,000 bears are milked on about 250 farms, though animal welfare groups say the real number could be double that. Demand for illegal wild bear bile, believed to be more potent, is also increasing, they say.

Amid international pressure, Vietnam outlawed the milking practice in 2005, and some 4,000 bears in captivity were implanted with microchips to help identify any new bears added illegally. Owners were warned not to tap them for bile. But the practice continues, and a black market thrives.

"We want this industry to end. Government has decided to phase this out, and we understand it's going to take time," said Chris Gee from the World Society for the Protection of Animals in England. "Across the whole of Asia there's probably 20,000 bears on bear farms."

Last year, a farm in northern Vietnam was raided for selling bile to busloads of South Koreans, who watched it being extracted as part of their sightseeing tours. Some of the farms in Vietnam are owned by South Koreans and Taiwanese.

"They're more organized and bigger. They're run like a business now," said Bendixsen. "It's part of a package tour."

Bear bile contains a high concentration of ursodeoxycholic acid. A synthetic version is sold as a pill and used in Western medicine for treating gall stones and liver ailments.

The pill is sold in China but cannot be used in traditional medicine because it is not derived from a natural source.

In a paper published last year, Yibin Feng from the School of Chinese Medicine at the University of Hong Kong suggested herbal substitutes that produce the same healing elements for various ailments could replace bear bile.

Another option is to use bile taken from slaughtered pigs or rabbits, which contains lower concentrations of ursodeoxycholic acid, or use artificial bear bile, which has a similar chemical makeup and produces the same medicinal effects.

"We found some animal bile and plants have better effects than bear bile in some diseases," Feng said. "Given all these, people in China should accept these alternatives. Of course, some people in mainland insist that no matter how close those substitutes can be, it is still not as good as the real ones."

The moon bears, named for the tan crescent-shape marking across their chests, will remain in quarantine for 45 days. They will then be moved to a building with large living cells where they will learn to mingle with other bears, before moving to a bear house where they can play outside in an enclosure with trees, grass, tunnels and swings.

They'll also be spoiled with dollops of honey and peanut butter.

[TaichiMantis]

You beat me to it...;) Another is rhinos. Just saw a tearjerker on Animal planet this month.

[Lucas]

that stuff is so sad.

[GeneChing]

http://www.bizarro.com/images/vegan/BzAnimalRightsCartoon12.jpg

[GeneChing]

Throughout 2010, the Year of the Tiger, the Tiger Claw Foundation (http://www.tigerclawfoundation.org/) will be supporting WildAid’s efforts to protect wild tigers.

Tiger Claw’s KungFuMagazine.com Championship II and Shark City Nationals are holding a special showcase competition for the WildAid Tiger Champion. For details, click here (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/info/tournament/WildAid.php). Tiger Claw’s KungFuMagazine.com Championship II and Shark City Nationals are June 12, 2010 in San Jose, CA.

For more on WildAid, click here. (http://www.wildaid.org/index.asp?CID=1)

[GeneChing]

Hopefully by now you've seen our WildAid Tiger Champion (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/info/tournament/WildAid.php) division, for our upcoming Tiger Claw's KungFuMagazine.com Championships II (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/info/tournament/index.php). I hope you can lend your support to our efforts.

Meanwhile, here's to the ongoing efforts of Operation Tram and CITES.

Smuggled wildlife: Traditional healers busted (http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=143&art_id=nw20100305162254325C476363)
March 05 2010 at 04:35PM
by Dave Clark

Police in 18 countries carried out a month-long coordinated mission against smuggled plant and animal parts used in various traditional forms of medicine, Interpol and national officers said Friday.

During the sweep, illegal products with a retail value of 10-million euros (about R102.2-million) were seized, the international law enforcement agency said.

"National wildlife enforcement authorities, police, customs and specialised units from 18 countries across all five continents worked together as part of Operation Tram which ran from 1 to 28 February," Interpol said.

British police targeted a business selling medicine from the Chinese tradition, but an Interpol spokeswoman told AFP the global operation was against all use of endangered species in cures from various cultures.

For centuries, traditional Chinese healers have used tiger bone to treat arthritis, rhinoceros horn for fevers and convulsions and bear bile to treat various infections, thus encouraging poachers to hunt rare animals.

In Rome, Italian forest rangers said they had seized 30 000 products containing wildlife worth about one million euros after checking more than 3 000 individuals, planes, baggage, and container ships.

Arrest warrants were issued against 40 individuals or companies.

"We noticed there is great deal of illegal traffic in Italy," the director of Interpol operations in Italy Colonel Giuseppe Verrocchi told AFP, adding that parts of tiger, bear and pangolin - an ant-eating mammal - and rare plants were seized.

"The products were imported directly from India, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Vietnam through the ports of Mestre, Trieste and Naples and Milan airport," an Italian statement said.

In London, the Metropolitan Police said officers had raided a Chinese traditional medicine business and found what seem to be plant species protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

"Most traditional Chinese medicines are perfectly legal. However, a small number of people continue to trade in illegal products containing endangered species," said Sergeant Ian Knox from the force's wildlife crime unit.

"This trade threatens some of the world's most iconic species, and it will continue as long as the demand exists," he added.

A director of the company that owns the raided properties will be questioned once the plants have been analysed, Scotland Yard said.

The British police have been working against the use of illegal animal and plant products in traditional Chinese medicine since 1995 under its Operation Charm, and joined Interpol's Operation Tram last month.

Police in Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Georgia, India, Italy, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, Turkey and Zimbabwe also took part in the Tram operation.

"The important cultural, historical and religious values of traditional medicines is recognised by the law enforcement community," said senior British officer Chief Constable Richard Crompton, according to the statement.

"However, the increased use of endangered species in medicines can no longer be tolerated as it places extreme pressure on their very survival," he warned.

According to Interpol, Operation Tram "revealed a large amount of medicines either containing or marketing the use of illegal ingredients such as tiger, bear and rhinoceros." - Sapa-AFP


WWF hails Interpol efforts to curb illegal wildlife trade (http://www.panda.org/wwf_news/?190205/WWF-hails-Interpol-efforts-to-curb-illegal-wildlife-trade)
Posted on 05 March 2010

Demand for tiger body parts used in traditional Chinese medicine and habitat fragmentation from unsustainable regional infrastructure development have driven the decline of the region’s Indochinese tiger population.
Related links

WWF hails the efforts of a recent worldwide Interpol operation to curb the illegal trade in traditional medicines containing endangered animal and plant species.

'Given that this crosses many borders, co-ordinating effective efforts to tackle the illegal trade in wildlife is not easy,' said WWF-UK's wildilfe trade advisor, Heather Sohl. "It's great to see 18 countries all working simultaneously to investigate and curtail the trade in traditional medicines containing threatened species. This can be a blueprint for future action on other areas of illicit wildlife trade too.'

The bust comes as WWF is preparing to call on countries which are members of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) to improve law enforcement, using intelligence-led, coordinated and cross-border approaches, to stop the illegal wildlife trade, when they meet in Doha, Qatar from 13 to 25 March.

'Such measures will help protect some of our most valued and yet threatened species such as tigers, rhino and elephants,' Sohl said.

Interpol conducted a month-long investigation into the illegal trade in traditional medicines containing protected wildlife products across 18 countries, according to its website. The investigationresulted in a series of arrests worldwide and the seizure of thousands of illegal medicines worth more than EUR 10 million.

For more details about the operation, which were released today, see http://www.interpol.int/Public/ICPO/PressReleases/PR2010/PR014.asp

[GeneChing]

Right now, China is discussing lifting the ban on tiger trade and allowing tiger farms. Of course, this would be an open invitation for poachers. This death at the zoo raises suspicions.


Page last updated at 08:03 GMT, Friday, 12 March 2010
Eleven rare Siberian tigers die at Chinese zoo (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8563673.stm)
By Michael Bristow
BBC News, Beijing

Eleven rare Siberian tigers have died over the last three months at a zoo in north-eastern China.

The local authorities believe that a lack of food contributed to their deaths, according to media reports.

The news is bound to raise concerns about the treatment of captive tigers in China, which is this year celebrating the year of the tiger.

China has only about 50 tigers left in the wild, but it has about 5,000 in captivity.

The tigers died at the Shenyang Forest Wild Animal Zoo in Liaoning Province. That fact was confirmed by a worker at the zoo.

But there are discrepancies about how they died.

A local wildlife protection official, Liu Xiaoqiang, is reported to have said that malnutrition was one cause.

The tigers were apparently fed cheap chicken bones.

Mr Liu also said that the tigers had been kept in very small cages, restricting their movement and lowering their resistance to disease.

A manager at the zoo, which is currently closed, said the animals simply died of various diseases.

But however the tigers died, their deaths will inevitably raise questions about how the animals are treated in China.

Animal campaign groups say there is simply not enough protection for tigers held in the country's zoos and farms.

A spokesman for the International Fund for Animal Welfare in Beijing said: "[The government has] given too many credentials to groups that do not have the capability of taking care of these animals."

Tiger trade

In China there is also still a trade in tiger parts, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine.

They are used to treat rheumatism and to strengthen bones.

The BBC recently found that the Siberia Tiger Park, based in Heilongjiang Province in the northeast of China, is selling a "tiger bone wine" that contains three small tiger bones.

These issues have been discussed for some time, both inside and outside China, but they are being given extra prominence this year - because this year is the year of the tiger.

Support WildAid. (http://www.wildaid.org/index.asp?CID=1)

[Dale Dugas]

dear lord,

there is no reason to use Tiger Bone or Tiger ***** when you can get the same actions from horses, boars, and other domesticated or larger populated wild animals.

pretty much looking to use the calcium matrix in the bones.

You can get that from other sources.

[GeneChing]

So let me get this right. A zoo starves 13 Siberians, which attracts international outrage and accusations of tiger harvesting. China loses a ton of face on their already sketchy animal conservation stance. So the solution is to pay off the zoo?

China investigating zoo over dead tigers (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h08K0FJr8_cpa1glSHqiDoyNmo1g)
(AFP) – 14 hours ago

BEIJING — Authorities are investigating a Chinese zoo where three dozen animals including 13 rare Siberian tigers died recently, amid charges it was harvesting their parts, state media said Monday.

The probe of the zoo in the northeastern city of Shenyang will look at whether the animal parts were being used as ingredients in Chinese medicine and other products, Xinhua news agency said.

China banned the international trade in tiger bones and related products in 1993, and is a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which also bars such trade.

But such transactions exist as many tiger parts, such as *****es and bones, are commonly believed to increase sexual potency or cure certain illnesses.

Xinhua quoted a manager at the Shenyang Forest Wildlife Zoo as saying that the carcasses of the dead tigers, 11 of which starved to death and two of which were shot after mauling a worker, have been cut up and put in cold storage.

But another unnamed zoo worker said the bones had been used to make tiger-bone liquor that was used to "serve important guests".

The deaths, which came to light as China celebrates the Lunar Year of the Tiger, have been blamed on a combination of inadequate funding, an unusually cold winter and poor general conditions at the facility, the China Daily said.

Zoo workers fed the tigers cheap chicken bones in recent months as funding dried up. On Sunday, the Shenyang government announced that it had allocated one million dollars to save surviving animals and fund the zoo.

Besides the tigers, 22 other animals have died, including rare species that are protected in China, among them a red-crowned crane, four stump-tailed macaques, and one brown bear.

The Shenyang government has a 15 percent share in the zoo, which is mainly privately owned.

China says it has nearly 6,000 tigers in captivity, but just 50 to 60 are left in the wild, including about 20 wild Siberian tigers.

In the 1980s, China set up tiger farms to try to preserve the big cats, intending to release some into the wild. But conservation groups say the farms are used to harvest ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine.


Source: Zoo starved tigers to ransom govt (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2010-03/15/content_9591554.htm)
By Zuo Likun (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-03-15 13:38

Eleven Siberian tigers that died at a strike-plagued private zoo were “intentionally starved to hold the government to ransom,” a source told the Nanfang Daily.

Initial disbelief stirred up into public outrage after media reports over the weekend revealed that eleven Siberian tigers have been starved to death in the past three months at the private-holding Shenyang Forest Wildlife Zoo in northeast China.

The zoo was forced to close last November after two tigers were shot dead in an accident and has been plagued by strikes over back pay. The anonymous insider said the zoo staff’s salaries had been delayed for 18 months.

The zoo’s annual revenue, largely from ticket fees during the six-month peak seasons, averages about 12 to 20 million yuan ($1.8 to 2.9 million). That sum, coupled with a government subsidy of 2 million yuan ($293,000) each year, couldn’t have left the zoo in red, the source said.

“It can’t go so far as to delayed payments and animal starvation. Now a few tigers are starved, which is simply a hijack to ransom the government for the zoo’s debts,” said the source.

The problem was echoed by the zoo’s deputy Party secretary Wu Xi.

“The feedstuff generally costs about 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) a year. But the boss uses the revenues to pay debts and salaries, and the money actually spent on the wild animals was less than 8 million yuan ($1.2 million),” Wu said.

The zoo’s boss Yang Zhenhua showed up on Sunday at the company’s dining hall for a ten-minute staff meeting, assuring employees’payments and pleading the workers go back to their jobs.

So far, a probe into the tiger deaths is underway, while animal experts have been called in to ensure the remaining animals’health. The Shenyang municipal government has allocated 7 million yuan ($1.02 million) for the rescue work, two million of which will be used to resume the zoo’s operation.

[GeneChing]

The shame is that we only think about it in Tiger years. Nevertheless, we're doing our part. Support our WildAid Tiger Championship (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/info/tournament/WildAid.php)this year.


Endangered Species Perish While Governments Debate Trade Rules (http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2010/2010-03-15-01.html)
DOHA, Qatar, March 15, 2010 (ENS) - The future of the world's remaining tigers, elephants, rhinos, and polar bears, bluefin tuna, sharks, and coral as well as rosewood, mahogany, and holywood will be decided over the next 10 days by delegates from 175 countries meeting in Doha.

The delegates represent countries that are Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, CITES. They meet only once every three years to decide trade rules for animals and plants at risk of extinction due commercial trade.

The CITES treaty offers varying degrees of protection to some 34,000 species of animals and plants in trade, through a system of permits and certificates.

Species are included in one of three lists - Appendix I allows no commercial trade, Appendix II allows trade by permit, and Appendix III lists species that are protected in at least one country, which has asked other CITES Parties for help in controlling the trade.

The year 2010 marks the International Year of Biodiversity and the role of CITES in regulating the global trade in plant and animal species is viewed as central to promoting the dual goals of conservation and sustainable use.

In his welcoming remarks to CITES delegates, Qatar's Environment Minister Abdullah bin Aaboud al-Midhad, highlighted the success story of the Arabian oryx, which was extinct in the wild by the early 1970s.

"Qatar has had a great role in keeping some creatures that are endangered to be extinct, including the Arabian oryx," said al-Midhad. "It was resettled in natural reserves, and now it is deemed to be the biggest oryx herd in the Arab world." More than 1,300 oryx are now in existence, he said, and Qatar has given animals from this herd to "neighboring and friendly countries."

After May 1, CITES will have a new leader. After 10 years in the job, Secretary-General Willem Wijnstekers will retire to be replaced by John Scanlon, a top advisor at the United Nations Environment Programme. An Australian national, Scanlon has served in environmental law, policy and management at national and international levels.

In his opening remarks to the delegates, Wijnstekers pointed out that the CITES budget of $5 to $6 million is not enough to cover the increasing number of activities and results that Parties and others expect from CITES.


"In the absence of necessary core funding," Wijnstekers said, "CITES will not be able to fully exploit its great potential and we seriously risk to let down not only the many animal and plant species we appear to attach such great importance to, but we also risk to let down the developing world in its struggle to conserve wildlife from the many threats it faces."

In Doha, more than 42 proposals are on the table, indicating a high level of international concern about the accelerating destruction of the world's biological diversity and the potential impacts of climate change on the biological resources of the planet.

The perilous situation of the world's 3,200 remaining wild tigers is in the spotlight as 2010 is the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese lunar calendar.

The CITES Secretariat and the international policing agency, INTERPOL, are asking countries to submit information about crimes against tigers, so that they can be analyzed and effective anti-poaching strategies developed.

In the early 1900s, tigers were found throughout Asia and numbered over 100,000. In the 1970s, the world woke up to the fact that wild tigers were disappearing. Between the 1970s and 2010, governments and conservationists spent tens of millions of dollars trying to save tigers in the wild and millions continue to be spent. But wild tigers are still falling to poachers.

"If we use tiger numbers as a performance indicator," says CITES Secretary-General Willem Wijnstekers, "then we must admit that we have failed miserably and that we are continuing to fail. How have we let this happen?"

"Although the tiger has been prized throughout history, and is a symbol of incredible importance in many cultures and religions, it is now literally on the verge of extinction," Wijnstekers said. "2010 is the Chinese Year of the Tiger and the International Year of Biodiversity; this must be the year in which we reverse the trend. If we don't, it will be to our everlasting shame."

Tigers are today primarily poached for their skins but almost every part of a tiger's body can be used for decorative or traditional medicinal purposes. Most tigers are now restricted to small pockets of habitat, with several geographical populations teetering on the brink of extinction.

At a symposium in Beijing on Friday, the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies, WFCMS, issued a statement urging its members not to use tiger bone or any other parts from endangered wildlife.

"Tiger conservation has become a political issue in the world. Therefore, it's necessary for the traditional Chinese medicine industry to support the conservation of endangered species, including tigers," said Huang Jianyin, the federation's deputy secretary.

The WFCMS is an international academic organization based in Beijing, with 195 member organizations in 57 nations where traditional Chinese medicine is used.

In its statement, the federation said some of the claimed medicinal benefits of tiger bone have no basis. The use of tiger bones was removed from the traditional Chinese medicine pharmacopeia in 1993, when China first introduced a domestic ban on tiger trade. China is among the 175 countries that are Parties to the CITES treaty.

As an international traditional Chinese academic organization, the WFCMS said it has a duty to research the conservation of endangered species, including tigers. "We will ask our members not to use endangered wildlife in traditional Chinese medicine, and reduce the misunderstanding and bias of the international community," said Huang.

"CITES governments should be encouraged by this statement and use the opportunity they have at this meeting to pass measures, that if properly enforced, can help put an end to tiger trade," said Dr. Colman O'Criodain, wildlife trade analyst, WWF International.

"The societies' public declaration is a clear signal that the traditional Chinese medicinal community is now backing efforts to secure a future for wild tigers," said Professor Xu Hongfa, head of the wildlife monitoring network TRAFFIC in China.

WWF and TRAFFIC are calling for a permanent ban on all trade in tiger parts and products, and for a curtailment of commercial captive breeding operations.

continued next post

[GeneChing]

continued from previous post

Delegates to the CITES meeting also will review progress in the conservation of the great apes, Asian big cats, and the Tibetan antelope.

The escalation of rhino poaching and strategies for fighting criminal networks trading in their horns in parts of Africa and Asia is also on the CITES agenda.

In the 1990s, rhino numbers grew in many of its range states, but in the mid-2000s, rumors emerged that rhinoceros horn could stave off cancer or halt its spread. The CITES Secretariat says that rhinos in India, South Africa, Nepal and Zimbabwe now appear to be killed by organized crime groups that control the smuggling of rhino horns to the Asian Far East, where they are sold on the black market for thousands of dollars.

"The 'shoot to kill' policy adopted by some governments in Africa does not seem to be deterring poachers and one national park store was even robbed at gunpoint, so that horns removed by park staff from rhinos that had died naturally could be stolen," the Secretariat said.

Elephant poaching and the ivory trade will occupy the delegates once again. At the last CITES conference in 2007, Parties agreed to a nine-year moratorium on any further trade in ivory. Yet proposals have been submitted from Tanzania and Zambia seeking permission for a one-time sale of 112 tons of ivory.

With or without permission, these two countries are hoping to open the door for future ivory trade by 'down-listing' their elephant populations from Appendix I to Appendix II.

At the same time, says the International Fund for Animal Welfare, there has been an escalation in seizures of illegal ivory since the last meeting, and an increase in poaching of elephants in central and eastern Africa.

"To permit any step towards further trade in ivory makes no sense whatsoever," said IFAW's Jason Bell-Leask. "It flies in the face of every basic conservation principle and is contrary to the agreement made at the last meeting."

The African Elephant Coalition of 23 African elephant range countries opposes the proposals for the one-time sales. This group insists that the nine-year ivory trade moratorium agreed in 2007 provides all African range states the opportunity to cooperatively secure elephants in their habitats and assess the impacts of the previous legal sales.

Marine species are also high on the CITES agenda this year.

"CITES will address a number of critical issues relating to the international trade of species, but many will focus on marine issues," says Simon Stuart, chair of International Union for the Conservation of Nature, IUCN, Species Survival Commission. "The number of marine species affected by illegal, unmanaged and unreported fishing, as well as bycatch, is contributing to many species such as sharks and commercial fish becoming threatened."

Delegates will discuss whether or not to place a ban on international trade in the commercially valuable Atlantic bluefin tuna. The large fish is valued in the lucrative sushi trade, one was sold in January for over $120,000, but overfishing is threatening the species.

All 27 European Union member states agreed last week to support a ban on the bluefin tuna trade by placing the species on CITES Appendix I. The EU countries join a growing list of supporter, including the United States, but not Japan, where more than 80 percent of all bluefin tuna is consumed.

Other species to be discussed include the spiny dogfish, which appears on fish and chips menus in the UK, and is threatened with over-exploitation. The fate of the porbeagle shark, again under threat from overfishing, will also be decided at CITES.

"CITES COP15 will address a number of critical issues relating to the international trade of species, but many will focus on marine issues," says Simon Stuart, chair of IUCN's Species Survival Commission. "The number of marine species affected by illegal, unmanaged and unreported fishing, as well as bycatch, is contributing to many species such as sharks and commercial fish becoming threatened."

A little-known Iranian salamander could become the first species protected by CITES because of e-commerce, a new threat to endangered wildlife.

The Kaiser's spotted newt, found only in the Zagros Mountains of Iran, is considered Critically Endangered and is believed to number fewer than 1,000 mature wild individuals. Iran is proposing the amphibian for an Appendix I listing.

The newt is sought as a pet by collectors and numbers have dwindled by more than 80 percent in recent years. In 2006, an investigation by TRAFFIC into the sale of Kaiser's spotted newts revealed 10 websites claiming to stock the species. One Ukrainian company claimed to have sold more than 200 wild-caught specimens in one year.

"The Internet itself isn't the threat, but it's another way to market the product," said Ernie Cooper of TRAFFIC Canada. "The Kaiser's spotted newt, for example, is expensive and most people are not willing to pay US$300 for a salamander. But through the power of the Internet, tapping into the global market, you can find buyers."

WWF and TRAFFIC are concerned about online trade in elephant ivory, and precious corals, including overharvested red and pink coral, currently proposed for listing on CITES Appendix II. All 31 species of red coral are vulnerable or endangered.

Delegates to the CITES meeting will consider whether to take a more proactive approach to regulating the online trade in endangered species. This may include the creation of an international database of the trade, scientific research to gauge the correlation between wildlife loss and online trade, and closer collaboration with INTERPOL.

[GeneChing]

Shut there asses down. Bust them for making tiger liquor. Feed them to the tigers.

China zoo shut amid tiger parts harvest allegation (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5huBdZFRZGiCLn6BiRJZHNltP925g)
(AFP) – 12 hours ago

BEIJING — A zoo in northeastern China has been shut after a spate of Siberian tiger deaths as reports Wednesday said dozens of the dead animals may have been used to make a virility tonic.

China's forestry ministry has ordered the zoo in the city of Shenyang to suspend operations and urged the local government to step up a probe into the deaths of 13 of the endangered tigers, the state-run Global Times reported.

Authorities are investigating whether the Shenyang Forest Wildlife Zoo in Liaoning province was harvesting tiger parts to produce ingredients for the lucrative traditional Chinese medicine market, the Beijing News said.

The problems at the zoo have thrown a spotlight in the current Year of the Tiger on the 6,000 captive tigers held in the nation's zoos and breeding farms.

In the 1980s, China set up tiger farms to try to preserve the big cats, intending to release some into the wild, but conservation groups say many farms harvest ingredients for traditional medicine.

The Beijing News quoted an unnamed zoo official saying between 40 and 50 tigers may have died at the privately operated zoo since 2000 and that it was an "open secret" that the zoo was producing tiger-bone liquor.

Tiger parts, such as *****es and bones, have long been used in traditional Chinese medicine to increase sexual potency or treat certain illnesses.

Troubles at the zoo first came to light in November last year when two hungry tigers were shot and killed as they mauled a zoo worker, who survived.

Since then, 11 more tigers have died at the financially strapped zoo due to malnutrition and poor conditions, press reports have said.

Large vats of tiger-bone liquor have been produced at the zoo since 2005 and were given to high-level officials of the provincial forestry, parks, and police bureaux, the Beijing News reported.

China banned all trade in tiger bones and related products in 1993, and is a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which also bars such sales.

China is believed to have just 50 to 60 tigers left in the wild, including about 20 Siberian tigers.

On the bright side...

Good news from China as Chinese medicine societies reject use of tiger bones at CITES conference (http://www.examiner.com/x-5936-Animal-Advocacy-Examiner~y2010m3d13-Good-news-from-China-as-Chinese-medicine-societies-reject-use-of-tiger-bones-at-CITES-conference)
March 13, 7:16 PMAnimal Advocacy ExaminerP. Elizabeth Anderson

The World Wildlife Fund, one of the largest conservation organizations in the world, and TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring network, are calling for a permanent ban on all trade in tiger parts and products, as well as a reduction in commercial captive breeding operations.

Consequently, both welcomed the statement by the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies (WFCMS) that urged its members not to use tiger bone or any other parts from endangered wildlife.

The WFCMS is an international academic organization based in Beijing, with 195 member organizations spanning 57 nations where traditional Chinese medicine is used. It aims to promote the development of traditional Chinese medicine, which is a primary form of healthcare in China and achieving wide acceptance in the United States.

The statement, made at a symposium Friday in Beijing, acknowledged that some of the claimed medicinal benefits of tiger bone have no basis.

In 1993, the traditional Chinese medicine pharmacopeia removed the use of tiger bones and China introduced a domestic ban on tiger trade.

Illegal trade in Asian big cat products is a key issue at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Conference of Parties meeting at Doha, Qatar. China is among the 175 countries that are signatories to this international treaty governing wildlife trade.

This public declaration is a clear signal that the traditional Chinese medicinal community is backing efforts to secure a future for wild tigers.

Huang Jianyin, deputy secretary of WFCMS said that traditional Chinese medicine practitioners should identify, use, and conduct research on effective substitutes for tiger products to improve the international image and status of traditional Chinese medicine and promote its use around the world.

Wild tigers are especially in the spotlight as 2010 marks the celebration of the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese lunar calendar. This year presents a unique opportunity to galvanize international action to save this iconic species.

[Dragonzbane76]

Shut there asses down. Bust them for making tiger liquor. Feed them to the tigers.

You know I've watched people die and not gave much thought to it. But I have a 'soft' spot in me for animals. I could watch a human be tortured and brutally beat. But if I saw someone doing it to an animal, i get pretty angry and p!ssed and wanted to do the same to them.

Did you guys catch that video of the guy throwing the dog off the bridge in like germany or something? That's a prime example of what i'm talking about. The bridge wasn't high enough to kill it, just cause pain. One of those moments I would have liked to have been there and threw him off the bridge.

[GeneChing]

I've been talking a lot about our work to help promote WildAid this year and I've been remiss about sharing the WildAid PSAs.

WildAid PSA - Jackie Chan :30 Year of the Tiger (English) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81MKjmsnEgM)

WildAid PSA - Jackie Chan: Tigers 2009 (English) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acy3qwRfum8)

[GeneChing]

... but another horrific situation. The relationship of TCM and endangered species is truly tragic and really sullies the authenticity of TCM in our generation.

Chimp Bones & Monkey Blood: Folk Medicine Threatens 101 Primates (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/03/29/chimp-bones-monkey-blood-folk-medicine-threatens-101-primates/)

Last week’s meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) put the spotlight on marine species like the bluefin tuna and some endangered sharks, as the meeting failed to protect them from being overfished to extinction. But a new survey published in the UK journal Mammal Review reminds us that it’s not just marine animals that are endangered by humans, but also primates.

The survey showed that despite CITES’ tight trade regulations for primates, more than a hundred primate species, from gorillas to monkeys to tiny lorises, are endangered by traditional medicine. The survey found that animals across the world were being hunted and killed for their perceived magical or medicinal values–of the 390 species studied, 101, or more than a quarter, are regularly killed for their body parts, with 47 species being used for their supposed medicinal properties, 34 for use in magical or religious practices, and 20 for both purposes [BBC].

The survey found that people still use primate parts to treat a wide variety of ailments. In Bolivia, spider monkey parts are used to cure snake bites, spider bites, fever, coughs, colds, shoulder pain, and sleeping problems; in India, the survey found that many people believe that macaque blood is a cure for asthma. Other monkeys or lorises have their bones or skulls ground up into powder administered with tea, or have their gall bladders ingested or blood or fat used as ointments [BBC]. Monkeys are also valued in Sierra Leone, where a small piece of chimpanzee bone is tied to a child’s waist or wrist, as parents believe it will make the child stronger as he grows older.

But even as primate body parts are considered valuable, local customs and beliefs can sometimes be instrumental in helping save the species, the survey found. In parts of Asia, Hindu beliefs help protect species such as long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) in Bali or grey langurs (Semnopithecus spp) in India. While in the village of Bossou in the Republic of Guinea, the Manon people consider chimpanzees sacred [BBC].

Apart from the indiscriminate hunting, the survey noted that other pressures like loss of habitat, subsistence hunting, and trade in bush meat are also leading to the decline in primate numbers. Of the 101 primate species studied in detail, the researchers found that 12 were classified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as being critically endangered, 23 as endangered, and 22 as vulnerable.

The survey comes even as the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies (WFCMS) issued a statement this month urging its members not to use tiger bone or any other parts from endangered wildlife, as they had no proven medicinal value. The use of tiger bones was also removed from the traditional Chinese medicine pharmacopeia in 1993 when China instituted a domestic trade ban on tiger parts. But despite, the internal ban, the survey notes, trade in tiger bones still continued.

[DRAGONSIHING]

Just watched a report on TV about an animal sanctuary here in the DFW area. They take in large cats. I know there are several in this area. They had a beautiful young tiger cub they had just received. It had been declawed. The operator of course explained that these animals could never be returned to the wild. And declawing tigers like domestic cats causes a deformity to the foot, not to mention a loss of self protection and climbing ability. This also causes the earlier on set of artheritis in their feet. We need to protect them when and where we can.

[Dale Dugas]

I do not use endangered species in my formulas.

I use Horse or Pig Bone in lieu of Tiger Bone.

You want to use the calcium matrix that is in the bone.

No need to use rhino horn or most of the other endangered forms when you have herbs that do similar actions.

[uki]

interesting topic... on an energetic level, the species is highly influential of the outcome of the remedy... think about it - a regular alley cat bone or a tiger bone?? i'll take the tiger bone please... not saying i do and i sure don't agree with big tough manly wanna be tough ****nuts who have to shoot tigers for sport, but species is and always will be highly relevant to the outcome of the treatment. :)

[GeneChing]

This interview started with one topic and went to another, but I'm happy as to where it went. At least I could post it here.

College of Traditional Chinese Medicine celebrates 30th anniversary (http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/College-of-Traditional-Chinese-Medicine-celebrates-30th-anniversary-90187087.html)
By: John Upton
April 8, 2010

Lixin Huang, president of the San Francisco-based American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, will help host a 30th anniversary gala at War Memorial on April 18, beginning at 2 p.m.

What is ACTCM? It's a graduate school that trains students to become licensed practitioners in acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine.

How many students are enrolled? We currently have a student body of 280. For a master's degree, the program costs about $55,000.

Is Chinese medicine popular in San Francisco? Yes — I would say not only in San Francisco, but in the U.S. Forty-three states have passed legislation for the practice of acupuncture and herbal medicine. ACTCM has a community clinic where we see 20,000 to 30,000 patient visits per year.

In the Year of the Tiger, how is ACTCM helping wild tigers? ACTCM has been working with the World Wildlife Fund, Save the Tiger Fund and Animals Asia Foundation to launch a campaign of not supporting any use of tiger products in traditional Chinese medicine.

How are tigers used in Chinese medicine? Chinese medicine used tiger bones for over 1,000 years. In 1993, the Chinese government completely banned the use of tiger bones in medicine.

[GeneChing]

Two Chinese tiger smugglers nabbed in the act (http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/04/15/6470240.html)
Apr 15, 2010 15:32 Moscow Time

Two Chinese citizens have been arrested in the Russian Maritime region as they attempted to smuggle the skins and bones of three Amur tigers into China, RIA News reports. Border guards had to fire warning shots to stop the smugglers. Almost every body part of a tiger is used in traditional Chinese medicine. The Amur tiger has been put on the Red List of Endangered Species. So far, just about 500 animals are still left. In China, the killing of a tiger is punishable by a death sentence.
The situation with Amur Tigers was already an issue during the last year of the tiger, 1998. That was a large part of the focus of my article on Jackie Chan saving tigers back in the 1998 NOV DEC issue of World of Martial Arts (http://www.martialartsmart.com/wm-806.html).

[GeneChing]

Ultra-Rare, Perhaps the Last Remaining, Javan Rhino Found Killed in Vietnam (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/ultra-rare-javan-rhino-killed-vietnam.php)
by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY on 05.10.10

The total estimated population of the Javan rhinoceros in Vietnam was perhaps eight individuals just three years ago. Now WWF reports that there is one less of the beyond critically endangered rhinos in the Cat Tien National Park, with one found dead late last week, its horn removed by poachers.

Local people reported finding a large dead mammal to park officials at the end of April, with the body confirmed to be a Javan rhino after a search of the area was conducted. Though not yet confirmed, WWF speculates that this could be the last Javan rhino left in Vietnam.

As WWF points out, rhino poaching hit a 15-year high in 2009, with rhino horn being more valuable by weight than gold. The prime cause of the increasing demand is use of the horns in Traditional Chinese Medicine--despite the fact that the horns have been removed from the official pharmacopeia.

There are no Javan rhinos in captivity, with the largest remaining population (estimated at less than 60 individuals) being on the island of Java itself. Historic range (as indicated on the map above) of the Javan rhino extended throughout Java and Sumatra in Indonesia, up through Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, as well as to the northwest through Burma and into the easternmost part of India and Bangladesh.
There's vid if you click the link.

[TaichiMantis]

That's it!. All the deities and priests around the world should spread the "Curse of the Rhino" has now been thrown on anyone using, buying or selling Rhino anything.

BTW, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on Animal Planet had a show on China's last elephants. (http://animal.discovery.com/tv-schedules/series.html?paid=15.15894.129797.35201.1) Will be replayed on May 18.

http://animal.discovery.com/videos/mutual-of-omahas-wild-kingdom-chinas-last-elephants.html

[GeneChing]

WildAid is holding a silent auction next Friday. Check it out.



4/10/2010Celebrate Endangered Species Day!

UPDATE: Absentee bidding is now open for our silent auction!

Our online supporters get a sneak peek at the auction items and a chance to bid before event night! Act now and take something home, with all proceeds benefitting endangered wildlife!

As a service to bidders unable to attend the silent auction, WildAid will enter their absentee bid. All lots will be purchased at the lowest possible price subject to any reserve price and other bids and never more than the top amount indicated by the bidder. Absentee forms may be submitted by e-mail, fax, mail or in person to the WildAid offices. Bidders will be notified via phone or e-mail of the success or failure of their bids the week following the auction. All purchases must be paid for upon notification of purchase. Credit cards submitted will NOT be charged until the bidder is notified by WildAid after the silent auction on Friday. May 21st. In the event of identical bids the earliest bid received will take precedence.

WildAid believes that scientific study, field protection programs and strong legislation are necessary, but not sufficient in curbing illegal wildlife trade. Addressing consumer demand has long been ignored and perhaps viewed as outside the expertise of conventional conservation organizations, but any coherent portfolio of actions to address endangered species must include demand reduction plans.

WildAid has developed a unique, integrated model to address demand. We work with government, business, community leaders, media partners, celebrities and high profile individuals to advocate social and behavioral change. We promote new regulations for the protection of wildlife and greater local and international cooperation for improved enforcement. WildAid has built a unique network of key strategic partnerships to deliver high-impact, culturally sensitive, nationwide multi-media campaigns aimed at changing attitudes, reducing unsustainable consumption of wildlife while building high-level political support for conservation.

Join us for a lively discussion with experts currently creating and delivering innovative strategies to protect biodiversity and convert consumers worldwide.

Threatened, Endangered, Extinct: Marketing Biodiversity to Global Audiences

Panel Members:

Steve Trent - WildAid Founder & President, Director of China & India programs

Eric Steinhauser -WildAid Executive Creative Director

Shawn Heinrichs - Executive Producer, Blue Sphere Media

Marcel Bigue - WildAid Director of Marine Programs

Date: Friday, May 21, 2010Time: 6:00 - 8:30pm

Place: The University Club800 Powell Street (corner of California St) San Francisco

****tails & Hors D'oeuvres

Silent Auction including travel, restaurants, jewelry, limited edition signed wildlife prints and more...

RSVP to:
Erin Sullivan
sullivan@wildaid.org
Tel: 415-834-3174

[GeneChing]

A Reason to Celebrate (http://www.worldwildlife.org/who/media/press/2010/WWFPresitem17862.html)
Amur tigers get first China-Russia transboundary protected area
For Release: Aug 30, 2010

This year the major highlight of the Amur Tiger Cultural Festival in the northeastern Chinese city of Hunchun was not the colourful costume parade, art performances or even the ecological tour of a tiger habitat.

On August 29, the Chinese and Russian governments announced a collaboration on the first transboundary Amur tiger protected area between Jilin province in China and neighbouring Primorsky province in Russia.

The agreement, facilitated by WWF, will help wildlife authorities establish a transboundary protected area, which is a cooperative conservation network that crosses international borders, and partner to restore the endangered species. It marks another important milestone during the Year of the Tiger in 2010.

Destruction and fragmentation of habitat, poaching and lack of prey have reduced the number of wild Amur tigers. It is the largest of all the tiger subspecies with an estimated total population of about 450. Of these, 20 tigers have been periodically spotted within the borders of China’s Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces.

“A new transboundary protected area would provide a wider and healthier habitat for Amur tigers and other endangered species, such as the Amur leopard, musk deer and goral,” said Yu Changchun, Director of Conservation Department of Jilin Forestry Department at the event.

Jilin and Primorsky provinces will increase information sharing on the protection of the two big cat species, adopt identical monitoring systems for tigers and their prey, conduct joint ecological surveys and develop plans to launch an anti-poaching campaign along the border.

“While tigers—the species at the top of the ecosystem—are better conserved through the agreement, other species, the forest habitat and all the biodiversity resources will also benefit from this protected area,” said Dr. Zhu Chunquan, WWF-China’s Conservation Director.

In addition to promoting the transboundary protected area, WWF-China successfully helped establish a protected area for tigers in Jilin. It is also working with northeast China’s Heilongjiang province, another important home to Amur tigers, to bring it under the fold of the transboundary protected area. If this plan comes to fruition, the protected area for Amur tigers and other threatened species will double.

“This agreement is a great boost for Amur tiger habitats in Russia and China. Since both countries play a crucial role in terms of global tiger recovery, a future transboundary network would represent a big step in WWF’s global tiger conservation effort,” said Dr. Sergey Aramilev, Biodiversity Coordinator for Amur Branch of WWF-Russia, which is also involved in promoting the agreement. “There’s a lot of work to be done to implement this agreement, such as making sure it receives proper government funding, but this is a major step forward nonetheless.”

By the way, here's a link to our WildAid Tiger Champion thread (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?t=57416). I should have posted this here long ago. :o

[GeneChing]

...otherwise we'd still be burning witches and eating mercury for immortality.


Does Protecting Endangered Rhinos Conflict With Traditional Chinese Medicine? (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/01/does-protecting-endangered-rhinos-conflict-with-traditional-chinese-medicine.php)
by David DeFranza, Washington, DC on 01.24.11

A report released in the first weeks of 2011 announced that in the previous year a record number of endangered rhinoceros had been killed by poachers—333 in 2010 compared to just 133 in 2009. The next day, South African police cornered a band of poachers and—after a protracted firefight—shot and killed five of them.

The two events illustrate the status of the rhino across its range. A rapid increase of poaching in Sub-Saharan Africa—in spite of expanded efforts of conservation police in many afflicted countries—has been fueled by a growing demand for rhinoceros horn on the medicinal black markets of East and South East Asia. Only by curbing this demand, conservationists say, can the rhinos truly be protected.

But is this approach to conservation an attack on traditional medicine and time-honored cultural practices?

Some practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) believe that efforts to end the international trade of rhinoceros horn are, indeed, an affront to their culture. Limiting the use of rhino horn—which is commonly prescribed to treat fever, among other ailments, but never as an aphrodisiac—others say, prevents patients from receiving the treatment they need to get healthy or even survive.

"I agree that all herbalists have duties to protect the endangered animals," one Hong Kong TCM trader told New Scientist, "however, we are equally obliged to use these antidotes to cure the patients. In my opinion, human lives are much more important than those of the animals."

A Perception of Potency

The problematic use of endangered species in TCM is not new. For centuries, traditional medicas and pharmacopoeias have noted the danger of exploiting rare antidotes—at the risk they may become lost to medicine—and provided more common alternatives.

In the case of rhinoceros horn, alternatives including buffalo horn have been documented since as early as the sixth century.

Unfortunately, these alternatives are often thought of as lesser equivalents. The common perception is that products from the rare original source is the most potent and that alternatives—whether from other animals, farm-raised animals, or, worse of all, synthetic sources—are not as effective as cures.

This understanding—which is not supported by the Chinese Government or the TCM establishment—continues to drive the black market in wild-caught animal products including, of course, the horns of critically endangered rhinoceros.
The Medical Reality

Many treatments fully embraced by Western Medicine have natural roots. Indeed, several now common treatments—notably Artemisin as a treatment for malaria and Ephedrine for asthma—were taken from Traditional Chinese Medicine, where they have been used for centuries.

Rhinoceros horn, however, is not one of these medicines. Studies conducted in 1983 and 2008 at the Zoological Society of London both concluded that rhino horn has no therapeutic value.

A study conducted at Chinese University in Hong Kong in 1990 looked specifically at rhino horn's efficacy as a fever reducer. Researchers found that in extremely large doses, rhino horn could slightly lower fever in mice. As the concentrations were reduced, however, the ground horn quickly lost its power and, by the time it reached levels commonly prescribed, it had no impact whatsoever.

Understanding TCM

These findings, of course, do not invalidate the entire practice of Traditional Chinese Medicine. In fact, this view of TCM—common among Western onlookers—as a monolithic and unchanging practice is one of the key misunderstandings muddying the debate over the use of endangered animal products.

The earliest documentation of TCM practices is found in Shang Dynasty hieroglyphics dating back to 1600-1100 BC. From those early notations it was modified and refined extensively, most notably between 300 - 100 BC and around 200 AD.

In modern history, TCM branched with followers of the Jingfang school relying on documents from the Han Dynasty, and practitioners of the Wenbing school using more recent texts from the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The history of TCM, clearly, is long and its ability to change and adapt over time is likely why it remains relevant.

Today, TCM exists as a parallel system to Western Medicine in much of East Asia. Its focus on healthy diet and exercise—and a holistic approach to treatment—makes it an excellent compliment to diagnoses arrived at via Western Medicine and, often, patients will be consulted by a team that consists of practitioners of both systems.

The problem, in reality, is not the practice of TCM, which some activists and conservationists have argued. Instead, it is an economic system that spans borders and is driven by a lack of education at the consumer level and opportunism among dealers and traders.
A Cross-Cultural Solution

The solution, then, is one that considers the unique needs of all involved, including TCM practitioners and patients, conservationists, governments, and international governing bodies. Activists and policy makers must operate from a position of understanding, recognizing the proven value of TCM and focusing, specifically, on the problems TCM faces in countries increasingly eager to embrace Western culture. Practitioners, on the other hand, must continue to advocate for the sustainable use of natural resources but also focus efforts on educating patients on the essential value of alternatives.

In the end, Traditional Chinese Medicine should not become a scapegoat for international conservation issues. Instead, it should be recognized as a valuable, centuries old, body of medical practice and, more significantly, a flexible tool for educating people otherwise unconcerned with the health of species struggling a continent away.

UPDATE: Reading the comments, there seems to be some confusion over the central argument of this post. To help clarify things, here is a quick summary:

1. The efforts of conservation police in Africa, while commendable, have not been able to keep pace with increasingly well financed and equipped poachers.

2. This is and economic issue. Market demand in Asia (and yes, Yemen and other places) drives up the price of illegal animal products, making the financial payoff poachers stand to earn worth, in their eyes, the risk of arrest or death.

3. Market demand is based on the belief that rhino horn has a medicinal value. Science has shown it does not but that hasn't dissuaded everyone.

4. Traditional Chinese Medicine is a centuries-old cultural institution that has the ability to change. More importantly it has, like all cultural institutions, the ability to change how people think. By working with and not against TCM practitioners (ie. doctors and pharmacists) activists have an effective tool for eliminating the bulk of the demand for rhino horn.

5. This is an international issue, meaning that the full participation of the United Nations, national governments, and NGOs like TRAFFIC are essential for finding a solution.

[PlumDragon]

Nice one, Gene.

Killing an endangered species for their parts is crazy--there are so many other effective strong herbs out there that clear heat or whatever the herb needed that its just uncalled for.

[Dale Dugas]

Unfortunately it is hard to stop this as these concepts have been taught within the culture for thousands of years.

Not saying it is okay, just that anthropologically speaking I can see where it comes from.

Thanks for posting this Gene.

[GeneChing]

I wonder if we could ground up those poachers noses to make aphrodisiacs? Is that comment in bad taste? Sorry. :rolleyes:

7 February 2011 Last updated at 10:06 ET
Three 'rhino poachers' shot by rangers in South Africa (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12385011)
By Karen Allen Southern Africa correspondent, BBC News

Three suspected rhino poachers have been shot and killed by rangers in South Africa's Kruger National Park.

Security forces confronted a gang of five at the well-known tourist destination. Another member of the group was wounded.

Rangers say they recovered a firearm, ammunition and other tools used for rhino poaching from the scene.

It is the latest in a series of attempts to reverse the rising trade.

Demand for rhino horn has soared in recent years - fuelled by the belief in parts of Asia that it has medicinal properties.

The black market price of rhino horn is now in the region of £35,000 ($55,000) a kilogram.

Last year, South Africa recorded more than 300 cases of poaching.

Despite the prospect of high-level prosecutions, the financial rewards for criminals are helping to fuel the trade.

[GeneChing]

Epidemic of UK rhino horn thefts linked to one criminal gang (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/08/rhino-horn-thefts-chinese-medicine)
Rhino horns stolen from museums fetch twice the value of gold on the Chinese medicine market
Esther Addley
guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 August 2011 16.48 BST

Rosie the rhinoceros took her last breath somewhere on the Indian subcontinent early last century. She was shot, skinned, stuffed and shipped to London. Then, in 1907, she was acquired by Ipswich Museum, which swapped her with the Natural History Museum for a pig. For more than a century, in Ipswich, she has suffered the pats of generations of school children, her horn curling to the ceiling.

Last month, however, Rosie suffered the second violation of her ignominious afterlife, almost as cruel as the first.

At 12.27am on Thursday 28 July, two men forced their way through a fire escape at the rear of the museum and made straight for the rhinoceros, where they swiftly wrenched off her 45cm (18-inch) horn. They paused only to collect the skull of a second black rhino, displayed on a ledge above its stuffed cousin, before fleeing in a silver saloon car. Nothing else was stolen.

One might think that only a foolish criminal would bypass the lavish gold burial masks of Titos Flavios Demetrios upstairs in the Egyptian gallery, or even the priceless Hawaiian cape made from feathers of the 'o'o bird, in favour of some century-old rhino remains. In fact, police believe these were very canny criminals indeed.

The Ipswich rhinoceros-horn theft is merely the latest from museums and auction houses across Britain and Europe, driven by soaring prices for horn in the far east. According to Europol, many of them are conducted by an Irish crime gang more accustomed to drug trafficking, money laundering and smuggling.

In February, the stuffed and mounted head of a black rhino was taken from Sworders Fine Art Auctioneers in Stansted Mountfitchet, Essex. On 27 May, a similar head was taken from the Educational Museum in Haslemere, Surrey, which has one of the largest natural history collections in the UK. Last month it was the turn of a museum in Liège, Belgium; three weeks later the Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences in Brussels suffered a similar heist, in which the head of a black rhino, dating from 1827, was stolen.

According to the Metropolitan police, 20 thefts have taken place across Europe in the past six months – in Portugal, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Belgium and Sweden as well as the UK. Scotland Yard and Europol are now advising galleries and collectors to consider locking up their rhino horn collections or keeping them away from public view. Several institutions, including the Natural History Museum and the Horniman Museum in south London, have removed their displays or replaced horns with replicas.

Behind the crime wave is a surge in demand from the far east and European Asian communities for powdered rhino horn, which is used in traditional Chinese medicines. It is valued as a remedy for everything from fevers and headaches to cancer, and demand is so intense it has pushed the value of horn to £60,000 per kilogram – twice the value of gold. Sworders had valued their rhino head, as an artefact, at £50,000; in the medicinal market, however, it could be worth £200,000.

"It is a new crime phenomenon targeting people who may not have ordinarily been victims of crime and who are vulnerable victims," said Patric Byrne, Europol's head of unit for organised crime networks. "And we are not dealing with petty criminals." The gang "of Irish ethnic origin", which the agency has identified as being responsible for many of the attacks, has a background in violence, drug trafficking and intimidation, he said. "There is a strange and very lucrative market in Chinese medicine. They have found that this product attracts a particular premium in some Asian communities."

Detective Constable Ian Lawson, from the Metropolitan police's art and antiques unit, said the gang used a variety of methods to steal the objects, from carefully planned burglaries to "smash and grab" raids, and police had also been alerted to "hostile reconnaissance" from gang members.

Even more worrying is an associated growth in the poaching of live rhinos, according to conservation experts. "In the last three years, 800 African rhinos have been killed and experts agree that we are facing the worst rhino-poaching crisis in decades," said Lucy Boddam-Whetham, the acting director of Save the Rhino International.

Nearly 200 rhinos were killed in South Africa in the first six months of this year, compared with 125 in the same period last year. The organisation says the museum thefts are stimulating the live-rhino poaching, making their situation even more perilous. There are only 20,000 white rhinos and fewer than 5,000 black rhinos in the wild.

Police tape has been removed from around Rosie at Ipswich Museum, replaced by an apologetic laminated note explaining the missing horn. "People love this museum. It's just so sad," said Bryony Rudkin, the councillor who holds the portfolio for museums and culture at Ipswich borough council. "On the morning after it happened, we had a family come in – a grandmother, mother and child – and the grandmother said, 'I remember coming when I was a child. It's really sad, because everyone in Ipswich knows who she is.'"

"It's a bit selfish to just take the horn," said Miriam Kendall, 10, from Dennington, visiting with her father and younger brother. Tristan, six, thought the thieves were "stupid".

At least there is some good news for Rosie. As a result of the robbery, she is to be the focus of a panel on a new civic mural to be mounted on the town's waterfront, where she will appear not in her mutilated state but with her dignity, and horn, restored. The museum is, meanwhile, making her a replica horn, which will be screwed, very firmly, into the nose of the long-dead beast.
This is another reason why we support WildAid (http://www.wildaid.org/index.asp?CID=1)

[Dale Dugas]

I hope anyone who illegally trades in any form of life on the CITES list, burns in a hell of their own making.

digusting.

[David Jamieson]

I read recently about a mother bear who killed her cub and then herself in a bile farm.

However, oddly enough, when I looked at the pictures for the story, I couldn't help but notice that none of the bears attendants following this was Chinese. they were all Caucasians.

So, I wonder what is propaganda, and what is not in regards to these stories sometimes. there doesn't seem to be a lot of cross referencing going on in a lot of it.

[SimonM]

In the US, many have tigers as pets.. in fact no one knows for sure how many tigers are kept in the US as pets..and evidently they have rights over the animal to keep it in a cage and look at it until it dies, but heaven forbid they use the animal once its died or kill it and eat it or use it for medicine.


The use of endangered species in the pet, entertainment and medical testing fields in North America IS just as bad as the use of endangered species in the medical products field in China.

I oppose both practices with equal zeal.

And, no, I'm not a PETA type, if people want to eat pork, well, there are plenty of pigs on earth. It's just that alpha predators, such as Tigers, Bears and Wolves, and macrofauna such as Elephants and Rhinos serve incredibly valuable roles in the ecosystem. Hauling them out for human expedience is simple arrogance and laziness on our part, and to the detriment of the world.

As for great apes....

I'd no sooner keep a great ape as a pet, or experiment on one against his or her will than I would a human. Anybody who has ever had the pleasure of meeting a chimpanzee, bonobo, orangutan or gorilla can testify to the fact that they are intelligent, self-aware, thinking beings who seem, honestly human.

I oppose slavery and human trafficking. I oppose the trade in great apes for the exact same reasons.

[GeneChing]

Pink poisoned rhino horns?

Pink And Poisonous Rhino Horns Could Thwart Poachers (http://www.businessinsider.com/pink-and-poisonous-rhino-horns-2012-12)
Randy Astaiza | Dec. 20, 2012, 5:52 PM

Conservationists in South Africa have come up with a new way to protect the local rhinoceros from poachers: make their horns bright pink and poisonous, reports Popular Science.

Rhino horns are highly sought for their use in traditional Chinese medicine. A common misconception suggests they are also used as an aphrodisiac, but the tradition in Chinese medicine is actually to take the powdered horn to cure fever and convulsions.

There is no evidence to support that the rhino horns hold any magical or medicinal properties. In fact the horn is made out of keratin, the same protein that makes up your hair and nails, and the amount of keratin given through the medicine is equivalent to chewing on your fingernails.

400 rhinos were murdered in South Africa in 2011, and this year the count is up to 200. The problem has gotten so bad that to stop poachers some conservationists are suggesting huge projects such as implanting GPS trackers to follow the rhinos.

Instead of tracking the animals, The Rhino Rescue Project wants to discourage poachers from killing them by injecting dye and possibly even poison into the rhino's horns. They plan to infuse it "into the horn using a patented high-pressure device," which would make the horn unsuitable and even toxic to humans.

The high pressure device would not cause any harm to the rhino. Also, the dye they would use is similar to the dye used in ink packs to secure money at the bank, and the poison would be one designed to kill parasites, neither of which have negative side effects on the rhino or other animals in its ecosystem. Wait, does that mean in that chewing fingernails in TCM is equivalent to placebo aphrodesiac? Cuz that would explain a few things about nail chewers...

[GeneChing]

I was torn about posting this in either our WildAid Tiger Claw Champion thread (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?t=57416) or our Chinese Counterfeits thread (http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?t=57980), but here felt best in the end.

In Twist, Fake Medicine Could Save Rare Animals (http://news.discovery.com/animals/endangered-species/fake-chinese-medicine-may-kill-people-but-help-endangered-species-130326.htm)
Mar 26, 2013 03:20 PM ET // by Benjamin Radford

Fake and diluted ingredients, including herbs and animal parts, are increasingly finding their way into traditional Chinese medicines. Investigators have found many supposedly medicinal powders diluted with everything from flour to corn starch to sand.

Sometimes the dilutions are the result of cutting corners by manufacturers, but often it’s done by middlemen and retailers seeking to increase their profit margins.

There is little or no governmental regulation of these medicines, and the problem is getting worse. As one traditional Chinese medicine manufacturer noted, “counterfeiters are posing a great threat, as fake products are made to closely resemble genuine ones.

Counterfeiters can produce fake medicinal herbs with starch and gypsum powder, or mix dirt or dust with the herbs to increase their weight.”

Dilution, Inert Ingredients and Placebos

Many legitimate, regulated drugs and food products contain inert or inactive ingredients or “fillers.” Sometimes these ingredients help delay — or speed up — the body’s absorption of a drug’s active ingredient, for example, while fillers in food may add flavor or bulk, coloring or increase shelf life.

While some Chinese herbs and medicines have active ingredients and work as promised, many others do not, and their efficacy relies on the placebo effect. Because the placebo effect works when the patient believes a drug or treatment is effective, there are relatively few complaints from consumers themselves. The effectiveness is often the same whether the medicines are real, diluted or fake.

This is not to say that altered, diluted, or fake medicine of any kind is good, of course. Though most of the ingredients used to dilute drugs are relatively harmless, some can be toxic. In some cases Chinese herbal medicines may even be contaminated with prescription medications.

A 2002 study in The Journal of Internal Medicine reported that “an analysis of 2,600 samples of Chinese herbal remedies in Taiwan showed that 24 percent were adulterated with at least one synthetic medicine…. The case reports showed that two or more adulterants were present in 14 of 15 Chinese herbal medicines.”

This may be even more dangerous than having no active ingredient at all because prescription drugs invariably carry side effects and drug interaction warnings that the patient needs to know about. Hundreds of thousands of people may be taking heart medications, anti-anxiety, steroids and other drugs without knowing it.

Though most traditional Chinese medicine is consumed in China, counterfeit and diluted Chinese drugs are sold and shipped worldwide, including to Africa where approximately 1/3 of malaria drugs were found to be bogus or substandard, resulting in many deaths. Unfortunately, malaria cannot be cured by the placebo effect.

But there is another twist to the story, because in some cases fake medicine may help save endangered species.

Endangered Species and Traditional Chinese Medicine

Demand for body parts — driven by the alternative medicine and traditional Chinese medicine industries — have severely threatened giant manta rays, whose populations have declined globally by about a third in recent years. The problem has become so concerning to marine biologists and conservationists that the Australian government recently enacted a law protecting the giant ray.

And it’s not just manta rays. Many other animals face similar threats around the world. In Africa, several species of rhinos have been driven to near extinction because of demand for their horns. They horns are claimed to act as an aphrodisiac or even cure cancer. Tigers and bears have also been slaughtered by the thousands, their bones and claws used in dubious alternative medical treatments.

Ironically, dilution of traditional Chinese medicine may indirectly help reduce the use of these endangered animals: If starch or corn meal can be secretly swapped for rhino horn powder or ground tiger bones, this reduces the demand for these rare animals. The ingredients hold no benefit — and in fact pose a serious risk to wildlife — but old superstitions die hard.

The real tragedy is that these animals are being killed for myths. If manta ray gill rakers, white rhino horns, tiger bones, bear claws and other body parts could actually cure cancer and other diseases, scientists would be studying them to isolate the active ingredients — without further endangering the animals.

[GeneChing]

Imperial County man admits smuggling endangered fish for black market (http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jun/12/local/la-me-ln-smuggler-fish-20130612)
June 12, 2013|By Tony Perry

Harvested totoaba fish bladders drying, seized in a smuggling case at the Calexico port of entry. U.S. border inspectors in Calexico have seized 529 bladders since February that they believe were destined for China and Hong Kong.

http://www.trbimg.com/img-51b928a0/turbine/la-me-ln-smuggler-fish-20130612-002/600/398x600
Harvested totoaba fish bladders drying, seized in a smuggling case at the… (Associated Press / U.S.…)

A 34-year-old Imperial County man pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court in El Centro to smuggling parts of an endangered species of fish into the U.S. to profit from a lucrative black market.

Anthony Sanchez Bueno admitted that he smuggled three coolers worth of dried swim bladders from the endangered Totoaba macdonaldi, hidden under ice and fish.

The smuggling incident, involving 170 bladders weighing 225 pounds, occurred at the Calexico port of entry, prosecutors said. Bueno admitted that he had arranged to take the bladders to a man in Calexico.

The bladders are prized for use in Chinese soup and can sell for up to $5,000 apiece in the United States, twice that amount paid in markets in Asia, authorities said.

Authorities have seized 529 bladders weighing 700 pounds since February. The fish travels in shallow waters at the mouth of the Colorado River and also the east coast of the Gulf of California. The swim bladder helps control buoyancy.

Among its devotees, Totoaba macdonaldi's meat is thought to aid in fertility and skin vitality. Bueno is set to be sentenced in September. The maximum sentence is 20 years in prison. Anyone know the Chinese name for these bladders?

[GeneChing]

Ivory isn't used in TCM to my knowledge. It's just for jewelry and art. Nevertheless it is Hong Kong and China is the main culprit.

Hong Kong Seizes Smuggled Elephant Tusks (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/world/asia/hong-kong-seizes-smuggled-elephant-tusks.html?_r=2&)
Tyrone Siu/Reuters

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/07/20/world/20hongkong_337/20hongkong_337-articleLarge.jpg
A customs officer walked on Friday past ivory tusks that were seized by the Customs and Excise Department in Hong Kong.
By BETTINA WASSENER
Published: July 19, 2013

HONG KONG — Customs officials in Hong Kong on Friday announced one of the largest seizures of smuggled ivory ever made in the city — and their fifth since October — highlighting the pervasiveness of a trade that conservationists describe as an all-out crisis for elephant populations in Africa.

The shipment, consisting of 1,148 tusks weighing in at 4,800 pounds, was worth an estimated $2.25 million, according to a customs department statement.

The tusks were concealed in a container coming from the West African nation of Togo.

Rising affluence in Asia has caused demand for ivory and many other wildlife products to soar in recent years, putting many animal and plant species under severe pressure.

Despite rising awareness and warnings that poaching has pushed some species to the brink of extinction, enforcement and penalties often remain weak, and represent an insufficient deterrent to poachers and smugglers, wildlife experts say.

In the case of ivory, the demand stems mainly from China, where it is highly prized for its use in ornaments and sells for hundreds of American dollars per kilogram on the black market.

Tens of thousands of elephants have been killed for their tusks in recent years in Africa, where the revenues from the poached ivory are believed to be fueling conflicts across the continent.

The fact that the number of large-scale shipments has been on the increase also is indicative of organized criminal involvement, say experts at Traffic, a group that monitors the trade in endangered wildlife.

Two other seizures made in Hong Kong in the past nine months weighed in at just over nearly 2,900 pounds, while a shipment intercepted last October weighed more than 8,300 pounds. All originated in Africa.

Hong Kong, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines are the main transit points within Asia for large ivory consignments arriving from Africa, Richard Thomas, a spokesman for Traffic, said in an e-mail on Friday.

[GeneChing]

Discovering this would freak me out. They look like some sort of aliens.

Zhuhai border police seize 956 frozen pangolins in really weird raid (http://shanghaiist.com/2014/05/14/zhuhai-police-pangolins.php)

http://shanghaiist.com/upload/2014/05/pangolins1.jpg
Zhuhai border police recently uncovered a smuggling ring that was attempting to transport 956 frozen pangolins, weighing four tons, in Guangdong. Pangolins, for those who aren't up to speed on their nocturnal ant-eater relatives, are like large, scale-covered sloths whose armor is thought to cure cancer and asthma as part of Traditional Chinese Medicine. (Spoiler alert, it definitely doesn't.)

http://shanghaiist.com/upload/2014/05/pangolins.jpg
An investigation is ongoing but according to Directory of National Key Protected Wild Animals, pangolins are a "second-class" national protected animal. For severe rare animal smuggling cases, criminals can be sentenced to life imprisonment or even death.

[GeneChing]

Follow the link for the citations.

8/08/2014 @ 12:47PM 2,610 views
Extinction By Traditional Chinese Medicine - An Environmental Disaster (http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/08/08/extinction-by-traditional-chinese-medicine-an-environmental-disaster/)
James Conca Contributor

As China’s massive energy and economic development spawns the largest middle class in history, it’s also creating the largest upper and middle class population on the planet. And they are causing another type of environmental disaster – extinction of endangered species through poaching.

An epidemic of poaching is sweeping the world (Nature Conservancy) fueled by the rising rich of China and Asia. Endangered species are being killed at an increasing rate for the sole crime of being the core of bizarre cultural traditions. Caught in this frenzy of nasty rituals are animals like the rhinoceros, which as a species may not be long for this world (Save The Rhino).

Despite entreaties from the United Nations and many western governments, there is a dense silence from the governments on the receiving end of these body parts. We see this over and over in developing countries on every issue from worker rights to environmental destruction. “The West had its way on this, so why can’t we?”

True. Europe had the original spoiled-rotten rich folks who for centuries could buy whatever, and whomever, they wanted. Then came the United States and its nouveau riche and robber barons who wanted even more trophies of their wealth. Then the Japanese in the second half of the last century did their obnoxious newly-rich stuff. All of these people, and even the not-so-rich, want symbols or rewards for what they see as their achievement in rising to a level previously reserved only for the aristocracy.

And now the Chinese and other rising economies are producing an even bigger population with disposable incomes sufficient to feed their tastes for the traditions that are forbidden or just expensive, things like mixed bat blood and monkey’s milk, meat of a camel’s hump, or plain old hedgehog’s genitals (Travel and Leisure).

http://blogs-images.forbes.com/jamesconca/files/2014/08/RhinoKills.jpg
An epidemic of poaching is sweeping over Africa, paid for by the rising number of rich Chinese and Asians, fueled by the growing energy production from coal. Caught in this frenzy of nasty rituals are endangered animals like the rhinoceros, which as a species may not be long for this world. Source: Save The Rhino

An epidemic of poaching is sweeping over Africa, paid for by the rising number of rich Chinese and Asians, fueled by the growing energy production from coal. Caught in this frenzy of nasty rituals are endangered animals like the rhinoceros, which as a species may not be long for this world. Source: Save The Rhino

I don’t mean to imply that cultural differences reflected in unusual customs are necessarily primitive or horrible but…uh, actually I do mean that. Traditions concerning ingesting rare things like powdered rhinoceros horn or the eggs of endangered sea turtles are primitive and horrible.

Many of us thought that the rise of Viagra would reduce the poaching of many of these animals. But we were wrong in our assumption that most of these body parts are used as aphrodisiacs. They’re used as medicinal cures for a host of ailments, real or imagined.

Powdered Rhino horn in Traditional Chinese Medicine is prescribed for fevers and convulsions, typhoid, rheumatism, gout, headaches and hallucinations, vomiting and food poisoning, as well as good ole possession by the devil (Compendium of Materia Medica by Li Shih-chen, A.D. 1597).

But Rhino horn is made of keratin, meaning it’s just as effective as grinding up your own fingernails and eating them. (Note to self – might be a good business strategy for when rhinos are gone)

Studies have shown that all of these medical claims for all of these rare body parts are false and useless. But this has not stopped TCM from getting its own “scientific” journal, the Chinese Medicine Journal. This new journal is published by BioMed Central which is owned by Springer Verlag, a science publishing giant who has decided that embracing a new huge audience is more important than rigorous scientific integrity or the preservation of endangered species.

To the millions of people who practice Traditional Chinese Medicine, rhinoceros horn is a medical necessity, they believe it works and are willing to fund the poachers as effectively as any drug cartel. The dwindling number of rhinos only increases the price and ensures their extinction.

An even more tragic example is death by association. The extinction of the Vaquita marina, the world’s smallest porpoise and Mexico’s only native marine mammal, is imminent. But not because anything about them is poachable (Tri-City Herald). These creatures get caught in Mexico’s northern Sea of Cortez during the illegal gillnet fishing for totoaba, a huge fish whose swim bladder is highly valued by Chinese chefs, and is itself protected.

One totoaba bladder brings more than $10,000 in Asia. So it’s no wonder that the poachers simply kill the porpoises and leave them to rot. Since there are only 100 individual Vaquita left, they will be gone forever in just three or four years. You’d think the Chinese government would outlaw this cuisine just as a matter of principle, but no one ever accused the Chinese of being nature-lovers.

We all know that the wealthy are more likely to be selfish (The Guardian), but this type of narcissism is beyond the normal pale of destructive human behavior. I understand clearing old growth forests to plant crops – it’s counter-productive and wrong, but I understand it if people’s livelihoods are at stake – but to extinct noble beasts because you’re worried about erectile dysfunction or a cough is beyond belief and should be punishable by having to rot in prison or becoming premature organ donors themselves. This planet doesn’t need stupid selfish humans to strain an already stressed-out Earth.

But poaching doesn’t just kill beautiful animals that will never return to this world, it threatens the lives and communities of people who live near them (Nature Conservancy). Poaching creates corruption and crime. It drives away tourism whose renewable income far exceeds the one-time pay-off from killing an animal.

Why is this suddenly an issue with China? Because they only recently developed sufficient energy production to power the magnitude of wealth necessary to devastate whole species on a lark.

Middle class wealth directly evolves from energy development, which directly comes from infrastructure investment. It takes between 3,000 and 6,000 kWhrs per person per year to have what we consider a good life, to get into the middle class (United Nations Human Development Index).

continued next post

[GeneChing]

http://blogs-images.forbes.com/jamesconca/files/2014/08/HDI.jpg
The United Nations Human Development Index shows the direct and strong relationship between access to energy (equivalent to electricity in kWhrs/year/person) and quality of life. It requires at least 3,000 kWhrs per person per year to have what we consider a good life (HDI > 0.9), and about 6,000 kWhrs per person per year to be fully in the middle class. Note that China is a combination of 500 million people who have only recently entered the middle and upper class and 800 million people still in abject poverty. But that is going to change fast. Source: United Nations Development Program

The United Nations Human Development Index shows the direct and strong relationship between access to energy (equivalent to electricity in kWhrs/year/person) and quality of life. It requires at least 3,000 kWhrs per person per year to have what we consider a good life (HDI > 0.9), and about 6,000 kWhrs per person per year to be fully in the middle class. Note that China is a combination of 500 million people who have only recently entered the middle and upper class and 800 million people still in abject poverty. But that is going to change fast. Source: United Nations Development Program

It doesn’t matter whether you were a the 17th century nobleman getting the equivalent of 3,000 kWhrs/year off of backs of ten slaves, five indentured servants, four cows and three horses (a great calculation for the student) or you are the reader of this post, getting about 10,000 kWhrs/year off the backs of coal and gas with a little hydro, nuclear and renewables. It just takes sufficient energy to have food, shelter, health care and not spend six hours a day carrying water back to your hut.

Prior to the development of our modern energy resources, and the infrastructure to use them, there was no middle class. The aristocracy and wealthy merchants got that energy by exploiting animals and other humans. Then came 1850 and coal. It took about 20 years for Britain to set up the infrastructure, but by 1870, there were 10 million middle-class Brits. And they did not have to own anyone to get there.

It took the United States over 80 years starting in 1890 to grow the 200 million middle class Americans that made us the greatest nation on Earth. But beginning in 1992 with a plan to build 600 coal-fired fired power plants, China took only 20 years to grow 500 million middle class Chinese. This rate of energy and wealth development is staggering, and is why the global financial structure is beginning to shift East.

China’s present energy expansion will be even bigger, and is meant to bring the 800 million Chinese remaining in abject poverty up into the middle class. Barring some bizarre event, which is possible in any authoritarian government, this will happen before mid-century. At that point, China’s GDP will pass ours, their conventional military will be enormous, their dominance of Asia and the Pacific will be uncontested, and they will be everyone’s biggest worry.

But it is the collateral development of the rich that fuels the type of environmental harm that destroys whole species. China has 170 billionaires and over a million millionaires, still lower than the United States and Japan, but that will change over the next generation (USA Today). And it’s these people that think nothing of paying for a meal that has a $10,000 swim bladder in it. This is a vicious circle because the very wealthy are the very people who can stop this destruction and death. But they are the very ones that are making it worse.

It doesn’t appear that international awareness and pressure is doing much. It really will take a cultural change on the part of the Chinese people. I hope it happens before we lose all these wonderful animals.

The symbolism of rhino horn as an aprhodesiac is so obvious, but (and not to make light of this situation) it makes me wonder why there was no rhino style in Kung Fu.

[GeneChing]

457 dead pangolins seized in Guangdong, 4 suspects arrested (http://shanghaiist.com/2014/09/12/457-dead-pangolins-seized-in-guangdong.php)

http://shanghaiist.com/upload/2014/09/pangolin-bodies-1.jpg

Not again! Guangdong police received a report this week about 457 dead pangolins, or scaly anteaters, that were found in Shijing Town. A total of four large fridges full of pangolin bodies were seized and four suspects were arrested, according to Tencent News.

http://shanghaiist.com/upload/2014/09/pangolin-bodies-3.jpg

All the dead bodies were placed in a morbid spread on the ground of a room, with the largest weighing more than 20 pounds. We hope one of these fellows wasn't among them.

http://shanghaiist.com/upload/2014/09/pangolin-bodies-2.jpg

A pangolin is a rare, scale-covered mammal whose armor is believed to cure cancer and asthma, as well as other ailments, in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

A sergeant involved in the operation revealed that they were tipped off by other citizens.

[Images via Tencent News]

By Christy Lau

There was a great article in NG on pangolins recently. See The Luckiest Pangolin Alive: THE STORY OF A LITTLE PANGOLIN WHO’S MAKING A BIG DIFFERENCE (http://magazine.africageographic.com/weekly/issue-10/luckiest-pangolin-alive/) by SIMON ESPLEY, 5 September, 2014

[GeneChing]

Thousands of smuggled pangolins confiscated in smuggling bust (http://www.cctv-america.com/2015/11/03/thousands-of-smuggled-pangolins-confiscated-in-smuggling-bust)

http://cdn.cctv-america.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/f9085982-0122-4783-b881-3bbcfd7695621-800x500.jpg
Guangdong authorities confiscate thousands of smuggled pangolins PHOTO/ Chinanews.com

November 3, 2015

Authorities in China’s Guangdong Province have busted a smuggling ring and confiscated 2,674 pangolins, Xinhua reported on Tuesday.

Photos taken on September 14, show dozens of pangolins without their scales, lying on the floor inside a fishing vessel. The police were on an anti-smuggling boat patrol on the Pearl River near Yamen, when suddenly they spotted the suspicious vessel.

414 boxes of frozen pangolins were discovered on it.

http://cdn.cctv-america.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/cbd41ecd-e726-49d9-8179-34b8eeef6d501.jpg

This is China’s biggest trafficking case involving the species in recent years.

The authorities arrested two suspects on the boat. According to Xinhua, the two received the shipment of smuggled pangolins in international waters, and were promised 10,000 yuan ($1,580) reward each, if they managed to deliver the pangolins to the predetermined destination.

Pangolins are listed as second-class state protected species in China. But despite being officially recognized as endangered, the species is subject to smuggling, as their meat is considered a delicacy and their scales are believed to have medicinal qualities.

http://cdn.cctv-america.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/0880d8f7-edd3-4689-b0e9-c99c895da36e1.jpg
PHOTO/ Chinanews.com

Story from Xinhua and CCTV.

Watch us live anywhere at http://www.cctvamericalive.com
Follow us: @cctv_america on Twitter | CCTVAmerica on Facebook

2,674 pangolins. That's a lot of pangolins. :(

[Mor Sao]

Years ago before the ban, one could buy and use the scales. Many dit da jow formulas used them. I do not use any endangered species.

Sickening images.

[Jimbo]

Those images are absolutely disgusting. And sad.

I recently saw a program where criminal gangs are poaching rhinos and elephants in protected reserves in Africa. They fly over in helicopters and massacre the animals with high-powered rifles, land, then take out the horns or tusks, then leave the carcasses to rot. The ultimate destination of these horns and tusks are to China. These animals are not only innocent but also highly endangered. I try not to think about it, because it gets me so mad. And to add further insult, whatever concoctions those rhino horns are used for are quack 'medicines'.

Whether or not you agree with Sea World's orca shows, what's going on in Africa, Asia and elsewhere to endangered animals for the sake of $$$ and quack Chinese 'aphrodisiacs' is far, far more insidious and destructive. So what the hell is PETA doing to stop this wholesale slaughter? Or are organized poaching gangs not a soft enough target for them to take on?

[SoCo KungFu]

Those images are absolutely disgusting. And sad.

I recently saw a program where criminal gangs are poaching rhinos and elephants in protected reserves in Africa. They fly over in helicopters and massacre the animals with high-powered rifles, land, then take out the horns or tusks, then leave the carcasses to rot. The ultimate destination of these horns and tusks are to China. These animals are not only innocent but also highly endangered. I try not to think about it, because it gets me so mad. And to add further insult, whatever concoctions those rhino horns are used for are quack 'medicines'.

Whether or not you agree with Sea World's orca shows, what's going on in Africa, Asia and elsewhere to endangered animals for the sake of $$$ and quack Chinese 'aphrodisiacs' is far, far more insidious and destructive. So what the hell is PETA doing to stop this wholesale slaughter? Or are organized poaching gangs not a soft enough target for them to take on?

While this is a thread related to TCM and the obvious place to point a finger would be at China, do keep in mind that behind China, it is the US that is 2nd or 3rd (depending on estimate) in imports of illegally harvested animals and animal parts (mainly ivory). And frankly, its a problem we (the developed world) created. If we (our corporations) actually paid people in these countries the true value of the resources we strip from their lands, then there wouldn't be so many impoverished individuals willing to take the risks associated with poaching. The main difference between China and everyone else is in who is driving the demand and which species are being targeted.

[GeneChing]

Must chase down this U of A study and find out what the 25 popular products are.


4 FEB 2016 - 12:34PM
Chinese remedies use endangered species (http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2016/02/04/chinese-remedies-use-endangered-species)

A University of Adelaide study has found DNA from endangered species including snow leopards and tigers in Chinese medicines sold around the world.
Source: AAP

4 FEB 2016 - 11:48 AM UPDATED YESTERDAY 12:34 PM

Traces of endangered animals including tiger and rhinoceros have been found in traditional Chinese medicines sold worldwide, an Adelaide pathologist says.

DNA has been found in more than 25 popular products, and includes traces of snow leopard in an arthritis treatment for sale in South Australia, University of Adelaide study author Professor Roger Byard says.

"We thought herbal products would contain herbs. I think that was our naivety. When we found dog and cat, we thought this could just be contaminant, this can be explained. But to find endangered species was quite alarming," he told AAP on Thursday.

"Rhinoceros horn is used to `cure' disorders ranging from cerebral hemorrhage to AIDS, selling for as much as $US50,000 ($A69,640) per kilogram.

"The powered bones of tigers and mole rats are used to treat arthritis; shell extracts of freshwater turtles are used to treat cancer."

Prof Byard said it was hard to tell just how many people were unwittingly consuming endangered animals on their quest for health - and not just in developing countries where such products were common.

"Our feeling is if can turn up in one of 26 (traditional Chinese) medications in Adelaide, in bigger cities like Sydney or Melbourne, this is just the tip of the iceberg," he said.

Prof Byard also said authorities often overlooked the role of traditional medicines in the illegal wildlife trade.

"Clearly any controls on the import and sale of such a preparation have failed. It is also unclear what steps are taken by authorities once such a preparation is bought to their attention," he said.

"This illegal and very damaging trade needs to stop. However, unfortunately, for a number of species, it may already be too late."

[GeneChing]

Some violators are dumb as rocks. :rolleyes:


https://thenanfang.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wild-python-hunt-eat-header-e1460920614487.jpg
Animal Cruelty

Brothers Catch Endangered Python, Cook It In A Stew, Then Are Arrested By Police (https://thenanfang.com/brothers-arrested-posting-pics-caught-endangered-animal-online/)
No eating endangered animals

Charles Liu Charles Liu, April 18, 2016 9:28am

Like many Chinese, the Guan brothers spent Tomb Sweeping Day paying their respects to their ancestors. However while sweeping their family’s tomb near Shuiming, Bobai, the brothers discovered an unexpected guest: a three-metre long python.

https://thenanfang.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wild-python-hunt-eat-01.jpg

Instead of leaving the endangered species to itself, the Guan brothers decided to take the 15 kilogram snake home, slaughter it, and cook it in a stew. However, before doing so, they decided to take a bunch of photographs of the capture and post them online. Thankfully, someone brought the incident to the attention of local authorities who, on the same day, arrested the brothers.

https://thenanfang.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wild-python-hunt-eat-02.jpg

The python is a state-protected animal in China. Following confirmation from Yulin forestry officials that the photographs were in fact of a protected python, the Guan brothers were arrested. Sometimes social media has its benefits.

https://thenanfang.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/wild-python-hunt-eat-03.jpg

Source: People's Daily Online, Sina Slide, Sina Photos
Photos: People's Daily Online, Sina Slide, Sina Photos

[GeneChing]

Revealed: the Laos market selling ivory carvings and ‘medicinal’ rhino horn from slaughtered wildlife to Chinese buyers (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/17/revealed-the-laos-market-selling-ivory-carvings-and-medicinal-rh/)
Philip Sherwell, asia editor
17 APRIL 2016 • 3:42PM

The array of Buddhist figurines, bracelets, ornaments, pendants and chop-sticks shone creamy-white under the shop spotlights in their display cabinets.

The Laotian woman behind the counter passed the wares to her Chinese customers who held them admiringly and carefully inspected the workmanship.

And she openly assured the would-be customers that the intricately carved pieces were ivory from Africa, the most desirable source, handing them a pen-torch to check for the pinkish hue that indicates high quality.

“The best,” she boasted in Mandarin, as other shoppers studied the list of contents in bottles of tiger bone wine.

In the cases next to them was a much more expensive luxury – rhino horn - sometimes carved into trinkets, but usually offered as bark-like strips on sale in jars, to be ground down, dissolved into water and drunk for “medicinal” purposes.

The store was one of several in a squat concrete market on the outskirts of Vientiane, the capital of Laos, that is the new Asian shop-front for the carnage of some of the world’s most majestic wildlife.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2016/04/16/95524774_Laos-large_trans++eo_i_u9APj8RuoebjoAHt0k9u7HhRJvuo-ZLenGRumA.jpg
Some of the carved ivory items on sale in Laos CREDIT: PHILIP SHERWELL FOR THE TELEGRAPH

Elephant, rhino and tigers are being slaughtered in tens of thousands in Africa and Asia to satisfy the demand of predominantly Chinese consumers for products and “traditional remedies” made from their tusks, horns and bodies.

The Chinese government has in recent years clamped down on the illicit wildlife trade within its borders. So smugglers and buyers now conduct much of their business in their southern neighbours of Vietnam and particularly Laos – the “Wild East” for wildlife trafficking.

The Telegraph visited San Jiang market following information supplied by the Environmental Investigation Agency, a London-based international campaigning organisation that tracks and exposes global environmental crime.

“Laos has emerged as a safe haven for wildlife criminals as international syndicates seek weak spots where enforcement in poor and corruption thrives,” said Julian Newman, EIA’s campaigns director.

Combatting this sickening trade in endangered species is close to the hearts of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge who this week toured a wildlife sanctuary in Assam, India.

They were told about anti-poaching initiatives, yet just hours later the scale of the crisis was brutally illustrated when a rhino in the same park was shot dead and its horn backed off.


With Prince Harry, the royal couple have founded United for Wildlife to work with leading charities to fight the scourge.

Commenting on The Telegraph’s reporting from Laos, a Kensington Palace spokesman said: "It is absolutely vital that these markets are dragged out of the shadows and people learn the truth about what is going on.

"United For Wildlife and the Duke of Cambridge are completely committed to doing everything they can not only to protect animals but also to reduce demand on the ground because that is the only sustainable solution to the problem of poaching."

A royal source said the Duke, who is aware of the market in Laos, will "have significant focus on reducing demand in South East Asia" later this year.

And a major anti-poaching summit will be held later this month in the Kenyan capital Nairobi attended by African leaders and international conservations, as well as celebrity campaigners such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicole Kidman and Elton John and philanthropists George Soros, Paul Allen and Howard Buffett.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2016/04/17/2442835_A_RANGER_WALKS_PAST_POACHED_ELEPHANTSepa00 0223213_FILES_Rangers_with_the_Elite_Anti-Poaching-large_trans++eo_i_u9APj8RuoebjoAHt0k9u7HhRJvuo-ZLenGRumA.jpg
Rangers from Kenya's Elite Anti-Poaching Unit survey the site where 10 elephants were slaughtered by poachers in Tsavo East National Park CREDIT: EPA

There will watch the burning of 120 tons of seized ivory, the largest ever pyre of tusks, intended to send the message that poaching and trafficking do not pay.

But, Mr Newman noted, “those efforts will fail as long as markets in Asia remain open for business”. And as The Telegraph discovered at San Jiang, those markets remain highly lucrative.

We were shown one garish ornament carved out of rhino horn that weighed 321 grams. The seller did the numbers and came up with a price of $53,450, but offered to knock off the $450 if we bought there and then.

In its carved form, the rhino horn was retailing at a head-spinning $16,600 for 100 grams. Uncarved, it sells for about $6,000 for 100 grams – more expensive than gold - making a cut-off horn from a larger animal worth about $200,000.

The horn is usually ground down and dissolved into boiling water in China and also Vietnam where it is believed to have restorative qualities ranging from curing hangovers to cancer.

More affordable are the ivory trinkets and jewellery. Ivory has long been a much sought-after commodity in East Asia and newly affluent Chinese buyers are now driving the market.

In San Jiang, nearly all the buyers and many sellers were Chinese. The prices were quoted in yuan, conversations were conducted in Mandarin and the shop names are written in Chinese script first and then sometimes Lao.

On offer were chopsticks at $290 a set, pendants at $380 and bracelets for $500 upwards. The price was again calculated by weight, with carved ivory, fetching $6 per gram. The seller was asking for $3,729 for an elaborate eight-inch high Buddhist statuette.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2016/04/16/95524776_laos-xlarge_trans++Cca9BU0TuyHkZJzHTSJqzg57EFzlVrO-V_kNyX87nOk.jpg
The $3,729 figurine on the scales CREDIT: PHILIP SHERWELL FOR THE TELEGRAPH


Bottles on nearby shelves offered tiger bone wine and bile harvested from captive battery bears, while Buddhas shaped from the beaks of endangered hornbills were also prominently displayed.

Behind the counter, a manager casually held several wads of $100 bills half-an-inch thick – a graphic visual indicator of the monies involved in the business.

I was the only Westerner there, posing as a British tourist looking for an unusual present, accompanied by a local Chinese-speaker. The sellers were wary about my presence, but they allowed me to take photographs of items on sale so that I could show them to a friend who was advising me on my purchase.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2016/04/17/95525113_Laos_market_-_outside_shots_inc_lots_of_Chinese_signage_and_one _of_the_storefronts_plus_hot-large_trans++eo_i_u9APj8RuoebjoAHt0k9u7HhRJvuo-ZLenGRumA.jpg
Chinese writing on the signage outside the shops in the market CREDIT: PHILIP SHERWELL FOR THE TELEGRAPH


With the guide, they showed no such inhibitions, immediately offering to befriend him on WeChat, a messaging application popular in China and widely used to conduct illicit wildlife trades.

When I asked whether I needed an export certificate to bring the items through customs, the sellers laughed. After all, as there is no legal cross-border trade in ivory, then there can be no paperwork to authorise it.

“No problem,” said on vendor, deploying her only language, then patting her pockets and telling the guide that I should just carry any smaller purchases with me.

There are also websites offering helpful hints on how to carry them on flights – one tip is to wrap the ivory in tinfoil to throw off X-ray machines.

continued next post

[GeneChing]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2016/04/17/95524770_Laos_-_misc_ivory_products_inc_3729_figurine_on_scales__ ____PIC__Philip_Sherwell-xlarge_trans++qVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bH u2jJnT8.jpg
Some of the ivory products on sale at the market including a $3,729 figurine CREDIT: PHILIP SHERWELL FOR THE TELEGRAPH


Laos, a small landlocked communist-ruled state, has become such a hub due to its strategic location in South-East Asia, weak law enforcement and widespread corruption. Located down a street less than a mile from the Mekong river, San Jiang is conveniently close to the city’s airport for Chinese shoppers.

“Almost all of the ivory on sale in Laos comes from elephants slaughtered in Africa,” said Mr Newman of EIA. “The failure of Lao authorities to honour their international obligations and clamp down on the open sale of ivory is appalling.

“The situation for Africa’s elephants is dire. About 30,000 are being poached for their tusks every year, and the scale of the loss is outstripping natural replacement, threatening the long-term survival of the species.

“For Africa’s endangered rhino populations, the outlook is even more parlous. Since 2008 5,940 have been poached, out of a wild population of about 25,000. In 2015 alone 1,338 were killed, the sixth year in a row the number has increased.

“This slaughter is being driven by escalating prices for rhino horn in the main markets of Vietnam and China for pseudo-health benefits, black markets that Laos is culpable of openly supplying.”

In a report entitled Sin City, the EIA and Education for Nature Vietnam last year documented how a corner of north-western Laos, the so-called the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (GT SEZ) in Bokeo Province, has become “a lawless playground” catering to the desires of visiting Chinese gamblers and tourists who can openly purchase and consume illegal wildlife products and parts.

International records show that Laos was implicated in at least 11 major ivory seizures between 2009 and 2015. The combined weight for these seizures is more than 10 tons of ivory – representing the equivalent of more than 1,500 dead elephants.

Laos has also gained global notoriety as the base for several wildlife-trading operations. Best-known is the one headed by a businessman known as Vixay Keosavang – the “Mr Big” of the international trafficking world.

In 2013, the US government offered a $1 million reward for information leading to the dismantling of his syndicate, which is said had affiliates in South Africa, Mozambique, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and China.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2016/04/16/95543852_carving-large_trans++eo_i_u9APj8RuoebjoAHt0k9u7HhRJvuo-ZLenGRumA.jpg
A Thai craftsman in the Surin province carves a Buddha figure CREDIT: JONAS GRATZER/GETTY IMAGES


Mr Vixay remains a free man, his business intact, and told one journalist that he worked with Laotian officials.

Laos has twice been sanctioned twice under CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) the international agreement between governments governing such activities.

The country has acknowledged the challenges. In a speech to mark the UN-designated World Wildlife Day last month, Sommad Pholsena, the minister for natural resources and the environment, pledged that Laos would implement CITES and crack down businesses trading endangered wildlife.

Also last month, Vientiane hosted a meeting of law enforcement officials from border areas of Laos, Vietnam and China to discuss regional moves to tackle wildlife smuggling.

But there have so far been no significant prosecutions or convictions or major seizures, unlike in neighbouring countries such as Thailand and Vietnam.

As the state-run Vientiane Times noted: “While governments in the region have provided a political voice to combatting wildlife trafficking networks, this is yet to translate on the ground and trafficking networks continue unabated.”

Additional reporting by Gordon Rayner in Assam

The very notion of Buddhist figures carved in ivory is ironic and sad.

[herb ox]

This species known as the Pangolin or Scaly Anteater is often overlooked in the discussions of endangered species which usually focuses on elephants, rhinos and tigers and sharks.... but this humble animal is easy prey for poachers, and their scales, known as Chuan Shan Jia, are prized for their blood-invigorating properties, treating diseases of the skin like boils and carbuncles, promoting lactation and regulating the menses. Chuan Shan Jia is salty in taste and cool in temperature, going to the Liver and Stomach. There are plenty of plant based herbs that can treat these conditions without endangering this species! However, the trade is surreptitious, and awhile back, I was contacted by someone on Faceb00k trying to sell me some. She stated emphatically that she had a "special permit" for "farmed pangolin scales" - BS!:eek:



http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/26549963

13 March 2014 Last updated at 07:20
'Shocking' scale of pangolin smuggling revealed
By Ella Davies Reporter, BBC Nature

Pangolin
9784

Official records show that pangolins are being illegally traded on a "shocking" scale, according to a report.

The globally threatened animals are sought for their scales which are used in traditional Chinese medicine.

Annual seizures have been estimated at roughly 10,000 animals but experts warn the illegal trade is far greater

Chinese enforcement officials worked with researchers from the UK to assess the extent of the problem.

9785
Pangolins


Zhao-Min Zhou, from the Public Security Bureau for Forests in China's Yunnan province, worked with researchers from the University of Oxford to analyse official records of pangolins seized from smugglers.

The findings are published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

"The numbers of pangolins traded are shocking, and all the more so considering the pharmaceutical pointlessness of the trade. This trade is intolerably wasteful," said Prof Macdonald, director of the University of Oxford's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU), and a co-author of the paper.

He praised the leadership of Mr Zhou in the study, which gives conservationists the first glimpse of official records of seizures.

The research team uncovered records that 2.59 tonnes of scales, representing approximately 4,870 pangolins, along with 259 intact pangolins (220 living; 39 dead) have been seized since 2010, resulting in 43 enforcement cases.

There are eight species of pangolin, four of which are found in Asia and four of which live in Africa.

Chinese and Sunda pangolins are listed as Endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Indian and Philippine pangolins are considered Near Threatened, as are Africa's giant and white-bellied species.

The animals roll into a ball for protection but this only makes it easier for poachers to collect and transport them unnoticed.
Surveying the bodies of trafficked pangolins Mr Zhou examines the bodies of seized pangolins

In traditional Chinese medicine, roasted pangolin scales are thought to detoxify and drain pus, relieve palsy, and stimulate lactation.

Rapid economic growth in Asia has resulted in soaring demand in recent years.

Pangolins by post

In addition to smuggling whole animals, traffickers use the postal system to transport their contraband.

In the report, Prof Macdonald and colleagues highlight that last November, Beijing customs officials intercepted five parcels of pangolin scales weighing 70kg each.

They subsequently discovered a further tonne of scales had been shipped in this way since April, the equivalent of 1,660 individual animals.

Prolific smugglers have received prison sentences from 11 years to life but with demand out-stripping supply, the trade is only becoming more lucrative.

According to the report, pangolin scales are currently worth £360 ($600) per kilo, twice the amount they traded for in 2008.

9786
Mr Zhou examines the bodies of seized pangolins

Pangolins only give birth to one offspring per year and conservationists warn that current declines are unsustainable.

Richard Thomas, from the wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC, described the animals as "overlooked" in comparison with the more "charismatic" targets of smugglers.

"Poor old pangolins are a bit of a forgotten species. There's been a lot of attention to the big iconic animals: elephants, rhinos, tigers but not much attention to pangolins."

He explained that Asian species of pangolin are protected under CITES legislation and have a "zero quota", meaning their removal from the wild for international trade is illegal.

TRAFFIC staff in Asia are helping to train customs and postal workers to help them detect smuggling attempts and raise awareness of the animals' plight.

"We've uncovered a disastrous situation and currently all the omens for the pangolin are bad but hopefully by drawing attention to this useless trade, international opinion may contribute to changing the situation of the pangolin," said Prof Macdonald.

[GeneChing]

Not just endangered, but overpriced. :rolleyes:


Restaurant fined for serving giant salamander that was too expensive (http://shanghaiist.com/2016/04/27/giant_salamander_too_pricey.php)

http://shanghaiist.com/attachments/alexlinder/giant_salamander.jpg

Authorities cracked down hard on a restaurant in Guangxi for trying to sell its customers a dish of giant salamander... at too steep a price.
The restaurant has been fined 500,000 yuan and its business and service licenses have been revoked after a tourist surnamed Wang complained about being charged 5,000 yuan for a 1.65-kg giant salamander.
According to Wang she was taken by a taxi driver to the restaurant, where the waiter recommended he try the giant salamander, without mentioning the price. Only after the animal had been killed did the waiter inform Wang that it would be 3,200 yuan a kilo -- though she could get a discount if he didn't ask for a receipt.
Wang was outraged. "The highest price I have heard people paying for a giant salamander in Guilin was 1,400 yuan per kilo,” she said, according to a Xinhua report.
She then protested to police... who helped him get the price down to a more reasonable 1,500 yuan a kilo.
However, the restaurant has rejected Wang's account of the events, claiming that the price of the dish was clearly labeled on the menu and Wang had accepted both the weight and price. Additionally, the restaurant manager told Xinhua that their giant salamanders were purchased from a local market at 700 yuan per kilo.
But, police agreed with Wang, punishing the restaurant under China's Pricing Law -- which is apparently a thing that exists and states that restaurants must not overcharge customers. Like billing them for 38 yuan per prawn or 5,000 yuan per endangered fish/giant salamander, for instance
While the fine is nice and all, we think that police may be missing the larger issue here. The giant salamander is a Class II Protected Species in China due to critical endangerment. Once widespread across central, south-western and southern China, they have become increasingly rare because of habitat loss, pollution and (especially) over-hunting. The giant salamander is considered a delicacy in China and it is also used in traditional Chinese medicine.

http://shanghaiist.com/attachments/shang_shanghaiist/giant-salamander-2.jpg

Late last year, a 1.4-meter-long, 52 kg one was discovered lurking in a cave outside of Chongqing. Honestly, we are a little worried about the little guy now.

Contact the author of this article or email tips@shanghaiist.com with further questions, comments or tips.
By Alex Linder in News on Apr 27, 2016 5:59 PM

[GeneChing]

Traditional Chinese medicine risks extinction if the endangered animals it abuses go extinct. :mad:


Sat Jul 2, 2016 2:55pm BST Related: ENVIRONMENT
China defends use of wild animals in traditional medicine (http://uk.reuters.com/article/us-china-endangered-idUKKCN0ZI0GB)
BEIJING | BY BEN BLANCHARD

http://s2.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20160702&t=2&i=1143836535&w=&fh=&fw=&ll=644&pl=429&sq=&r=LYNXNPEC610EI
A police officer carries a stuffed lynx specimen as he arranges confiscated rare wild animal products displayed at the courtyard of a police station in Kunming, Yunnan province, China January 22, 2014.
REUTERS/WONG CAMPION/FILE PHOTO

Traditional Chinese medicine risks extinction if there is a push by the government to completely replace the wild animal parts now used with substitutes, a senior Chinese lawmaker said on Saturday.

China, where an animal-loving middle class has been trying to change old ways, has promoted substitutes for tiger bones, rhino horns and certain other wild animal products, but doubts persist about their usefulness even among some officials.

Beijing in 1993 banned trade in tiger bones and rhino horns, both prized in traditional medicine, as part of global efforts to halt declining animal stocks. But illegal poaching continues, driven by illegal demand in an increasingly affluent country.

Speaking after China amended its wildlife protection law, Zhai Yong, head of parliament's environment and resources protection committee legislation department, admitted using wild animals for medicine was highly controversial. But substitutes reduce the effectiveness of traditional medicine, he said.

"If in the future original products from wild animals are all substituted, our Chinese medicine perhaps won't be of any use anymore. This issue needs to be discussed by us Chinese people," he added.

Commercial tiger farms in China are legal and tiger parts from these farms often end up being made into tonics and going into other medicines, animal rights groups say.

Substitutes exist for tiger bones and many other products from wild animals such as bear bile, the extraction of which from live animals rights groups condemn as barbaric.

Yan Xun, chief engineer of the wildlife preservation department in the State Forestry Administration, said skin and bones from farmed tigers were "legal assets" but tiger bones could not be used in Chinese medicine since the 1993 ban.

State media this week cited another lawmaker, Jin Hua, as saying the law should not ban the use of wildlife due to the importance of traditional Chinese medicine.

"Some international forces use this as a pretext to attack the raw material requirements for traditional Chinese medicines, and often require China to forbid their trade," she was quoted as saying.

The amendments to the wildlife protection law brought only small changes. It still permits the continued "utilisation" of wild animals for medicine and also allows for them to be used in public performances, something animal rights groups have expressed concern about as well.

While the revised law bans mistreatment of wild animals, it contains no specific punishments for any violations.

(Editing by Tom Heneghan)

[GeneChing]

China's demand for rare $50,000 'aquatic cocaine' fish bladder pushing species to extinction (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/china-totoaba-fish-bladder-trade-aquatic-cocaine-money-maw-endangered-species-report-a7317256.html)
Rare organ now one of the most sought-after aphrodisiacs in the world

Lucy Pasha-Robinson 20 hours ago

https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/styles/story_large/public/thumbnails/image/2016/09/20/16/totoaba-maws-offered-for-sale-by-yong-de-chang-in-shantou-june-2016-c-eia-0.jpg
Totoaba swim bladders are offered for sale in Shantou, China EIA

China’s illegal trade in the rare totoaba fish bladder is driving an endangered species of vaquita fish to the brink of extinction, according to a new report.

Numbers of the vaquita have been decimated by illegal poachers using gill nets to trap the totoaba fish, nicknamed “money maw” or “aquatic cocaine” for its staggeringly high price tag on the Asian market.

While prices have fallen in recent years, some large totoaba bladders can still fetch more than $50,000 each on the Chinese black market.

Both species are found only in the northernmost corner of Mexico's Cortez Sea and both are critically endangered, with only 60 vaquita thought to be left in the wild.

The totoaba fish are highly sought after for their alleged health benefits in treating circulatory and skin problems and are believed by some to hold aphrodisiac properties.

The Environmental Investigations Agency (EIA) are now warning of a “buoyant trade” in China, with “no attempt to curb the practice” despite repeated condemnation from environmental activists.

EIA oceans campaign head Clare Perry said the Chinese government needed to acknowledge its vital role in saving the endangered vaquita species.

https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/styles/story_medium/public/thumbnails/image/2016/09/20/16/totoaba-fish-maw-shown-to-eia-investigators-in-yongsheng-marine-products-in-2016-c-eia.jpg
A Chinese trader shows EIA investigators a rare, totoaba fish maw (EIA)

"Trade is happening openly of the totoaba in mainland China despite it being illegal, and we actually found a whole new center for the trade in Shantou that had clearly seen no efforts from the Chinese government," she told The Independent.

"Given the information out there, it's quite a shocking lack of law enforcement when you have the survival of a species at risk."

Ms Perry also warned of a lack of incentive for Mexican smugglers to stop the poaching, warning it was a low risk alternative to cocaine smuggling, with high reward.

She said: “The trade has been going on for over a century.

"However, when Mexican fisherman started making a lot of money, the organised crime groups got involved, as they do with all of these wildlife products where they see quick profit.

“That’s when the trade really exploded.”

Julian Newman, EIA’s campaigns director said dual responsibility needed to be taken to effectively stamp out the trade between the Mexican suppliers of the maw and the Chinese market driving the fishing.

In 2015, Mexican federal environment agency Profepa revealed the commodity was worth more than cocaine in the country, with one kilo of bladder selling for the same as 1.5 kilos of the drug.

In an attempt to stamp out the practice, the Mexican military scours the 5,019-square mile stretch of Californian Gulf several times a day looking for poachers.

Speaking to Mexican newspaper Reforma, one army chief, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “Traffickers entered the business forcefully, applying their organisational structures and their corrupting influence.

“Organised crime has established networks, routes, contacts, points of sale and padrinos, or sponsors, in official institutions.

“What was once used to traffic drugs was implemented for the totoaba.”

However, the Mexican Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat) reported that traffickers often camouflaged the bladders with other legally-fished maw.

One environment official said: “The training of police agents isn’t enough, be it at the municipal, state or federal levels.

“The situation is the same with the Army, Navy and customs personnel: they’re not trained to detect these crimes.”

https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/styles/story_medium/public/thumbnails/image/2016/09/20/16/vaquita-if-used-must-be-credited-as-copyright-todd-pusser.jpg
Two vaquita spotted in the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, with only 60 thought to be left in the wild (Todd Pusser)

The vaquita is the smallest and rarest cetacean species, closely resembling the common porpoise.

Ms Perry said it was not clear that China had a full understanding of the implications of the totoaba trade for the vaquita.

She said: “Domestically, China must stamp out the illegal trade, but also some very swift awareness raising needs to happen among business traders and consumers to save this critically endangered species.”

Now who the heck even thought that this would be a good aphrodesiac in the first place?

[GeneChing]

A ranger, poacher and investigator explain pangolin trade (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/a-ranger-poacher-and-investigator-explain-pangolin-trade/2016/10/05/11a805a6-8b0e-11e6-8cdc-4fbb1973b506_story.html)

https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_1484w/2010-2019/Wires/Online/2016-10-05/AP/Images/UgandaSavingSpeciesPangolins-10893.jpg?uuid=2djvyIqzEeaM3E-7GXO1Bg
In this Friday, Sept. 23, 2016 photo, park ranger Denis Odong stands in an open area in Kidepo Valley National Park in northern Uganda. Although a global wildlife summit banned all trade of pangolins, doubts remain whether that will stop their illegal traffic in Africa fueled by growing demand from Asian consumers, particularly in China. (Helene Franchineau/Associated Press)

By Helene Franchineau | AP October 5 at 11:12 AM
KAMPALA, Uganda — Commercial trade in the pangolin, a scaly anteater with a distinctive coat of hard shells, is now forbidden following decisions made last week at a conservation meeting in Johannesburg.

The pangolin is the world’s most heavily trafficked mammal, with rampant poaching driven by demand for its meat, considered a delicacy in Vietnam and some parts of China, and its scales, which are used in traditional Chinese medicine.

The Associated Press spoke to a former pangolin poacher, a park ranger trying to curb poaching, and an undercover investigator about the trade.

___

THE FORMER POACHER

Michael Ojara, a 20-year-old farmer, said police arrested him in April after he caught a pangolin near his village in northwestern Uganda and tried to sell it. Ojara, whose village of Lagaji is located near Murchison Falls National Park, said he was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.

“I don’t want to engage in poaching anymore, because I feel that if I do again, I will get arrested,” Ojara said in an interview late last month. Ojara said he had also killed an elephant a few years ago that wandered into his village from Murchison Falls because it was ruining his crops.

___

THE RANGER

Denis Odong, 30, is a Ugandan ranger who said he has only spotted a pangolin once in his eight years on the job. Odong, who works at the Kidepo Valley National Park, bordering South Sudan, said local villagers need to be provided with incentives to preserve wildlife.

But buyers of pangolin scales, which are widely used in traditional Chinese medicine, play a greater role, he added. “Even the Chinese themselves, they know that poaching the pangolins will endanger the species,” Odong said.

___

THE UNDERCOVER INVESTIGATOR

Rebecca T. works as an undercover investigator into the trade of pangolins for the Natural Resource Conservation Network, a Ugandan nonprofit group. The 27-year-old agreed to an interview on condition of partial anonymity because revealing her identity could undermine her investigations.

Posing as a potential buyer, Rebecca connects with traffickers and travels across Uganda to meet them, see the products — usually live pangolins or scales — and negotiate prices. Once a deal and meeting has been set up, the group works with police to mount an operation and arrest the traffickers.

“They have big people behind them, they are not alone,” the investigator says of the traffickers. “They use expensive dogs, sometimes guns, and if you trace these guns you find that they come from the authorities.”

___

The International Women’s Media Foundation supported Franchineau in her reporting in Uganda as part of its Africa Great Lakes Initiative.

Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

TCM just likes pangolins because their weird looking.

[GeneChing]

Approximately 5,000 to 7,500 pangolins. ******. :mad:


China Announces Its Largest-Ever Seizure Of Trafficked Pangolin Scales (http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/28/507220370/china-announces-its-largest-ever-seizure-of-trafficked-pangolin-scales)
December 28, 20168:06 AM ET
CAMILA DOMONOSKE

http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2016/12/28/gettyimages-630598630_wide-7e4e677e0cd500d7c0e39f09b54a995411618f81-s800-c85.jpg
An undated photo, released Wednesday, shows Shanghai customs officers checking pangolin scales at a port in Shanghai. Chinese customs seized over three tonnes of pangolin scales, state media said, in the country's biggest-ever smuggling case involving the animal parts.
STR/AFP/Getty Images

Chinese officials have seized 3.1 tonnes (more than 3.4 tons) of illegally trafficked pangolin scales from a port in Shanghai, according to state media.

It's the largest such seizure China has ever made, Xinhua News Agency reports.

Pangolins are the world's most widely trafficked mammals — their meat is a delicacy and their scales are used in traditional Chinese medicine.

All eight species of pangolin are facing extinction.

"The pangolin is about the size of a raccoon and looks like an artichoke with legs," NPR's Jackie Northam wrote last year. "Its head and body are covered with an armor of t***** scales, giving it the appearance of a reptile. When a pangolin is scared, it curls up into a tight ball."

This fall, commercial trade of the pangolin was "officially banned by the international body responsible for regulating the international trade of endangered species," as NPR's Rebecca Hersher reported.

Pangolins are now covered by "the strictest protections available under international law," she writes.

http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2016/12/28/gettyimages-610214710_wide-05a123aa8cc2412f663db761d5eb119f97b1866b-s800-c85.jpg
A game reserve guide in Zimbabwe holds a female pangolin at Wild Is Life animal sanctuary outside Harare on Sept. 22. Pangolins are the world's most heavily trafficked mammal; demand for pangolin meat and body parts is driving the secretive scaly ant-eating mammals to near extinction.
Jekesai Njikizana/AFP/Getty Images

Rebecca continued:


"In a statement following news of the international commercial ban, Elly Pepper, the deputy director of the Natural Resource Defense Council's wildlife trade initiative, wrote that the trade ban would 'give the world's most-trafficked mammal a fighting chance at survival.' "

The pangolin scales seized in Shanghai were mixed in with wood products shipped from Nigeria, Phys.org reports, citing state broadcaster CCTV.

The illicit animal parts were discovered on Dec. 10, the South China Morning Post reports, and authorities accuse the suspects of smuggling pangolin scales from Africa to China since 2015.

Approximately 5,000 to 7,500 pangolins must have been killed to produce the more than 3 tons of pangolin scales, Xinhua reports.

Based on reported black-market prices for the scales, the seized scales would have been worth more than $2 million, Phys.org says.

"The scales are nothing more than keratin, the same substance that makes up fingernails," the science news service writes. "Yet it has been falsely touted as a cure for multiple ailments, including cancer, among some practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine."

[GeneChing]

It's AngelAbaby, not Angelbaby (as an editor, I feel the pain of a misspelled headline, and maybe just a shade of schadenfreude ;) )

Good ol' WildAid (http://www.wildaid.org/). This is why we support them (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?57416-WildAid-Tiger-Claw-Champion).


Angelbaby teams up with WildAid and Wunderman Shanghai to save Endangered Pangolins (http://brandinginasia.com/pangolins-wildaid-wunderman/)
It is estimated that over 1 million pangolins have been killed and illegally trafficked in the last decade to supply rising demand for their meat and scales in China and east Asia.

By Staff - Jan 12, 2017

http://brandinginasia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Wildaid-Angelbaby-696x357.jpg

WildAid, an environmental organization that focuses on reducing the demand for wildlife products, together with Wunderman Shanghai have just launched a China-based integrated activation campaign aimed at raising public awareness of the plight of pangolins, the world’s most trafficked and least understood wild mammal.

It is estimated that over 1 million pangolins have been killed and illegally trafficked in the last decade to supply rising demand for their meat and scales in China and east Asia.
WildAid has enlisted celebrity spokesperson, Angelababy, to serve as the organization’s ambassador and have recently launched a campaign with her to promote awareness of the plight of these endangered pangolins.

http://brandinginasia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Pangolin-Angelbaby-300x188.jpg
The might pangolin

This phase of the campaign, created by Wunderman Shanghai, includes metro and airport advertising in major Chinese cities and an interactive WeChat platform that encourages conservation awareness of these gentle creatures through an interactive game.

The interactive game involves players going on a search for pangolins in a forest. Once they are able to spot and catch a pangolin, they are given a choice of what to do with their catch: sell, cook or bring home. All responses receive a personal reply from Angelababy encouraging them to stop the killing of these defenseless creatures, delivering the message of “when the buying stops, the killing can too.” Users are then prompted to spread the word of protecting pangolins on social media.

http://brandinginasia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Wildaid-Angelbaby-2-557x420.jpg

“We found that even with a superstar power like Angelababy, Chinese consumers are more likely to want a digital interactive platform that engages them in the message,” said Bryce Whitwam, CEO of Wunderman China.

Pangolins, the only known mammal with scales and are found in China as well as southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. These shy and harmless nocturnal mammals are the most heavily trafficked and poached for their meat and scales, believed in traditional Chinese medicine to cure rheumatism, asthma and other diseases.

http://brandinginasia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Angelbaby-Lovely.jpg
Chinese-born Hong Kong model, actress, and singer, Yang Ying, better known as Angelababy.

All 8 global pangolin species were recently uplisted at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to appendix 1 status, meaning international trade in pangolins will be banned. But more awareness is still needed to further reduce demand for their products.

WildAid’s acting chief representative in China Steve Blake says “this partnership between WildAid and Wunderman gives us an exciting new way to deliver the message of protecting pangolins. Campaigns like these have already proven to decrease demand for wildlife products, and we believe it is only a matter of time before we can start seeing this for pangolins.”

[GeneChing]

THAILAND SEIZES RECORD HAUL OF PANGOLIN SCALES INTENDED FOR TRAFFICKING (http://www.newsweek.com/thailand-seizes-record-haul-pangolin-scales-intended-trafficking-551767?rx=us)
BY JACK MOORE ON 2/2/17 AT 1:12 PM

THAILAND
Thai authorities revealed almost 3 tonnes of pangolin scales Thursday, in what they said was a record haul of the trafficked animal part.

The scales, made out of keratin, the same protein that fingernails consist of, were shipped from the Congo, through Turkey, before authorities seized two air cargo deliveries at Bangkok’s Suvarmabhumi Airport.

The hauls, worth more than $800,000, were intended to reach Laos. Poachers would have killed some 6,000 pangolins to create that amount of scales, according to customs chief Kulit Sombatsiri, Reuters reported.

http://s.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/styles/full/public/2017/02/02/pangolin.jpg
A vet from Save Vietnam Wildlife (SVW), holds an injured pangolin, as part of its Carnivore and Pangolin Conservation Program in Cuc Phuong National Park in the northern province of Ninh Binh, October 22, 2016. Thai authorities seized a record 3 tonne haul of pangolin scales, they said Thursday.
HOANG DINH NAM/AFP/GETTY

“This is the biggest lot (of pangolin scales) that we have seized,” Police Major General Worapong Thongpaiboon, acting commander of Thailand’s Natural Resources and Environment Crime Division, told AFP news agency. Thai police showed the haul, packed into white bags, to journalists at Bangkok airport.

Pangolins, shy in their nature, are the world’s most-trafficked mammal. Demand for their scales has risen because of the belief in some Asian countries, Vietnam and China for example, that they have medicinal benefits.

They are viewed as a delicacy in the region and pangolin fetus soup is believed to improve male fertility. As with other exotic animal parts, such as elephant tusks, they are mostly garnered in Africa and sold in Asia.

The harmless animals have sticky tongues that allow them to eat ants and termites. The animal recedes into a ball when it feels threatened.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the global body that sets wildlife trade legislation, banned the global trade of eight species of pangolins in January. The animal is critically endangered, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Why is it that any creature that is unusual and unique is believed to help with male virility?

[GeneChing]

I'm going to copy out all the pangolin items to their own indie thread (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70061-Pangolins) off the Endangered Species in TCM thread.


‘In love with the taste of wildlife’ – probe launched after officials hold 'endangered pangolin feast' in China (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/07/love-taste-wildlife-probe-launched-officials-hold-endangered/)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2017/02/07/pangolin-1-asociated-press-large_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq2oUEflmHZZHjcYuvN_Gr-bVmXC2g6irFbtWDjolSHWg.jpg
Pangolin's carry their offsprings on their tails CREDIT: AP

Neil Connor, beijing
7 FEBRUARY 2017 • 12:21PM

China has ordered an investigation after online images showed local officials holding a lavish banquet of meat of endangered pangolin, the most trafficked animal on earth.

The meat of the elusive creature - which is often likened to a tiny dinosaur – is seen as a delicacy by some in China, and feasts are considered an extravagant show of hospitality.

But Beijing banned the trade in pangolins more than ten years ago, amid fears that the insect-eating animal was being hunted to extinction.

The alleged feast in the southern province of Guangxi became a hot topic on the Chinese Internet this week after an online post went viral from a businessman who was present.

“This is the first time I have eaten it (pangolin), and it tasted great,” said the comment, which was posted alongside images of cooked meat and bones.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2017/02/07/Pangoli-meat-global-times-large_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqZ9XL2X431wTPNFE7gDJFdQ1vLv hkMtVb21dMmpQBfEs.jpg
'Pangolin meat' CREDIT: WEIBO/GLOBAL TIMES

“I have fell deeply in love with the taste of wildlife,” added the post, which was reputedly made by a businessman from Hong Kong who was describing a trade trip to Guangxi.

Pangolin smugglers in China can be served with prison sentences of ten years.

But there is huge demand for the nocturnal creature as its scales are highly-prized in Chinese traditional medicine as an ingredient which some believe can improve blood circulation.

Scales can sell for up to £2,000 on the black market, while a pangolin dish at Chinese restaurants would be expected to cost hundreds of pounds.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2017/02/07/JS119486308_AP_pangolin-scales-large_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqJOFPLyy_tlW1XZeapVO4-oTfaxFLFKTsddCrjfeRcj4.jpg
Thai customs officials arrange African pangolin scales at the Customs Department headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand, after they seized their biggest haul ever of African pangolin scales CREDIT: SAKCHAI LALIT/AP PHOTO

Animal protection campaigners believe up to 90,000 dead and alive pangolins have been seized by customs officials over the last ten years in China and Hong Kong.

Heather Sohl, chief adviser of wildlife, at WWF-UK, said: “Pangolins are the most trafficked mammal in the world and this is having a devastating impact on populations across Africa and Asia.”

The pangolin banquet, which was reported to have taken place in July 2015, had “violated Chinese law”, said Keith Guo, regional spokesman for Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals).

“In China, some people still believe the meat of wildlife can improve health, and this has no scientific basis,” he added.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2017/02/07/PD30069642-Pangolin-2-large_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq0yUt6ugM98uus3IXa1PYRbKrvq 5ANpb-j7WGBSw77vY.jpg
A Malayan pangolin is seen out of its cage after being confiscated by the Department of Wildlife and Natural Parks in Kuala Lumpur CREDIT: JIMIN LAI/ AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Comments on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, expressed outrage towards officials, who are often critisised for their extravagant lifestyles.

Beijing ordered provincial authorities to investigate the alleged feast, news site thepaper.cn said. Local authorities did not respond to a request from The Telegraph for comment

“So officials entertain themselves by eating endangered wildlife,” said one post. “No wonder I am concerned about the future of the country.”

Additional reporting by Christine Wei

[GeneChing]

I'm copying all the ivory posts off the Endangered Species in TCM (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?56248-Endangered-Species-in-TCM) to make an indie Ivory thread (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70361-Ivory). Illegal Ivory poaching is not really a TCM thing. It just got posted there because that's been our illegal animal poaching thread.


London investigators say obscure Chinese town is world’s biggest hub for illegal ivory (https://asiancorrespondent.com/2017/07/london-investigators-say-obscure-chinese-town-worlds-biggest-hub-illegal-ivory/#2zVfd10WhSQuS1zM.97)
By Asian Correspondent Staff | 4th July 2017 | @ascorrespondent

https://cdn.asiancorrespondent.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Ivory-Big-940x580.jpg

The EIA says it found a massive ivory smuggling syndicate operating out of a small town in China. Source: AP

INVESTIGATORS from London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) have discovered how a little-known town in southern China has become a global hub – the world’s biggest, in fact – for the smuggling of ivory tusks poached from African elephants.

Following what it describes as an “exhaustive investigation” spanning three years, the EIA said a syndicate member told undercover investigators that Shuidong town in Guangdong province is the destination for a staggering 80 percent of all poached ivory smuggled into China from Africa.

Shuidong, EIA said, is home to a network of ivory trafficking syndicates whose reach extends to East and West Africa, including the elephant poaching hotspots of Tanzania and Mozambique.

After years of painstaking undercover work during which investigators infiltrated one of the leading syndicates, the EIA detailed the inner-workings of the syndicate in its new report (https://eia-international.org/wp-content/uploads/EIA-The-Shuidong-Connection-FINAL.pdf) entitled, The Shuidong Connection: Exposing the global hub of the illegal ivory trade.

In its investigation, the EIA tracked a shipment of more than two tonnes of tusks from northern Mozambique to Shuidong. The investigation, it said, provided insights into the workings of an active ivory smuggling ring.

EIA Executive Director Mary Rice said the smuggling of ivory was still rampant in China despite the Chinese government’s laudable decision to close its domestic ivory market, leading to a fall in price for ivory tusks in the country.

Rice said although they had been identified in the past, the smuggling group was still active until late June 2017, extending its operations to West Africa to source lucrative tusks poached from forest elephants.

“The Chinese Government’s decision to shut its domestic ivory market by the end of 2017 is an admirable response to mounting international pressure to end the industrial-scale slaughter of Africa’s elephants,” Rice said in a statement.

“What EIA discovered in Shuidong, however, clearly shows transnational criminal networks are operating with near-total impunity.”

Rice added it was vital that enforcement agencies in Africa and China “put these criminals out of business immediately.”

https://cdn.asiancorrespondent.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ChinaIvoryDestruction.jpg
Customs officers stand guard in front of confiscated ivory in Dongguan, southern Guangdong province in 2014. Source: AP

The EIA said its first encounter with the Shuidong smugglers was in September 2014 during an investigation into elephant poaching in Tanzania.

In Zanzibar, the main gateway for shipments of tusks flowing out of Tanzania, the EIA found that a single group from the syndicate had sent out 20 shipments of ivory tusks to China in just one year.

“They formed part of an international network of people from Shuidong supplying the booming Chinese market for sea cucumbers; with their knowledge of working in Africa and supply routes to China,” the EIA said.

“Their presence in strategic coastal towns and their business cover, the Shuidong traders in East and West Africa were ideally positioned to move into the illegal ivory trade.”

As a result of improved enforcement efforts and prosecutions, the EIA in April 2016 found that ivory traffickers were switching their focus from Tanzania to Mozambique.

In Pemba, a port town, the EIA said investigators posed as potential ivory traders and logistics specialists and gradually gained the trust of the syndicate partners.

Over the span of a year, investigators found African-based “fixers” who consolidated ivory shipments in secure locations as well as key Chinese syndicate players travelling to Africa to inspect tusks for quality.

The EIA also alleged key customs and border enforcement personnel, as well as freight agents, had taken bribes to turn a blind eye to the illegal activity.

Julian Newman, EIA Campaigns Director, said: “EIA has shared, in confidence, the detailed intelligence unearthed during the course of the Shuidong investigation with relevant Government departments and enforcement agencies and looks to them to use it.

Newman added action is needed to end the criminal enterprise which is “devastating Africa’s elephant populations.”

[GeneChing]

What is it with horns?


Despite Ban, Rhino Horn Flooding Black Markets Across China (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/wildlife-watch-rhino-horn-china/)
The country is pledged to end the trade in elephant ivory this year, but will it take steps to help save rhinos?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/2017/07/18/rhino-china-black-market/01-rhino-china-black-market.adapt.590.1.jpg
An attack by a poacher left this rhino in South Africa hornless. More than a thousand rhinos there have been slaughtered for their horns annually during the past four years.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENT STIRTON, GETTY IMAGES, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

By Laurel Neme
PUBLISHED JULY 18, 2017

How do you disrupt the illicit rhino horn supply chain from Africa to Asia? That’s the question spurring a new investigation into rhino horn trafficking in China and Vietnam undertaken by the Elephant Action League (EAL), a Los Angeles-based conservation NGO.

Rhinos are being decimated by poaching. In South Africa, home to almost 80 percent of the world’s rhinos, more than a thousand have been slaughtered annually during the past four years. That’s 8,000 percent more than were killed a decade ago, in 2007. Last year rangers in Kruger National Park were called out to stop more than 2,800 incursions by poachers—roughly eight every day.

It has generally been thought that Vietnam is the main market for rhino horn, although little has been known about the traffickers and their links to countries of origin and transit. Until now, that is.

The EAL report confirms that much of the horn winds up in Asia—but that China, not Vietnam, is the black market behemoth.

EAL’s investigation, conducted from August 2016 through June 2017, involved off-site research, intelligence analysis, and multiple undercover field missions to key locations in Vietnam and across China, with a focus there on provinces along the southern border: Guangxi, Guangdong, and Yunnan, as well as Henan, Fujian, and the capital, Beijing.

This confirmation that rhino horn is ubiquitous in China underscores how important it is for the country to take steps to shut down the trade, which is illegal, just as it has made strong moves to end trade in elephant ivory.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/2017/07/18/rhino-china-black-market/02-rhino-china-black-market.adapt.352.1.jpg
A new report details how China is driving the illegal trade in rhino horn, carved into artwork and used in traditional medicine.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BRENT STIRTON, GETTY IMAGES, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

“As in the case of the elephants, the future of the rhino lies in the hands of China, and its willingness to enforce the law, and in the hands of the international community to apply pressure on China and Vietnam to stop this madness,” says Andrea Crosta, director of EAL and the author of the report.

“Unlike the illegal ivory trade, where to make real money you have to smuggle or sell hundreds of kilos of ivory, in the case of the rhino, with a wholesale price for raw horn of roughly 40 times more per kilogram than raw ivory, you need much less to make good money,” Crosta says. “So overall the volume of the rhino horn illegal trade in terms of pure quantity is much smaller than for ivory, yet the profits for traders are much higher.”

The hundred-page report, released today, reads a bit like a spy novel, with numerous quoted conversations (unattributed in this publicly available document) that give insights into the minds of rhino traffickers.

EAL details a web of traffickers, transporters, wholesale dealers, and traders that shows—by its very complexity—why stopping the trade is so difficult.

The investigators found that dealers in China typically don’t maintain an inventory but rather supply it on-demand to avoid detection. Dealers also use WeChat to connect with buyers and Alipay to process payments.

The names of key suspects and other evidence have been handed over to relevant authorities. “They can’t arrest these people just because it’s in our report, but it’s more than enough to trigger their own investigation,” Crosta says.

Some highlights of the report:

Although trading rhino horn has been illegal in China since 1993, it’s ubiquitous in the country. “It’s shocking to see how widespread and easy it is to find,” Crosta says. Given China’s huge, increasingly affluent population and the fact that fewer than 30,000 rhinos remain worldwide, this represents a serious threat to the survival of rhinos in the wild.
China appears to be the largest consumer of illegal rhino horn, and Vietnam is a key enabler. While nobody knows for sure, Crosta estimates that “several hundred rhino horns go through Vietnam to China every year—which may be up to half the total trade.”
The black market for rhino horn in China is stable and strong. “It’s not a market that is going down,” Crosta notes. That contrasts with EAL’s earlier ivory trade investigation, which found that Chinese traders didn’t want their children to go into the ivory business because it was a dying market. “You don’t feel that here,” Crosta says.
One of the most important routes for smuggled rhino horn is across the mountains from Vietnam into southern China. That’s a choke point that authorities could target. Often, rhino horn is smuggled from Vietnam to either Guangxi or Yunnan Provinces, then moved on to primary retail markets in cities in the provinces of Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, or in Beijing. Traders often hire individuals, including children, to transport the contraband across the border because they can more readily avoid detection or inspection.
Rhino horn traders generally also deal in other illicit wildlife products—most commonly elephant ivory and pangolin scales, but investigators also found large quantities of tiger parts (teeth, skins, and bones), as well as bear paws, bile, and gall bladders, hawksbill turtle shells, helmeted hornbill beaks, snow leopard skins, civet cats, king cobras, wolf skins and teeth, and corals. “China is still the largest market for illegal wildlife products,” the report says, “and this was evident in nearly all locations investigated by the EAL team. Vietnam is not far behind—most likely only because it is a smaller country.”
Based on the investigation’s findings, Crosta thinks current rhino horn awareness campaigns don’t resonate with the public. “Traders and buyers are concerned about only one thing: law enforcement. Nothing else.” He suggests a campaign focused on law enforcement that says, “If you buy or sell rhino horn, you go to jail”—provided it’s followed up with action.

EAL has handed a 200-page confidential intelligence brief to law enforcement agents in China, Vietnam, Interpol, and the United States. The brief contains case files on 55 rhino horn traders and traffickers in China and includes videos and other evidence.

“This is the most important outcome of this investigation,” Crosta says. “We’re not talking about a guy selling a bracelet or cup, but high level traders—people capable of importing and selling many raw horns and products.”

Laurel Neme is a writer covering wildlife trafficking and a frequent contributor to National Geographic. She is the author of Animal Investigators: How the World’s First Wildlife Forensics Lab is Solving Crimes and Saving Endangered Species and Orangutan Houdini.

[GeneChing]

The price of eternal youth: Protected frogs are DRIED TO DEATH so shops can make traditional Chinese medicine that's supposed to help women 'look beautiful' (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5082195/Protected-frogs-dried-DEATH-women-young.html)
WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
Hasma, a popular medicinal food in China, is made with frogs' fallopian tubes
The frogs are dried to death so their tubes could be taken at the 'highest quality'
The best Hasma is produced in north-east China from a rare type of wild frogs
Hasma is rich in protein and can supposedly improve women's skin condition
By Tiffany Lo For Mailonline
PUBLISHED: 04:41 EST, 17 November 2017 | UPDATED: 08:18 EST, 17 November 2017

Sometimes, beauty comes with a very hefty price.

In China, protected wild frogs are being cruelly killed so traditional Chinese medicine vendors could turn them into a popular 'anti-ageing' food ingredient.

Hasma, or known as 'xue ha gao' in Chinese, is made with the fallopian tubes of dried-up female frogs and is supposed to help consumers look young.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/11/16/16/464BBE9E00000578-5082195-The_drying_process_can_trap_all_the_nutrients_in_i ts_form_before-a-66_1510850980749.jpg
Cruel: Hundreds of Asiatic grass frogs are hung and dried to death in Jilin, north-east China

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Dried to death: Asiatic grass frogs, once captured, are hung up for up to 30 days until they die

The best hasma is made in the north-eastern part of China and comes from Asiatic grass frogs, a protected amphibian species from the forest in the region under the Regulation on Protection of Wild Medicinal Resources.

Shocking pictures have emerged from Chinese media, capturing the production process of the popular medicinal food ingredient.

The photos are taken in Changbai mountain, Jilin Province, on November 7.

They show two full racks of frogs being hung up in front of a common grocery shop. The retailer pierced the frogs by a wire and hung them up until their death.

After the animals are killed, their collagen-filled tubes would be removed from their remains and put on sale in the shop. Their remains are thrown to the bin.

The shop owner told a reporter from iFeng.com: 'The hanging method can ensure that the hasma can be extracted at its best quality.'
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/11/16/16/4657388D00000578-5082195-Hasma_will_then_be_sold_in_boxes_for_women_in_groc ery_stores_or_-a-64_1510850980744.jpg
Hasma (pictured) is usually sold in boxes in grocery stores or Chinese medicine shops

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It's often cooked and eaten as Chinese dessert along with sugar and dried fruits (pictured)

Chen Jianping, an associate professor from the School of Chinese Medicine at University of Hong Kong told HK Economic Times: 'Pure hasma should be made from the fallopian tubes of female Asiatic grass frogs.

'However today, the hasma (on the market) might contain fallopian tubes, ovary or fat tissues from any frog families.'

In addition to the air-drying process, extra steps are apparently taken to the frogs in order to produce the best hasma.

According to Pixpo, when the frogs are captured they are cruelly knocked out with electricity before being hung up for about 20 to 30 days until they die.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/11/16/16/464BBEB200000578-5082195-Female_Asiatic_grass_frog_store_nutrients_in_their _oviducts_when-a-60_1510850980740.jpg
Female Asiatic grass frog store rich nutrients in their oviducts before they hibernate in winter

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Two full racks of frogs are hung up in front of a grocery shop in north-east China

The same Pixpo report said female Asiatic grass frogs have rich nutrients in their fallopian tubes. The tubes, which contain high protein and oestrogen. In winter when the frogs hibernate, the nutrients become a vital source of energy for the animals.

Hasma has become a precious health supplement for Chinese women, and can be dated back to Ben Cao Gang Mu, a 16th century Chinese herbology masterpiece written by legendary herbologist Li Shizhen.

In particular, pregnant woman believe hasma could help them achieve wrinkle-free skin. In addition, it's thought that hasma could boost women's energy level and stop them from feeling tired during pregnancy.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/11/16/16/464BBE5700000578-5082195-Hasma_is_considered_as_a_precious_health_supplemen t_that_are_fav-a-62_1510850980742.jpg
Hasma is considered as a precious health supplement that are favoured by Chinese women

Regina Lo, 48, a mother of two from Hong Kong, told MailOnline that she consumed hasma as a health supplement during her pregnancy in 2002.

'I used to have it once every week, boil them and pour in milk or sugar and eat it as dessert,' she said.

However, she said she did not experience any obvious change.

'I didn't see any difference, but psychologically I felt my skin got smoother and more glowing.'

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Chinese medicine doctors said that hasma has high protein, vitamins and oestrogen

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/11/16/16/464BBDDE00000578-5082195-Female_grass_frogs_were_hung_on_wires_for_20_to_30 _days_before_b-a-59_1510850980738.jpg
Female grass frogs were hung on wires for 20 to 30 days before being dissected for hasma

Professor Cui Hequan from Henan University of Traditional Chinese Medicine said hasma contains very high medical value, according to a People's Daily Online report.

'Hasma contains high collagen and amino acid which could help consumers get better metabolism, thus it could regenerate new skin and make women look youthful.

'It can also help balance the hormones and boost energy level.'

Professor Cui said hasma is suitable for pregnant woman who wish to provide extra nutrients to their babies, accelerate recovery from child birth and improve their skin condition.

According to The Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China, published by the Ministry of Health, hasma can cure people who suffer from cough, sweating and insomnia.

The report recommended the food to people who have weaker health.

However, Dr Sun Lihong, a professor from Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine said though hasma could beautify the skin, eating too much of it might put the consumers under the risk of cancer.

Dr Sun told a reporter from Yangtze Evening News: 'Medicinal foods of animal origin, such as hasma and propolis (a resinous substance produced by bees), we have to be cautious.'





TCM & Beauty (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70370-TCM-and-Beauty-Tips)
Weird stuff in TCM (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?50433-Weird-stuff-in-TCM-List-it!)
Endangered Species in TCM (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?56248-Endangered-Species-in-TCM)

[GeneChing]

Russian, Chinese smugglers arrested with ton of bear paws, animal parts—NGO (http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/965111/russian-chinese-smugglers-arrested-with-ton-of-bear-pawsngo)
Agence France-Presse / 04:18 PM January 31, 2018

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/wp-content/blogs.dir/10/files/2018/01/691bc9e343da0ae4de0c9580dee1d5f50edcca20-620x414.jpg
The Siberian tiger, seen here in a reserve in northeastern China, is an endangered species, hunted for use in traditional Chinese medicine. Image: AFP

A group of Russian and Chinese smugglers has been arrested near the border between the two countries in possession of a ton of bear paws as well as tiger, deer and frog parts, an animal protection group said Tuesday.

The smugglers were arrested at the weekend by Russian customs officers in the far east of the country with 870 of the bear paws “and the remains of at least four Siberian tigers” in their three vehicles, said the Russian tiger protection NGO.

The Russian and Chinese nationals were also caught with bear teeth, deer tails and *****es and other animal parts as well as arms and ammunition and an amount of amber, the Amur Tiger Center said.

According to the tiger protection group, the smugglers were headed for China when they were apprehended and were preparing to cross the frozen Lake Khanka on the border.

China is a big market for animals parts from endangered or protected species including tigers, bears, elephants, rhino and pangolins.

The parts are used in the traditional medicine market which flourishes despite the total lack of scientific evidence as to their efficacy and Chinese government campaigns to end the trade.

“The animal body parts are often transported close to Chinese New Year,” which this year falls on February 16, the NGO’s head Sergey Aramilev said.

The Siberian tiger, also known as the Amur tiger, is the largest of the big cats. There remain only around 350 of the animals in the wild, in China, Russia and North Korea. NVG



Wonder what the penalty is? Hope it's harsh.

Thread: Endangered Species in TCM (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?56248-Endangered-Species-in-TCM)
Thread: 2018 Year of the EARTH DOG (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?70579-2018-Year-of-the-EARTH-DOG)

[GeneChing]

Jaguars killed for fangs to supply growing Chinese medicine trade (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/04/jaguars-killed-for--fangs-chinese-medicine-trade)
Demand from Chinese workers raises demand for skin and body parts of endangered species
Robin McKie, Observer science editor

Sun 4 Mar 2018 02.00 EST

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/7e856ffc2ff2f7fd41a69348e4bbb04e7992f090/240_0_3600_2160/master/3600.jpg?w=620&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&
Jaguar numbers have dwindled in recent years, especially in South America. Photograph: Jalen Evans/Getty Images

Conservationists who have uncovered a growing illegal trade in jaguar fangs in South America are linking it to Chinese construction projects that could be threatening wildlife globally.

Experts say major Chinese power plant, road and rail works in developing nations are key stimulants of illicit trade in the skins, bones and horns of endangered animals.

Local people find out that Chinese construction workers have an interest in buying animal bones, horns and body parts for their supposed medical properties and an illicit trade is established. “Essentially, these projects act like giant vacuum cleaners of wildlife that suck everything back to China,” a conservation researcher, Vincent Nijman, of Oxford Brookes University, said last week. “It is a real worry.”

The problem in South America is of particular concern. More than 100 jaguars – a species whose numbers are dwindling – may have been killed in less than a year to supply a trade in their body parts with China. As tiger parts – which are prized by practitioners of Chinese traditional medicine – are becoming scarcer, so a market is opening up for organs from other big cats, including the jaguar.

Two examples of jaguar deaths are given in the current issue of Nature. It reports that on Boxing Day last year, the body of a jaguar was found floating in a drainage canal in Belize in central America.

“Its body was mostly intact, but the head was missing its fangs,” says the report. “Then, on 10 January, a second cat – this time an ocelot that may have been mistaken for a young jaguar – turned up headless in the same channel.”

The extent of the trade was also highlighted by Thaís Morcatty, a wildlife researcher based at Oxford Brookes University who has worked in South America. “Last year, there were more than 50 seizures of packages that contained jaguar parts in Brazil. Most of them appear to have been destined for Asia and China in particular. It is also worth noting there are major Chinese communities in Brazil,” she added.

Jaguars once roamed across much of the southern US, central America and South America. Today their numbers have been drastically reduced because of deforestation and by farmers shooting animals that attack their livestock. The prospect of them being used to supplement Chinese traditional medicine now threatens to reduce their numbers even further.

However, it is the global threat posed by this sort of trade that worries conservationists. For years, Chinese companies have been setting up vast construction project deals with more than 60 countries to construct ports, power stations, rail lines, roads, tunnels and bridges in the developing world. Examples include a $5.8bn power planet in Nigeria, an 835-mile-long railway in Angola and a six-lane, 680-metre-long bridge in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

“These projects are manned by Chinese workers and they go back and forth with local people and also send things back to their families in China,” said Nijman. “Among the things they send back are illicit bones, horns and skin valued by traditional medicine. There is not much sign of them using restraint. At the end of the day, almost anything that can be killed and traded will be.”

srsly? And what are jaguar fangs used for? Enlarging small *****es? :mad:

[David Jamieson]

When the mind is disconnected from the heart and the senses are disconnected from the world, we get this.
I know that sounds shmaltzy, but it is the bottom line.
There is no moral or ethic that says "this is fine, this is ok".

Fueled by superstition or refusal to use less destructive alternatives is destroying the whole world.
If consequences manifested sooner, we would likely do something, but as most serious change and loss occurs over a generation
we are oblivious for the most part.

:mad:

[Jimbo]

The types of people who buy products with these endangered species ingredients don't care about the destruction to those species. They only care about themselves and the questionable benefits they might get NOW. Or the imagined status it might give them. Even if they were somehow made aware of how dire the situation is, they just don't care.

Several years ago, there was a big negative reaction to the mutilation of sharks by fishermen who cut off their fins and throw them back into the sea to die, all to serve the (Chinese) market for shark fin soup. The reaction from China officials was basically, "You are all racist against China and Chinese culture. It's nobody else's business but ours." UH...NO. The health of the wildlife and food chain in the oceans is everybody's business. China (or any other country) does not own this entire planet, nor do they have the right to drive animal species to extinction so they can line their pockets.

Not TCM-related, but the same thing applies to the dolphin and whale-slaughtering "tradition" in Taiji, Japan; as well as the sick "sport" of rich Westerners big-game hunting elephants, rhinos, giraffes, and lions, etc., for fun and excitement.

[GeneChing]

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/animals/2018/09/jagua-poaching-suriname/jaguar-side-shot-nationalgeographic_2298784.adapt.885.1.jpg

Where Jaguars Are ‘Killed to Order’ for the Illegal Trade (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/09/wildlife-watch-news-jaguar-poaching-trafficking-suriname/)
Enterprising Chinese immigrants in Suriname have set up networks to hunt jaguars, process their bodies, and smuggle the products to China.
Jaguar poaching and trafficking is a growing problem in Suriname and across South America.
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE WINTER, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE
BY RACHAEL BALE

PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 23, 2018

A brief story appeared early this year on a news website in Suriname under the headline, “Jaguar teeth found on departing travelers.” The article noted that three Chinese men were arrested in January in possession of the teeth—illegal in Suriname, where jaguars are a protected species. The men were given a “hefty fine” and “sent away.”

Despite numerous inquiries to several ministries and the public prosecutor's office, many of the cases's details still weren't available; however, a representative for the Ministry of Physical Planning, Land, and Forest Management, which oversees wildlife issues, said in an email that the men actually were not fined and were allowed to continue on their journey. It's not clear who was responsible for that decision.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/animals/2018/09/jagua-poaching-suriname/jaguar-trafficking-south-north-america-threats-2.adapt.768.1.jpg
In China, jaguar teeth are likely used as substitutes for tiger teeth, which are turned into necklaces worn as status symbols or in the belief that they protect the wearer from evil. These teeth were confiscated by law enforcement in Bolivia.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTIAN RODRIGUEZ

Though few details are known, it’s apparent that this case is emblematic of a much larger, well-organized network of international jaguar trafficking, with the cats being “killed to order,” turned into jewelry and a medicinal product called “glue,” and smuggled out of Suriname in carry-on luggage on commercial airlines.

The problem was first highlighted by the World Wildlife Fund’s Guianas office in 2010. Now a new investigation by the London-based nonprofit World Animal Protection has provided insights into who the traffickers are, how they work, and the damage they’re doing.

CHINA’S STAKE IN SURINAME

China has been investing heavily in Suriname, as it has elsewhere in South America. A wave of Chinese immigration that began about 20 years ago has brought in thousands of people who work as loggers, miners, and shop owners. The Chinese run operations from major road and building projects to huge logging and mining concessions in the interior jungle.

Access roads to the logging and mining operations have opened up previously inaccessible forested regions, and the back-and-forth travel of Chinese expatriates facilitates the movement of goods out of Suriname. It’s in this setting that the illegal trade in jaguar products has developed.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/animals/2018/09/jagua-poaching-suriname/second-jaguar-poached-by-miner.adapt.352.1.jpg
A photo from social media obtained by an investigator shows a dead jaguar reportedly killed by a miner in Suriname’s interior.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY WORLD ANIMAL PROTECTION

“It is certainly likely that the influx of Chinese citizens has expanded the domestic market for jaguar parts in Suriname,” says Pauline Verheij of the nonprofit International Fund for Animal Welfare. She investigated Suriname’s jaguar trade in early 2018, before joining IFAW, and has found evidence of Chinese people buying jaguar parts in Suriname as long ago as 2003. She adds that in addition to the recent wave of Chinese immigrants, Suriname has a sizeable community of Chinese-Surinamese born and raised in the country who also buy and use jaguar products. Some evidence exists that other groups do as well, though on a much smaller scale.

“Filipinos are rumored to consume the meat—then you have anyone coming to buy jaguar teeth and fangs [for jewelry]. Sometimes the skins will be displayed by locals,” says Nicholas Bruschi, who led the World Animal Protection investigation. But “it’s the Chinese who seem to be dealing in the high amounts of product.”

The main driver of the trade, according to the investigation, is jaguar paste. Alternatively known as jaguar glue, it’s a molasses-like substance made by boiling down the body of a jaguar for seven days. It’s rumored to help with various ailments, from excessive sleepiness to sleeplessness. “There’s absolutely no evidence that jaguar paste cures anything,” Bruschi says.

While the origin of its use isn’t known, Bruschi believes that jaguar paste is an adaptation of tiger paste, a traditional Vietnamese “medicine” responsible in part for the massive illegal trade of tigers in Southeast Asia. Although tiger paste is primarily a Vietnamese product, it appears that jaguar paste is made by and sold to Chinese.

In Chinese, the word for jaguar basically translates to “American tiger,” and across South America, jaguars are also often called “tigers.” It’s unclear whether Chinese consumers are actively interested in jaguar paste itself, or whether they don’t differentiate between it and tiger paste. It’s also possible that once jaguar paste reaches China, it may falsely be labeled as tiger, according to Bruschi.

continued next post

[GeneChing]

THE SUPPLY CHAIN

The process can start in one of two ways. Sometimes a hunter comes across a jaguar or a rancher finds a jaguar stalking his cattle. They could kill the cat and sell it to a middleman for good money. This kind of incidental hunting typically is driven either by fear or by loss of jaguar habitat to ranching, farming, mining, and logging. With less space to hunt for wild prey, the cats are more likely to be tempted by cattle, chicken, and dogs in areas occupied by people.

In addition to these opportunistic forms of jaguar hunting, there’s “kill-to-order,” as Bruschi calls it. That’s when someone in Paramaribo decides he needs a jaguar and puts the word out through his contacts in rural areas that he’s looking to buy. Sometimes the bounty is advertised on social media and by phone, the investigation found, and it can be worth more than a rural person may make in a month.

It can take multiple shots to kill a jaguar and sometimes hours of stalking the wounded animal before the hunter can fire the lethal bullet, the investigation found. If the jaguar has a cub, it may be left for dead or sold into the illegal pet trade.

In Suriname, killing, transporting, buying, selling, even possessing a protected species such as a jaguar is against the law, punishable by up to $134,000 or up to six years in jail, according to Nancy del Prado, an environmental lawyer based in Paramaribo. So getting the jaguar’s body to the capital, where it will be processed, involves a gantlet of transfers, from car to car and safe house to safe house. “It’s constantly kept on the move to frustrate law enforcement,” Bruschi says.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/animals/2018/09/jagua-poaching-suriname/gold-mining-suriname-ap_101121118281.adapt.1190.1.jpg
Mining in Suriname’s interior has reduced jaguar habitat, which has brought the cats into contact with humans more often. Miners may shoot a jaguar out of fear or to protect their dogs, or to fill a bounty offered by a jaguar trafficker.
PHOTOGRAPH BY EDWARD TROON, AP

Once the jaguar gets to Paramaribo, it’s usually kept in a Chinese-owned shop. These businesses are less likely to be investigated by law enforcement because the Chinese community wields so much influence, says Els van Lavieren, with the Conservation International Suriname office, where she’s been investigating the trade for the past two years. “The Chinese community here runs all the shops. All the supermarkets are run by Chinese. They’re important in the economy of Suriname.”

The jaguar will be cooked down into paste, which is put into small containers that smugglers pack into carry-on luggage, often alongside Tiger Balm, a strong-smelling ointment commonly used by athletes to soothe muscle pain. The Tiger Balm helps throw airport sniffer dogs off track, according to the World Animal Protection investigation.

“A lot of Chinese people traveling back to China from here are involved in the smuggling,” van Lavieren says. “They’re going back anyway, so they’re taking some [jaguar products] to get some extra cash.”

In China, Bruschi says, the jaguar paste is sold within friend and family networks, though he says he wants to do more work to better understand that side of the trade.

Jaguar teeth—“by far” the most valuable body part, according to Verheij—are also an important part of the trade. They're sold mostly to Chinese, both in Suriname and China, as necklaces. The illegal trade in jaguar canines has also been identified in Bolivia and elsewhere in South America.

The whole process, from beginning to end, is “very sophisticated,” says a Surinamese park ranger, who asked to remain anonymous to protect his ongoing investigation into the trade. “They know exactly what they’re doing.”

WHERE IS LAW ENFORCEMENT?

Vanessa Kadosoe, of the National Zoological Collection of Suriname, who’s doing research on Suriname’s jaguar numbers, worries about what will happen to the forest if jaguars disappear. As an apex predator, jaguars control the populations of herbivores, such as deer and agouti, a type of rodent. Without jaguars preying on the plant eaters, their numbers could explode, which in turn could wipe out plant species and possibly lead to their gobbling up people’s crops. “If you take out the top predators, you’ll have the whole system come tumbling down,” she says.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/animals/2018/09/jagua-poaching-suriname/jaguar-tree-walk-pantenal-nationalgeographic_2675333.ngsversion.153774540253 6.adapt.1190.1.jpg
A remote camera captures a 10-month-old jaguar cub in Brazil’s Pantanal, one of the last bastions of the species. (Read National Geographic magazine's "The Shrinking Kingdom of the Jaguars.")
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE WINTER, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

A reliable estimate of the number of jaguars in Suriname doesn’t yet exist, but evidence suggests that poaching is taking a toll. The park ranger says he gets a call from informants about the shooting of a jaguar roughly every two weeks, and photos of dead jaguars show up on social media with some regularity. And Bruschi says that, anecdotally, certain areas are having fewer jaguar sightings.

“My assessment, based on several sources, is that the number of jaguars killed for their parts in Suriname may amount to well over a hundred on an annual basis,” Verheij says. “It doesn't take a biologist to understand that these numbers are hugely unsustainable.”

“Enforcement is one of the biggest improvements we can make because at the moment there’s so little enforcement going on that people aren’t even afraid to show pictures on Facebook with their guns and jaguars they’ve shot,” van Lavieren says.

It’s unclear how many arrests have been made for charges relating to selling and smuggling jaguar parts. In an email to National Geographic, the representative from the Ministry of Physical Planning, Land, and Forest Management said that they do keep statistics on arrests and convictions that the records aren’t digitized and “it would take some time to extract specific information regarding jaguars.”

INSIDE THE BLACK MARKET SALE OF JAGUAR PARTS

Go inside the black market trade of jaguar parts with National Geographic photographer Steve Winter and big cat biologist Alexander Braczkowski.
In her review of media reports on jaguar-related arrests, Verheij found that most offenders have been let off with a fine—as was the case with the three Chinese men in January—rather than being prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows. She also says customs controls at the borders should be beefed up and that the government needs to better fund its nature conservation division so it will have the staff, resources, and equipment necessary to do patrols and carry out investigations.

Kadosoe agrees. She wants to see rangers posted on the roads again, doing vehicle checks as they used to in the 1980s. More such monitoring would make some people think twice before illegally transporting a jaguar.

At present, according to the ranger, he and his colleagues are handicapped. He says there’s not even enough fuel for them to go out on patrol, given that they’re each usually allocated only 30 liters—not even a full tank—for each of their three cars for the entire month.

“What can you do with 30 liters of fuel in the forest? You can drive to the airport and come back. You can’t go ****her to check out the hunters, the poachers, the logging areas,” he says. “I’m doing this on my own.”

The ministry acknowledges that resources are scarce, but it says patrols do take place. “Our wildlife rangers carry out regular patrols, but there is enormous ground to cover and a relatively limited budget to work with,” the written statement says. It also acknowledges that there’s no specific strategy for jaguar conservation at the moment, though it says some proposals are pending that would specifically address jaguar protections.

The good news is that because most of Suriname is untamed jungle, jaguars still have naturally protected areas—for now. But for a long time Suriname has wanted to build a road straight through the jungle to connect Paramaribo in the north to the border with Brazil in the south, which would open up remote swaths of jaguar habitat.

Already a Chinese company has paved a road part of the way there.

Wildlife Watch is an investigative reporting project between National Geographic Society and National Geographic Partners focusing on wildlife crime and exploitation. Read more Wildlife Watch stories here, and learn more about National Geographic Society’s nonprofit mission at nationalgeographic.org . Send tips, feedback, and story ideas to ngwildlife@natgeo.com.

This article features a beautiful gallery of jaguars and a vid.

[GeneChing]

China Approves Use of Rhino, Tiger Parts for Medical Treatment and Research (https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-approves-use-of-rhino-tiger-parts-for-medical-treatment-and-research-1540904478)
Change eases 25-year ban and draws criticism from activists concerned to protect endangered species

https://images.wsj.net/im-33647?width=1260&aspect_ratio=1.5
China’s new regulations allow rhino horns from animals raised in captivity, apart from zoos, to be used for medical research or healing. PHOTO: ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
By Chun Han Wong
Oct. 30, 2018 9:01 a.m. ET

BEIJING—China has relaxed a 25-year ban on the sale and use of rhinoceros and tiger parts amid efforts to bolster the traditional Chinese medicine industry, angering activists who say it undercuts efforts to protect endangered animals.

A government directive published Monday said rhino horns and tiger bones could now be used for “medical research or in healing” by certified hospitals and doctors, as long as the parts were sourced from animals raised in captivity, apart from those in zoos. Other exceptions to the ban included scientific research and education, as well as cultural exchanges.

The decision dovetails with President Xi Jinping’s campaign to promote the multibillion-dollar traditional Chinese medicine sector, which evolved over millennia and includes the use of herbal medicine and acupuncture. The industry has gained size and clout over recent years as Mr. Xi has used it as a vehicle for expanding China’s global influence.

Conservationists said the decision could encourage poaching and facilitate black-market trade in rhino and tiger parts that many Chinese wrongly believe to have medicinal value. China is the world’s largest market for illegal rhino horn, according to Elephant Action League, a Los Angeles-based conversation nonprofit. Wildlife experts estimate that there are about 30,000 rhinos and 3,900 tigers left in the wild globally.

“It sets up what is essentially a laundering scheme for illegal tiger bone and rhino horn to enter the marketplace and further perpetuate the demand for these animal parts,” Iris Ho, a wildlife specialist at Washington, D.C, nonprofit Humane Society International, said in a statement.

https://images.wsj.net/im-33628?width=1260&aspect_ratio=1.5
Some Chinese practitioners use tiger-bone products to relieve joint pains and boost male virility. Many scientific studies have found they have no medicinal properties. PHOTO: PETER PARKS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Beijing banned the trade and medical use of rhino horn and tiger bone in 1993, when it also excised references to them from official catalogues of Chinese medical ingredients.

Even so, some practitioners still use rhino horn to treat ailments including fever, rheumatism and gout, while applying tiger-bone products to relieve joint pains and boost male virility. Many scientific studies have found no medicinal properties in either.

The State Council didn’t give reasons for easing the ban. Its publicity office referred queries to the Chinese-medicine regulator, which didn’t immediately respond.

Lu Kang, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, said the new directive updates the 1993 regulations that had become “incompatible” with other existing laws. China remains committed to protecting endangered animals and has set “strict supervisory mechanisms” to improve enforcement, Mr. Lu told reporters during a regular briefing on Tuesday.

The traditional Chinese medicine industry earns more than $120 billion annually and employs more than 660,000 medical practitioners, according to government data.

Mr. Xi has touted Chinese medicine as a scientific and cultural export, particularly to developing countries in Asia and Africa. In 2017, he gave the World Health Organization a statue depicting acupuncture points on the human body, as part of efforts to promote global acceptance of Chinese medical techniques.

Just last week, Mr. Xi visited a Chinese-medicine technological park in southern Guangdong province, where he called the field a “treasure of the Chinese civilization” and urged more efforts to take the industry global.

Some leading Chinese-medicine practitioners, including members of the national legislature, have lobbied for looser restrictions on the medicinal use of parts from endangered species.

“Under conditions that don’t affect the reproduction and survival of these animals, we should reasonably utilize them and conduct scientific research,” Zhang Boli, a legislator and president of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, said in 2015 remarks published by state media.

He said parts could be sustainably harvested for medicinal use by breeding rhinos and using bones from tigers that die from natural causes. China had about 4,000 tigers bred in captivity, according to a 2016 state-media report.

Last year, the government’s Chinese-medicine regulator said it had commissioned an industry group to study ways to “protect and utilize endangered animals for medicinal use,” including rhinos. Its aim was to “satisfy the public’s basic pharmaceutical needs, premised on sustainable development of endangered medicinal resources,” the regulator said.

It wasn’t clear if those studies led to the State Council’s directive, which was issued on Oct. 6 but released publicly only three weeks later. State media reports on the directive highlighted government assurances that the trade in rhino and tiger parts would be strictly managed to ensure the protection of such animals.

Conservationists say China’s decision is bewildering given its recent record in supporting wildlife protection, which had contributed to declining rhino-horn prices in recent years. Two years ago, the Chinese government said it would ban all domestic ivory trade by the end of 2017, a move widely applauded as a significant step in reducing elephant poaching.

—Fanfan Wang contributed to this article.

Write to Chun Han Wong at chunhan.wong@wsj.com

One step forward, two steps backward...

[GeneChing]

After the previous article, I'm encouraged to hear that there was outcry and that it had an effect.


Asia & Pacific
China makes a U-turn on legalizing tiger and rhino trade following international outcry (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/china-makes-a-u-turn-on-legalizing-tiger-and-rhino-trade-following-international-outcry/2018/11/13/ce9c0278-e6f3-11e8-bd89-eecf3b178206_story.html?utm_term=.4c466c2f9535)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/yZAf8x-CuHoGDzOrnUkX1oL4Y84=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/N2B5UOW35QI6RBO7PJVU2JOPXM.jpg
Customs officers stand next to an intercepted rhino horn shipment during a news conference in Hong Kong on Nov. 15, 2011. (Bobby Yip/Reuters)

By Gerry Shih November 13

HONG KONG — China has halted a directive that partially legalized the domestic trade in farmed rhinoceros and tiger parts, two weeks after the move drew a torrent of criticism from conservation groups.

A senior official in China’s cabinet said in a state media interview published Monday that implementation of an October directive reviving the market for the endangered animal parts has been “postponed after study.”

The official, Ding Xuedong, did not specify how long the delay would last. But the interview, which was published in English and Chinese by the official Xinhua News Agency, was cheered by international conservation advocates who saw it as an acknowledgement by Chinese leaders that they made a misstep.

“The Chinese government has long been dedicated to the cause of wildlife protection and has made achievements recognized by the world,” Xinhua quoted Ding, a top official in China’s State Council, as saying.

China, Ding added, “has not changed its stance on wildlife protection and will not ease the crackdown on illegal trafficking and trade of rhinos, tigers and their byproducts.”

The State Council unveiled a directive in late October ending a 25-year ban on trade for rhino and tiger parts — as long as they were sourced from farmed animals and used for traditional Chinese medicine.

The announcement sparked an outcry from wildlife advocates, as well as the United Nations, which warned that a resumption of China’s market for tiger and rhino parts — no matter how narrowly proscribed — would fuel illegal poaching and devastate wild populations.

Conservation groups applauded China’s latest reversal, saying it was more consistent with the position that Beijing has carved out in recent years as a leader on wildlife protection, environment and climate change. China was praised last year for banning the elephant ivory trade altogether.

“It’s a positive sign that China has heard and responded to the overwhelming concerns from the international community,” said Leigh Henry, director of wildlife policy at the World Wildlife Fund. “It’s critical now that the ban remains permanent and is expanded to cover trade in all tiger parts and products, and that a commitment is made to phase out China’s tiger farms altogether.”

Wildlife advocates speculated in October that China’s move to revive the animal parts market was driven by domestic politics. Some viewed it as a way to promote traditional Chinese medicine, while others saw the measure as the handiwork of China’s tiger farms, which have raised an estimated 6,000 tigers in captivity and seek a market for their goods.

Ding, the senior Chinese official, said this week the government would maintain its policy of “three strict bans,” including a prohibition on the use of tiger and rhino parts for medicine, and appeared to extend an olive branch overseas.

“I would like to reiterate that the Chinese government is willing to work with the international community to jointly strive for protecting wildlife and building our harmonious and beautiful planet,” he said.

[GeneChing]

The insidious black market taking Hong Kong turtles to brink of extinction (https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/27/asia/golden-coin-turtle-hong-kong-intl/index.html)
By Caroline Malone and Ivan Watson, CNN
Updated 1:07 AM ET, Fri December 28, 2018
Conservationists fight to save endangered turtles
Golden coin turtles are endangered and only found in the wild in parts of Hong Kong.

Hong Kong (CNN) There's only one place left on Earth where a critically endangered species of freshwater turtle is known to survive in the wild: Hong Kong.
Golden coin turtles are native to the metropolis' natural streams and surrounding vegetation but are so rare it's almost impossible to see one in the wild. Turtle traps, on the other hand, can readily be found.
Poachers capture the reptiles to sell as pets, food or use in traditional Chinese medicine.
The golden coin turtle has a special yellow hue on its head, and three black stripes on its shell. It's a type of box turtle, meaning it can lock its limbs and head inside its shell to guard against predators.
But that doesn't protect it from human hunters.

Trapped

Researchers supported by the Hong Kong government's Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department regularly search the city's extensive country parks to clear away traps.
"From observation, it seems that illegal traps have been in decline," said Yik Hei Sung, an ecologist and assistant research professor with the School of Biological Sciences at Hong Kong University.
"However, recent surveys show that at a certain time of year turtle trapping activity is really high. There's a good chance trapping is very active in some places."
All wild turtles are protected by law.
Researchers alert the government when they find a trap. Hunting wild animals is punishable by one year in prison and a fine of up to $13,000 (100,000 HKD).

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/181224115411-hk-golden-turtle-01-exlarge-169.jpg
A sign warning against illegal hunting seen in a Hong Kong country park.

The golden coin turtle is listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, a global register. The Hong Kong government says anyone found with endangered species faces a maximum fine of $1.3 million ($10 million HKD) and 10 years in jail.
However, in the last three years only one person has been fined the relatively small sum of $1,500, after being caught with equipment to hunt wild creatures -- including turtles. No one has been prosecuted over golden coin turtles in recent years.
Because of their value as pets or for other purposes, rare turtles like the golden coin are bred on farms in China. It's also possible to own a wild turtle with a special license in Hong Kong.
However, experts say this provides a loophole via which wild golden coin turtles are sold as farmed versions in markets. Or shopkeepers use a license they've had for decades, even though they've traded many turtles in that time.
Prices vary, but turtle breeders can sell golden coin turtles for upwards of $10,000 online.

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/181224115520-hk-golden-turtle-03-exlarge-169.jpg
Despite being protected by law, loopholes allow golden coin turtles to be sold at markets.

Breeding program

The survival of most turtle species is under threat in China, where many have been caught to fill the demands of medicinal, pet and food markets.
The semi-aquatic golden coin turtle used to be found across southern China, Vietnam and Laos. After conservationists realized it was disappearing from the wild, the Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden in Hong Kong started a breeding program.
"We've basically been building for about 20 years an assurance colony of the three-banded box turtle," Kadoorie senior conservation officer Paul Crow said. "This species is on the brink of wild extinction, it's nearly gone. The only place on the planet that we have any recent evidence of them breeding in the wild is here in Hong Kong."
While Hong Kong is best known as a skyscraper-packed metropolis, about 40% of the city's territory is protected country park land. The parks' lush forests and streams are ideal for golden coin turtles -- but are also easily accessible by poachers.

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/181224115456-hk-golden-turtle-02-exlarge-169.jpg
The golden coin turtle used to be found across China and southeast Asia.

While breeding programs may save the golden coin turtle from extinction for now, researchers warn that unless the law is better enforced, it could die out in its last known native habitat in a matter of years.
"Over the last 10 to 20 years people have been seeing traps all over Hong Kong. There are basically very few streams that are easily accessible that have not been trapped," said Anthony Lau, an ecologist and lecturer at Hong Kong Baptist University.
"For the turtles it is not getting better."

Call anything 'gold coin' and Chinese are going to want it. Such a senseless waste. :mad:

[GeneChing]

Of course it was Chinese. :mad:


7 Chinese caught with $1m rhino horn pieces (https://www.herald.co.zw/7-chinese-caught-with-1m-rhino-horn-pieces)
27 DEC, 2018 - 00:12

https://www.herald.co.zw/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/12/Rhino-horn.jpg

Leonard Ncube Victoria Falls Reporter
SEVEN Chinese were arrested in Victoria Falls in possession of more than 20kg of rhino horn pieces valued about $1 million.

Zeng Dengui (35), Peicon Jang (35), Liu Cheng (23), Yu Xian (25), Yong Zhu (25), Chen Zhiangfu (30) and Qui Jinchang (29) were arrested following a search at their rented house in Aerodrome suburb on Sunday morning.

The rhino pieces were allegedly hidden in plastic bags and boxes.

Police received a tip-off that the seven were in possession of rhino horns.

The police applied for a search warrant before raiding the house on Sunday morning.

The seven appeared before Victoria Falls magistrate Ms Rangarirai Gakanje yesterday.

They were not formally charged for contravening Section 45(1) (b) of the Parks and Wildlife Act Chapter 20:14 as read with Section 128(b) of the same Act.

The sections criminalise keeping, possessing, selling or disposing of any live specially protected animal, meat or trophy of any such animal.

The magistrate remanded the accused in custody to Thursday next week.

Prosecuting, Mr Bheki Tshabalala said the accused were found in possession of the rhino pieces at No. 858 Aerodrome on Sunday morning.

“On 22 December information was received that there were some Chinese nationals at house number 858 Aerodrome, who were suspected to be keeping rhino horns. Police applied for a search warrant and proceeded to the house on Sunday morning whereupon searching they recovered a plastic bag containing several pieces of rhino horn in one of the bedrooms used by Liu,” said Mr Tshabalala.

He said several other pieces were found in a cardboard box and some stashed inside a mattress that had been cut for concealment.

A digital scale was also recovered, the court heard.

Mr Tshabalala said the pieces weighed 20,98kg and a veterinary surgeon confirmed that they were genuine rhino horns.

The total value of the pieces is $938 700. Mr Givemore Mvhiringi of Mvhiringi and Associates is representing the accused.

[GeneChing]

MARCH 27, 2019 / 10:09 PM / UPDATED 9 HOURS AGO
As China pushes traditional medicine globally, illegal wildlife trade flourishes (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-tcm/as-china-pushes-traditional-medicine-globally-illegal-wildlife-trade-flourishes-idUSKCN1R90D5)
Farah Master
6 MIN READ

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Chinese traditional medicine is rapidly expanding worldwide as a key pillar of the country’s Belt and Road initiative, but conservation groups say demand for treatments using animal products is driving a surge in illegal trafficking of wildlife.

https://s3.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20190328&t=2&i=1370914813&w=1200&r=LYNXNPEF2R07P
Workers weigh herbs behind a bust portraying Chinese herbalist Li Shizhen of the Ming dynasty, at a traditional Chinese medicine store in Beijing, China June 7, 2015. Picture taken June 7, 2015. REUTERS/Stringer

Since the start of the year, authorities in the Chinese territory of Hong Kong have seized record volumes of threatened species, including 8.3 tonnes of pangolin scales from nearly 14,000 pangolins and its largest ever haul of rhino horns, worth more than $1 million.

The former British colony is one of the world’s primary wildlife trafficking transit points, supplying an array of products including shark fins, tiger parts and rhino horn across Asia and into mainland China.

“One of the most alarming characteristics of wildlife trafficking is the growing use of threatened species in traditional medicines,” conservation group ADM Capital Foundation said in a recent report.

It identified the traditional Chinese medicine industry as accounting for more than three-quarters of the trade in endangered wildlife products in Hong Kong over the past 5 years.

China’s State Council has outlined a multi-decade plan to promote traditional medicine, including setting up hospitals, museums, medicinal zoos and botanical gardens in countries involved in its Belt and Road infrastructure rollout.

The industry is booming.

Worth some $60 billion a year, according to a World Health Organisation (WHO) Bulletin, and growing at around 11 percent annually, according to IBIS World, practices such as acupuncture and herbal supplementation are finding acceptance globally.

The WHO says it will formally recognize traditional medicine in its compendium in May, meaning more mainstream recognition of practices dating back more than 2,500 years.

While many practitioners have shunned the use of endangered species, environmental groups say traditional remedies including rare animals are still popular in Vietnam and China, where they are used for a range of ills from cancer to skin blemishes and hangovers.

Species including pangolin, rhino, saiga, sea horses, moon bears and tigers are some of the animals critically endangered by the trade, according to wildlife organizations.

Zhou Jinfeng, Secretary-General of China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, said the WHO should take sustainability and science as preconditions for incorporating traditional Chinese medicine into its compendium.

“All medicinal treatment should be on the principle of ‘do no harm’ to those using, or making it and to the species it depends on; meaning in most cases no vertebrate should be used within TCM,” Zhou said, referring to traditional Chinese medicine.

Inclusion in the compendium did not mean the WHO endorsed the scientific validity of traditional medicine, or that it recommended or condoned the use of animal parts, a WHO spokesman Tarik Jašarević said.

“WHO recommends the enforcement of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which protects rhinos, tigers, and other species,” he said.

TCM PLAYERS
While Hong Kong does not typically manufacture traditional Chinese medicine products, it imports them from the mainland and a wide array, including pangolin scales, saiga horn and shark fin, are readily available in the city’s Western district.

Hong Kong lawmaker Elizabeth Quat said preventing the use of endangered animals in traditional Chinese medicine must happen in the mainland.

“The Chinese government should do something. Manufacturing is mostly in China. The government needs to stop the production of it,” she said.

In online Chinese forums, customers can buy everything from African rhino horn to live young pangolins, also known as scaly anteaters, and the powdered horn of saiga, an endangered type of antelope found in Europe and Asia.

While the use of rhino horn is officially banned in China, pangolin and saiga products are legally used in Chinese medicine with the big traditional medicine companies all producing them.

Companies including Kangmei Pharmaceutical and Tong Ren Tang have been given permits by local government bodies to produce medicines with pangolin scales and saiga horns, according to corporate filings.

Gui Zhen Tang, which owns the biggest moon bear breeding center in southern China, has permits for extracting bear bile, according to its website.

China Traditional Medicine Holdings last year acquired Beijing Huamiao, a company it says holds permits for the “processed products of some of the endangered and protected wild animals”. It did not elaborate.

None of the companies responded to multiple requests for comment.

China’s State Forestry and Grassland Administration and the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine did not respond to requests to comment.

Hong Kong’s Health department said the city’s Chinese Medicines Board “has always been concerned about the balance between the protection of endangered species and the use of traditional Chinese medicine,” and it would continue to observe international regulatory trends and monitor the issue with regard to endangered species.

Farming of animals used in traditional medicine has been advocated by China’s Forestry administration and some breeders as a sustainable way to use endangered animals in traditional Chinese medicine.

However, activists say the use of farmed supplies of animals such as tigers and rhinos risks enabling the laundering of wild animal parts.

Many treatments have already substituted herbal products for animal parts, and practitioners say herbal alternatives are just as, if not more effective.

Lixing Lao, director at the School of Chinese Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, said there was no need to use endangered species.

“Chinese medicine is part of the world,” Lao said. “We take care of the human health, the animals. If we use endangered species, it damages our reputation.”

Reporting by Farah Master; additional reporting by Forina Fu, Vincent Chow and Holly Chik; Editing by Lincoln Feast

Damages TCM's reputation and damages the planet. :mad:

[GeneChing]

I'm launching this 'TCM ED treatments (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?71325-TCM-ED-treatments)' thread today although there's some news on this on other threads, such as our Endangered Species in TCM (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?56248-Endangered-Species-in-TCM). I'll copy this there too.

Nothing like wiping a species off the face of the planet to get your dick hard.l :(


Used as a natural Viagra in Chinese medicine, seahorse numbers are declining (https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/06/asia/seahorse-trade-chinese-medicine-intl/index.html)
By Sarah Lazarus, CNN
Updated 8:37 PM ET, Thu June 6, 2019

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190524134422-02-seahorses-restricted-exlarge-169.jpeg

Hong Kong (CNN)In a row of shops in Sheung Wan, on the western side of Hong Kong Island, the seahorses are stored in plastic boxes and glass jars, their elongated, S-shaped bodies stacked like spoons.

In Hong Kong, this district is the center of the trade in traditional Chinese medicine -- an ancient system that uses dried plants and animal parts to treat ailments. Its narrow streets are crammed with delivery trucks and men pushing trolleys loaded with crates of dried fungi, herbs, berries -- and seahorses.
In Chinese medicine, seahorses are believed to have Viagra-like powers. Hong Kong is the world's largest trading hub for the dried animal. Sarah Foster, program manager of Project Seahorse at the University of British Columbia in Canada, said that analysis of global trade data shows that Hong Kong was responsible for around two thirds of all seahorse imports from 2004 to 2017. The World Wildlife Fund has reported that their popularity as a medicine is also driving sales in China, Taiwan and Indonesia.
While nobody knows how many seahorse are left in the world, experts say they are under threat.
With their miniature equine snouts and beady eyes, seahorses look very different than most other fish. And unusually, it's the males that get pregnant.
But perhaps more importantly to conservation efforts, these are hard animals to study. Spread across vast oceans, some seahorses are less than an inch long and some can change color to camouflage themselves -- making them challenging to spot.

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190605111614-sheung-wan-seahorses-exlarge-169.jpg
Sheung Wan is the epicenter of the trade in Chinese medicine and dried seafood in Hong Kong.

Foster said that about 37 million seahorses are caught in the wild every year. And despite regulations designed to protect them, smuggling is rampant.
According to Project Seahorse, research carried out around the world shows that populations of at least 11 species have dropped by between 30% and 50% over the past 15 years.
Why are seahorses used in Chinese medicine?
Seahorses were first mentioned in Chinese medical literature in 700AD but their use probably goes back much further, said Lixing Lao, director of the School of Chinese Medicine at the University of Hong Kong.

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190524140829-06-seahorses-exlarge-169.jpg
A herbal medicine shop in Sheung Wan. The cat is not for sale.

"According to Chinese medicine theory, seahorse is nourishing ... and gives the body more energy," he said. Mixed with herbs and boiled as a tea, dried seahorses are most commonly used to treat asthma and male sexual dysfunction, including impotence and premature ejaculation, he said.
Lao said there isn't there any scientific evidence that seahorses could relieve asthma or boost sexual performance, adding that there had not been any clinical trials carried out on humans in this area.
As a former British colony, Hong Kong sees a mix of both Western medicine and Chinese medicine -- there were 7,425 registered Chinese medicine practitioners in the territory in 2017, according to the Department of Health.
Seahorses retail in Sheung Wan for up to 40 Hong Kong dollars ($5) each.

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190524135309-04-seahorses-exlarge-169.jpg
Higher prices are charged for seahorses which are large, pale and smooth-skinned.

A shop assistant in Sheung Wan, who declined to give his name, said that from what he has seen, seahorses are mostly bought by men over the age of 50.
Smuggled in suitcases
In theory, seahorses are protected animals.
In 2002, all species were listed under Appendix II of CITES, an international treaty designed to ensure that the international trade in wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival. With this listing, seahorses can be exported only if they have been sourced sustainably and legally, and there is paperwork to prove it.
Some countries, including Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia, went further and imposed blanket bans on seahorse exports.
But these efforts have not saved seahorses, said Foster. Instead, the bans have created a black market.
Earlier this year, Foster participated in a research project in Hong Kong. Investigators questioned 220 traders about the origin of their seahorse stocks during 2016 and 2017 and found that an estimated 95% were imported from countries with export bans. The traders revealed that Thailand is the number one supplier of Hong Kong's Chinese medicine shops -- despite that country officially suspending exports in January 2016.
Small and non-perishable, dried seahorses are easily smuggled across borders, sometimes in mixed consignments with other dried seafood. Several of the traders in Foster's project admitted to carrying them in to Hong Kong in suitcases. With the trade now operating in the shadows, "it's a lot harder for us to monitor, track and manage it," said Foster.


https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190524141452-07-seahorses-restricted-exlarge-169.jpg
Seahorses for sale in Hong Kong's Sheung Wan district.

The Chinese medicine shops in Sheung Wan are not breaking the law in selling seahorses. A spokesperson for the Hong Kong government's Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) said that CITES measures for seahorses are designed to control import and export, but Hong Kong law does not ban trade within the territory.
The AFCD has been trying to stop the illegal imports. In 2018, Hong Kong authorities seized 45 shipments of incoming dried seahorses weighing a total of 470 kilograms -- approximately 175,000 seahorses. The heaviest penalty handed to a smuggler was a four-month prison sentence, said the spokesperson.
Caught in the net
The traditional Chinese medicine market might be fueling demand for seahorses, but if the trade was stopped it would not save them, said Foster. That's because the underlying problem isn't Chinese medicine -- "it's the fishing industry," she said.

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190528111130-09-seahorses-restricted-exlarge-169.jpg
By dragging a large net between them, these Thai pair trawlers catch more fish than two boats operating independently.

Foster explained that as relatively rare animals, seahorses are not usually targeted by fishing boats. However, when indiscriminate fishing gear is used, they get scooped up in the nets along with everything else.
Trawl nets -- large nets that are dragged along the seabed, catching everything in their path -- are the worst offenders. According to Project Seahorse, trawlers drag an area of seabed twice the size of the continental United States, every year.
Trawl fishing is widespread in Africa, Latin America, east Asia and southeast Asia, said Foster, and southeast Asia is a hotspot for seahorses.

https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/190524134417-01-seahorses-restricted-exlarge-169.jpg
Fishermen sort through the haul on a Mexican trawler.

As a valuable item, seahorses are usually retrieved from fishing nets and sold.
Even if the trade disappeared, seahorses would still be caught in the nets, said Foster -- which would almost certainly kill them. "Either way, they would be dying," she added.
Foster said the only way to save seahorses is to better manage fisheries -- reducing the size of fishing fleets, closing large areas of ocean to trawlers and making greater efforts to keep trawlers out of existing exclusion zones.
CNN contacted Thailand's Department of Fisheries for their view on seahorse exports and fisheries regulation but had not received a reply at the time of publication.
Foster would also like to see trade bans properly enforced with more rigorous checking of dried seafood shipments.
"Without greater political will, it won't be possible to stamp out the problem," she said, adding that she fears that seahorses will be wiped out in some parts of the world.

[GeneChing]

Hunting the Elusive Rhino-Horn Cartel of Thailand (https://www.gq.com/story/hunting-rhino-horn-cartel-of-thailand)
From an outpost in northeastern Thailand, a couple of shadowy men have for years been running the world's most elaborate poaching ring—earning an enormous fortune by destroying some of the planet's most exotic creatures. Now can an enterprising vigilante finally bring down an untouchable smuggling syndicate?
BY JOSHUA HAMMER
June 17, 2019

https://media.gq.com/photos/5cf58d0b09bcad6930fdd17e/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/rhino-poachers-summer-beach-reads-gq-june-july-2019.jpg
ILLUSTRATIONS BY KELSEY NIZIOLEK

The thunder crack of rifle shot hung for a faint second in the air. Then, with a tremendous tumble, the white rhino hit the dirt. It had taken five bullets to bring the animal down, the final one fired from near-point-blank range. Now, as Chumlong Lemtongthai watched the creature give up its last, pained breaths, he saw only one thing: money.

“Let's go,” he said, instructing his associates to clamber over the corpse, plant themselves astride the head, and remove the animal's twin horns with a few thrusts of a bone saw. Lemtongthai, who'd grown up in Thailand but had made his way to South Africa to strike it rich on hunts like this one, moved deliberately, keenly aware that the work that mattered most to him was just beginning. He knew that a small fortune was his to be won. But first he had to spirit the horns out of Africa and into the hands of his associates in Laos. Once there, they'd be fed down a supply chain that he helped control.

Hitting the black market in China or Vietnam, the horns would be shaved into a fine powder and packaged into tiny vials, and then sold to those who cling to ancient beliefs about their power to heal all manner of maladies—like rheumatism, perhaps, or maybe cancer. The price for such a specious remedy is steep. The rhino dust—sometimes stirred carefully into tea, other times ingested directly—can fetch $65,000 per kilogram. For Lemtongthai, that meant nearly $200,000 for a single horn.

Illicit though his scheme was, there was nothing particularly clandestine about Lemtongthai's behavior out here in the African bush. He motioned for a young lady—a Thai stripper named “Joy”—to approach the dead rhino. Joy had dressed for the hunt in tight jeans and a purple track jacket. She was given the rifle, and she moved in beside the animal, kneeling with the gun in hand. She flashed a wide smile for a waiting camera. It was critical that she appear to be the one who'd bagged the rhino. A photo of Joy and her prize would help with that.

Lemtongthai had been trafficking protected species for a dozen years—but lately had gathered an increasing degree of influence in a vast world of poachers, smugglers, and other merchants of animal death. He'd had a gritty start in life, selling fruit in a street market in Bangkok. But his fortunes turned around when he fell in with a pair of men who dealt in the bones of exotic cats, which can also be ground and are sold in vast quantities. Under their tutelage, Lemtongthai learned the tricks of the tiger-bone trade: procuring the carcasses, boiling them to separate flesh from bone, then wrapping the skeletons in plastic bags and shipping them to a major buyer in Laos for $450 a kilogram.
From there the bones would move east, across the Laotian border into Vietnam, or north, into China. Soon he set himself up in South Africa and used the same techniques to begin moving large quantities of lion bone back to Asia. He was rarely troubled by the government export quotas on lion bone—ranchers and local officials hardly enforced them—and Lemtongthai could earn $1,000 for a bag of bones. He found buyers for even the teeth and claws, which couriers smuggled on flights to Bangkok (thanks, allegedly, to the help of corrupt airline employees).

Lemtongthai drove a Hummer, smoked high-quality weed, gambled in the casinos at Sun City near Johannesburg, and became a regular customer at the Flamingo Gentlemen's Club in Pretoria—a strip club filled with dancers imported from northern Thailand.

But he wanted more. Demand for rhino horn was soaring in Asia, and in 2009 Lemtongthai leapt at the opportunity to expand his business. The work would be risky: South Africa imposed long jail terms for anyone caught poaching or trading the animals. But Lemtongthai knew about a game-changing loophole he could exploit. At the time, under South African law, sportsmen were permitted to hunt one rhino per year and take the head as a personal trophy.

And so it was that Lemtongthai cooked up a simple scheme: He'd hire ringers to pose as trophy hunters, obtain legal export certificates from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and ship the horns to Laos via Thailand. Rather than adorn somebody's wall, they'd be ground down to serve more lucrative purposes.

At first, Lemtongthai flew cronies from home, four or five at a time, to Johannesburg. He made deals with crooked ranch owners, and they in turn hired professionals to do the actual hunting and paid off rangers. Lemtongthai's even believed to have paid off a wildlife quarantine officer at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport to help ensure that his horns got through without a hitch.

Before long, Lemtongthai hit upon an even more efficient plan: He'd use sex workers and other South Africa-based Thai women instead. One day he showed up at the Flamingo and offered the girls about $500 apiece to join the charade. That's how several of the Flamingo strippers, including Joy, were transformed into the world's unlikeliest big-game hunters. Soon they were regularly shuttling in Lemtongthai's black Hummer from the strip club to a ranch a couple of hours away.

The grim business was booming, until the scheme hit a snag. In February of 2011, customs officials at Suvarnabhumi Airport stopped a package of rhino horns that had become separated from its CITES certificate. When the officials tracked down the document, they took a close look and noticed that the globe-trotting trophy hunter who'd supposedly nabbed this rhino was actually a 20-year-old woman originally from northeast Thailand. That seemed odd.
continued next post

[GeneChing]

https://media.gq.com/photos/5cf14c269367ba3427cd88f4/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/rhino-poachers-summer-beach-reads-gq-june-july-2019-02.jpg
A shipment from the Hydra syndicate, packed on ice and seized in 2008 on it's way to Laos.
Courtesy of Freeland Foundation

In all of Bangkok, nobody was more interested in this little customs anomaly than Steve Galster. A shrewd and determined American conservationist, he'd cultivated a cozy relationship with customs officials because he craved this sort of intel. When he was tipped off about the strange package, he knew exactly what was going on.

Galster had moved to Thailand a decade earlier, setting up his own cloak-and-dagger operation to map—and dismantle—the covert market for illegal animal parts. He had zeroed in on the networks that powered the illicit trade, devoting particular attention to an elaborate organization that he had dubbed Hydra, after the multiple-headed sea serpent of Greek mythology. The scheme that Lemtongthai was wrapped up in, Galster figured, looked like a Hydra operation.


The org chart of the Hydra cartel is a map of secrets: a field guide of “who's who in the zoo.”

Run by a handful of powerful gangsters based in Thailand and Laos, Hydra utilized an army of suppliers who would deliver rhino horns, elephant tusks, lion bones, tiger bones, bear bile, the spines of pangolins (anteaters found in dwindling numbers in Southeast Asia and Africa), and other parts harvested from protected wildlife. Hydra also maintained a network of corrupt cops, customs officials, and court officials to facilitate shipments and shield itself from prosecution. Lemtongthai, Galster grasped, appeared to be a major figure in the syndicate.

Indeed, Lemtongthai was feeding brisk demand at the time, according to Galster. On April 23, 2011, Lemtongthai's buyer in Laos placed an order for 50 sets of rhino horns and 300 lion skeletons, which would sell for a total of $15 million. Lemtongthai would clear $1.5 million on the deal.

While Galster was focused on Lemtongthai, officials in South Africa were gathering evidence on the staged hunts, too. In November 2011, as Lemtongthai stepped off a flight from Bangkok, cops stopped the trafficker at the airport. “We found [incriminating] documents and computer files, along with photos of dead rhinos he was posing with,” a South African investigator, Charles van Niekerk, told me. Faced with evidence compiled by both van Niekerk and Galster, Lemtongthai pleaded guilty to running the scam and was sent to prison for six years. For Galster, this victory was just the start. Determined to work up the shadowy Hydra chain, he paid close attention to the scurrying chaos and reorganization set off within the syndicate by Lemtongthai's capture. Galster wasn't going to rest, he vowed, until he had killed Hydra completely.

The nerve center of Steve Galster's operation is tucked inconspicuously into a back alley in central Bangkok, in a low-slung villa. The building's tranquil courtyard features a turtle-filled pond and a garden shaded by lush palms and hardwoods. Inside, where his Freeland Foundation does business, the mood is less serene.

In one windowless office, Galster's obsession is splayed across an entire wall—a tangled collage of data that represents the organizational structure of Hydra. Looking something like John Nash's wall of feverish scribblings in A Beautiful Mind, the diagram has taken Galster years to assemble and has required the service of high-powered analytic software as well as old-fashioned covert sleuthing. It's a blizzard of headshots, birth dates, maps, government ID numbers, biographical text blocks, and hundreds of crisscrossing lines that delineate pecking orders, family relationships, and criminal connections. It's a map of secrets: a field guide, Galster says, of “who's who in the zoo.”

The giant dossier is deadly serious for Galster. “They are mass, serial murderers,” he tells me. By way of example, he points to the rise in rhinos slaughtered in South Africa in the past two decades—from 13 in 2007 to 83 in 2008 to 1,028 in 2017, an average of nearly three a day—a spike that he attributes in large part to Hydra. “These guys are laying waste to the world's most iconic and precious species for a ton of money,” he says.

While the pace of the slaughter has quickened, the demand in Asia for illicit animal parts is nothing new. Ancient Chinese medical texts are replete with references to the medicinal properties of rhino horn, tiger bone, anteater scales, and bear gallbladders. Some of the powers are purely imaginary: The keratin that composes a rhino's horn has no proven medical value. Other products have uses a bit more grounded in science. Bear bile is rich in ursodeoxycholic acid, which is useful for treating liver and gallbladder conditions.

Scientific or not, the trade in animal parts has grown more complex. The market for tusks, bones, and pangolin scales—which are all hard, durable products that can be stashed away for years—now includes savvy commodities brokers who hold them in hopes of making big profits when prices spike.

For many wealthy elite in China and Vietnam, the reputed health benefits are almost beside the point. The products have become status symbols, hauled out at parties and business meetings—markers of taste and sophistication. And a fast-rising middle class in both countries is increasingly fueling the trade.

The effects have been devastating. Aside from the well-documented mass slaughter of Africa's rhinos and elephants, Asian tigers have declined from 100,000 over a century ago to fewer than 4,000 today, while the rhino population in Asia has plummeted to the brink of extinction during the same period. And the cruelty is near unimaginable: Bear bile “farmers,” who operate throughout Southeast Asia, often insert catheters into a captive live animal, a frequently agonizing procedure, to extract the precious fluid from its gallbladder. Sometimes traffickers save themselves the trouble and just kill the bear outright, cut out the organ for onetime use, and ship it on ice.

The Thai government has long known about the abuses, but for many years it turned a blind eye to them. “There have been no rewards, no bonuses, no incentives for fighting wildlife crime in Thailand,” Galster says. “Police would rather work in counternarcotics or counterterrorism. We're trying to change that.”

The Freeland Foundation routinely shares information and resources with the police. To a degree that's rare among public and private organizations, they even work together on tough cases.



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[GeneChing]

https://media.gq.com/photos/5cf14c2660b2218344884d94/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/rhino-poachers-summer-beach-reads-gq-june-july-2019-03.jpg

Galster is 57 and speaks in the flat tones of a native midwesterner. He wears a no-nonsense expression and tends to move along in big, loping strides, as if he always has somewhere important to get to. On a recent afternoon, he introduces me to two ex-narcotics agents on his staff: There's “General Eddy,” who became famous in law-enforcement circles for arresting the fugitive Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in 2008. Next I shake hands with “Poolsub,” who helped gather the evidence that put Chumlong Lemtongthai behind bars. In addition to the two dozen people working here in Bangkok, Galster also employs former military and law enforcement scattered around Southeast Asia—including “Nile,” a secretive character fluent in Vietnamese, whom I would later encounter at a beachside safe house and who has spent thousands of hours gathering surveillance photos and video footage of key Hydra players.

Galster's first glimpse at the highest rungs of Hydra leadership came over a decade ago. A wealthy and secretive Thai woman, whom Galster has never named, led him to a pair of poachers whom she persuaded to divulge their secrets. The men, Galster says, pointed to the figure who stood atop the organization: Vixay Keosavang, a former Laotian military officer. Soon after, Galster learned the identity of Keosavang's closest friend and alleged partner in crime: Bach Van Limh, a burly, gregarious Vietnamese immigrant to Thailand.

The two men lived opposite each other on the Mekong River—Bach on the Thai side, Keosavang in Laos. Bach's alleged expertise was in slipping contraband into the country. “He had people based at ports and airports; he had people in northern Thailand and in southern Thailand,” Galster says. “He had smugglers, people within the private sector, and government officers on his payroll.”

Keosavang, for his part, excelled in actually moving the product throughout Asia after it landed in Laos. He was aided in this enterprise, Galster says, by the import-export firms he ran across the river from Bach—legal businesses that are thought to have helped function as clearinghouses for illegal animal parts. He also owned several grim “zoos” in Laos, private menageries where an assortment of animals were raised for slaughter. Here, tigers, macaques, and other animals were allegedly held and then processed for shipment.

At the height of their business, around 2013, Keosavang and Bach Van Limh were said to be moving some 300 tons of wildlife parts a year—including 100 tons of live turtles, 100 tons of live snakes, 3 tons of lion and tiger bones, 75 tons of pangolin scales, and unknown quantities of elephant tusks and rhino horn. They were earning millions of dollars each year and using the proceeds to buy houses, hotels, expensive vehicles, and frequent trips together to Pattaya, the Thai beach resort famed for its sex industry.

But around 2014, Vixay Keosavang faded from the scene, seemingly done in by negative publicity from the arrest and guilty plea of Chumlong Lemtongthai, the architect of the faux rhino hunts in South Africa. That year, Galster says, Bach Van Limh also abruptly dropped out of view, returning to northern Vietnam. Perhaps he felt the walls beginning to close in. But wildlife contraband was still moving through the usual routes, leaving Galster to wonder: Who could be running Hydra now?

One night in Nakhon Phanom, where authorities were surveilling a group of suspected drug traffickers, an agent broke into the trunk of a suspect's vehicle. As he did, he caught the odor of urine and animal parts—a sign that the group might be moving wildlife as well. Galster was shown surveillance photos of some of the suspects and their associates, he says, and ran their names. They matched those of traders who had worked with Chumlong Lemtongthai. Galster also noticed something familiar in the photos, specifically the eyebrows and facial features of one of the men: He looked remarkably similar to the exiled Bach Van Limh.

In their bid to determine who was in charge of Hydra, Galster's team had, for months, been circling six shadowy figures. They all appeared to have overlapping friendships and business connections with one another. Curiously, the men also had similar names—Boonteung, Boon Chai, Mai Bach, Wanchai Bach, Bach My, and Chai. After analyzing Facebook data, depositions, and these new surveillance photos, Galster realized, in 2015, that he wasn't, in fact, chasing six ghosts. He and his team were pursuing only one. The names were aliases of a single person: a baby-faced resident of Nakhon Phanom named Boonchai Bach. He was the younger brother of Bach Van Limh—and he had apparently been anointed as his successor. “It was a ‘holy ****’ moment,” Galster says.

In addition to his profligate use of aliases, the younger Bach was a master of covert tradecraft. According to Galster, he fastidiously kept his name off bank accounts and property records, frequently changed his appearance, refrained from calling other members of the syndicate on his cell phone, and kept such a low profile that beyond his family, virtually nobody in Nakhon Phanom—a city roughly the size of Seattle—was aware of his existence. “He knew what he was doing,” Poolsub, the former Thai police officer, told me. Hunting Boonchai Bach wouldn't be easy, but bagging him, Galster knew, could upend Hydra.

https://media.gq.com/photos/5cf14c2409bcad12cafdd0f3/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/rhino-poachers-summer-beach-reads-gq-june-july-2019-01.jpg
Chumlong Lemtongthai, who was making a fortune smuggling rhino horns out of Africa—until he was jailed.
Courtesy of Freeland Foundation

Soon agents were scouring Nakhon Phanom, hunting for Boonchai Bach's headquarters. They cruised up and down the riverfront until they noticed something: a four-story residential structure that appeared to have an unusual security grille around the upper floors that obscured what was going on inside. The team surveilled the building and quickly spotted Boonchai Bach. They watched in the middle of the night as goods were loaded by henchmen, whom they followed to warehouses, hotels, and other properties. They identified a fleet of expensive vehicles that Bach used to travel back and forth across the Thai-Laotian border. But they couldn't catch him in a criminal act.

Then, on December 11, 2017, after two years in pursuit, Galster says, customs agents at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport received an alert that a Chinese national suspected of being a courier for wildlife traffickers would be arriving on a flight at noon. The customs men intercepted his suitcase before it reached the carousel—and found, wrapped in plastic, 14 rhino horns cut into 65 pieces. The shipment had a street value of more than $1 million. The officers sent the luggage along to baggage claim and waited to see what would happen next. They watched the Chinese man pluck the suitcase off the carousel and then stroll to the nearby office of Nikorn Wongprajan, a longtime airport quarantine officer. This was strange, they thought. The agents hustled over to Wongprajan's office, and there, stashed inside a locker, was the rhino horn.

Wongprajan—panicky and desperate to spare himself—agreed to help the police continue to follow the horn. The authorities trailed Wongprajan, and watched as he passed the package to one of Boonchai Bach's relatives. The cops swooped in.

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[GeneChing]

About a month later, General Eddy and Poolsub interviewed Wongprajan at Samut Prakan Prison, on the outskirts of Bangkok. An officer accompanied them. At first, Wongprajan denied any connection to Hydra, says Galster. Then Poolsub pulled out photos obtained by Freeland showing Wongprajan and Chumlong Lemtongthai together beside a dead rhino in the bush. Wongprajan, it looked like, had been Lemtongthai's crony and plant at the airport—expediting delivery of rhino horns from the fake hunts in South Africa to Bangkok. With Lemtongthai in prison, Wongprajan had allegedly established new relationships in Hydra. “We know you know this guy. You went to South Africa to see him,” Poolsub said. Wongprajan confessed. Then Poolsub showed him a photo of Boonchai Bach.

“Do you know this guy?” he asked.

Wongprajan nodded.

“Was this the guy you were selling rhino horn to?” the officer pressed.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Write it down.”

According to Galster, Wongprajan scribbled a note naming Boonchai Bach as the sponsor of the rhino-horn-smuggling operation—and signed Bach's photo. “I've got what I need,” the officer said. Then he issued a warrant for Boonchai Bach's arrest.

On the afternoon of January 18, 2018, Thai provincial police apprehended the suspected Hydra kingpin near Nakhon Phanom and shipped him to Bangkok. Soon, likely dazed and in disbelief, Bach found himself inside a cell at Suvarnabhumi Airport, charged with wildlife trafficking.

Steve Galster received the news about Bach's arrest via a WhatsApp message while in England on a fund-raising trip. You've got to be ****ting me, he thought, reading the text. All along, Galster had feared that the layers of protection surrounding Bach were impregnable, that the corruption and apathy of Thai government officials were too deeply ingrained to break through Bach's impunity. But now, against all odds, it seemed like the central pipeline had been ruptured. And with Nikorn Wongprajan prepared to swear at trial that he had been acting under Bach's orders, it looked like the supposed Hydra boss was going away for a long time. Galster had every reason to celebrate.

One warm evening earlier this year, I went with Galster to northeastern Thailand, to the epicenter of Hydra's illicit empire in the river town of Nakhon Phanom. At night, from the bank of the Mekong, we could hear the pulsing of pop music across the water, in Laos. I could also make out the putter of a motorized longboat slipping through the currents carrying who-knows-what—tiger parts, maybe, or methamphetamines or any of the innumerable commodities that journey stealthily through this part of Asia under the cover of darkness. “They always move at night,” Galster said.

Shortly before we arrived in Nakhon Phanom, Wild Animals Checkpoint agents just down the river in Mukdahan seized 182 baskets containing 2,730 rat snakes and cobras as they were about to be ferried out of Thailand and into Laos.

While we moved along the city's riverfront promenade, Galster pointed out Bach's apartment building, which is believed to have provided convenient accommodations to South African lion-bone dealers when they're in town. Galster says it also contains a back room that has played host to Hydra's meetings, making the operation the Nakhon Phanom equivalent of The Sopranos' Satriale's Pork Store. “All the Hydra players own hotels and resorts,” said Galster. “They're money-laundering machines.” Just down the street stands a bar owned until recently by Bach. A short drive from the center of town is the police station where a surveillance team observed Boonchai Bach's suspected bagman, making regular drop-offs in a zipped canvas sack.

The milieu is a natural one for Galster, who has spent his career investigating the illicit trade of drugs, arms, wildlife, and human beings. Raised in Wisconsin, Galster attended George Washington University in the 1980s and became interested in the Soviet war with Afghanistan. After graduation, he landed a job with an NGO that took him to the front, where he documented soldiers and Afghan mujahideen selling heroin to finance weapons purchases. Galster realized that opportunities abounded for a guy looking to mix high ideals with a taste for adventure.

In the early 1990s, he went undercover and joined Christian fundamentalists who were flying guns and Bibles to a rebel group in Mozambique. The dissidents were backed by the apartheid South African government, which was trying at the time to reopen the ivory trade. But the intelligence gathered by Galster and a colleague helped to derail the effort.

Two years later, Galster and another colleague, posing as his wife, infiltrated a trafficking gang in Zhanjiang, in southern China, where he earned the trust of dealers who showed off a stockpile of 500 rhino horns. He filmed the encounter, and before long, police in China swept up the gang, seized the horns, and burned the entire stock on live TV.

In 1994, Galster began investigating a litany of atrocities—cockatoo and scarlet-macaw trafficking in the Amazon, tiger poaching in the Russian Far East and Central Asia. If there were cartels threatening to wipe out animals, Galster made it his business to stop them.

In Thailand, in 2003, he met the turncoat poachers who showed him how the elaborate business worked—tracing for him the supply lines that led into Laos and then onward to Vietnam and China. “It was a free-for-all,” says Galster. “The attitude among traffickers was ‘Get it to Laos and we'll be fine.’ ”

That was the first time that Galster ever heard of Keosavang, the former military officer thought to be running Hydra. He quickly learned that the operation wasn't just relying on parts shipped from places like Africa. One of Hydra's suppliers, Galster discovered through informants, was the Tiger Temple, a zoo and meditation center near the famed bridge over the River Kwai in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. Western tourists flocked to the zoo to pet tiger cubs, learn mindfulness techniques, and walk along footpaths through the woods. Meanwhile, the Buddhist monks in charge were secretly spiriting live big cats to Laos. When Thai authorities shut down the Tiger Temple in 2016, they reportedly seized about 150 live tigers, the thawed carcasses of 40 dead cubs, 20 cubs in jars of formaldehyde, two tiger pelts, and 1,500 tiger-skin amulets.

Another suspected provider in what Galster was beginning to regard as the Hydra network was Daoreung Chaiyamat, who owned a wild-animal farm, the Star Tiger Zoo, in central Thailand. With the local police thought to be in her pocket, Galster says, she could dispatch trucks and boats to Hydra, shipments filled with tigers, as well as pangolins, turtles, snakes, ivory, and more. Freeland launched an investigation in 2009 that eventually helped police freeze $36.5 million of Chaiyamat's assets—including the tiger farm, houses, hotels, jewelry, cars, and cash. Photos obtained by Freeland showed Chaiyamat posing gleefully with a straw basket stuffed with Thai cash, and a toddler napping beneath stacks of Thai cash and American $100 bills.
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[GeneChing]

The scene at the Sriracha Tiger Zoo is degrading and depressing: Tourists dangle raw chickens from fishing poles over a bleak pen where the cats snarl and fight for the food.

Although no criminal charges for animal trafficking were ever brought against Chaiyamat, Galster's research into her and her cohorts provided him with key insights into how the Hydra gang moved its product. He learned, for instance, that pangolin scales, easily mistaken for wood chips, are often smuggled inside potato sacks, while tiger and lion skeletons are frequently disassembled and crammed, skulls and all, into plastic body bags. (The putrid—and telltale—scent of lion and tiger bones can become an occupational unpleasantry for those who smuggle them.)

Rhino horn, hard as a block of wood, can be flown in suitcases or duffel bags—traveling either intact or chopped into pieces that get wrapped in tinfoil or bubble wrap and then surrounded by shampoo bottles or deodorant to mask the foul odor.

Elephant tusks travel in all sorts of ways: inside tin containers labeled “telecommunications equipment,” in hollowed-out logs at the bottom of a shipment of timber.

Some of the contraband reaches Thailand by cargo ship before journeying to Laos and onward to points north. To get it across the Thai border, the product is either hauled by truck across the handful of bridges on the Mekong River or packed onto what Galster calls “banana boats,” wooden longboats with a single outboard motor, and ferried through darkness.

“This is the mother ship of the zoos,” Galster tells me as we pull into the parking lot of the Sriracha Tiger Zoo, a popular tourist attraction and reputed big-cat-laundering center. We're two hours south of Bangkok, near the seaside city of Pattaya, a favored hangout for the Hydra gang.

For years, the Sriracha Tiger Zoo has appalled Galster. He claims that sources familiar with what goes on inside have painted a harrowing picture of slaughter.

He says he was told that after tigers outlived their usefulness, butchers routinely knocked out the beasts with powerful drugs, slit their throats and dismembered them, then packed the pieces into vehicles for transport to Laos. The zoo always kept about 500 tigers on hand, one source told him, so that nobody would notice if a few went missing. The place was under police investigation for a while, but the attention faded away. Still, Galster suspects the zoo may be laundering tigers. Demand for tiger parts remains strong in Vietnam and China; the hottest new product on the market is a supposed aphrodisiac, extracted from the bones and sold in capsule form for $300 per pill.


Near midnight, in the heart of the city's red-light district, Steve Galster ducks into three clubs in rapid succession—hoping to pick up clues about the syndicate's latest activities.

We follow walkways lined with flowering trees, past throngs of tourists, almost all of them Chinese. The scene was degrading and depressing: At the Shoot 'N' Feed attraction, young men armed with pellet guns attempted to bring down chunks of raw meat suspended in tin boxes over a stark concrete enclosure filled with hungry, pacing adult tigers. ****her down the path, tourists dangled raw chickens from fishing poles over another bleak pen containing a dozen more of the huge, beautiful animals. To the delight of their tormentors, the cats snarled and fought one another for the food. Undercover investigations by wildlife advocates here and at a similar zoo in Thailand have produced videos that show what tourists apparently come to experience: chained tigers being forced to roar for photos, cubs separated from their mothers being bottle-fed by visitors.

Such zoos have been able to flourish in Thailand because of the wealth and political influence of those who run them—and the hopelessness of the public. “You don't have people power here,” Galster tells me. “You've got corrupt rich people getting away with it.” Nobody knows exactly how many tiger “sanctuaries” exist in the country, and it took a massive media campaign, including an investigative article in National Geographic, to prod the government in 2016 to shut down the Tiger Temple.

Later that night, Galster tells me that there's another piece of business he wants to check on while he's in Pattaya. He's been trying to track down a target he refers to as “Jayhawk,” a top Hydra associate who has dropped out of sight for months. Galster knows that Jayhawk is an enthusiastic patron of the beach town's tawdry sex clubs, favoring several bars and strippers in particular. Galster, who speaks Thai and knows the scene well, is hoping to find out whether Jayhawk has changed his patterns—and perhaps pick up clues about the syndicate's latest activities.

The taxi drops us off near midnight on Walking Street, the heart of the red-light district. Galster ducks into three clubs in rapid succession, each with a similar motif: a dozen Thai women dancing desultorily to techno music on a mirrored stage beneath strobe lights, surrounded by libidinous foreigners. At the fourth, after making inquiries with the bar hostess and the girls, Galster finds the woman he's looking for: “Doll,” one of Jayhawk's regulars. She's emerged from the dressing room and perches on a stool beside him. She's skinny, wears braces, and looks to be about 16. In a whisper, Galster tells me she's in her 30s. “She had the orthodontia to make herself look young,” he tells me.

Galster and Doll make small talk in Thai, and then he cuts to the chase: “Has the big, scary-looking Vietnamese thug who likes you been around lately?” he asks.

“Yeah, we were together last weekend,” she replies. He was here with a younger friend, Doll tells Galster.

As we head for the door, Galster tells me that he'll try to identify the young companion through his police contacts. But he's gleaned one important fact from the encounter with Doll: Jayhawk is back in the game.

After cops hauled Boonchai Bach off to jail in 2018, Hydra appeared derailed. Conservationists around the world cheered the development. Bach faced charges of rhino-horn trafficking and was eyeing four years in prison if convicted.

As the trial began last year in a provincial courtroom in Samut Prakan, Bach's lawyers insisted that their client was a victim of mistaken identity, Galster recalls. The prosecution, seemingly short on initiative, decided to rely predominantly on the testimony of its star witness, Nikorn Wongprajan, the airport quarantine officer. As long as he stuck to his story and told the court what he had already told cops—namely, that he'd been a key cog in a Bach-hatched scheme to move horns through the airport—the man believed to be running Hydra would end up in prison.


Galster is still chasing the man who he suspects sits atop the Hydra cartel. But he's trying a new approach—a Hail Mary attempt to appeal to the smuggler's conscience.

But when it came time for Wongprajan to identify the head of the organization, he refused to point at Bach, seated in the defendant's chair. Maybe he was thrown off by Bach's changed appearance—he had let his hair grow out and wore glasses. But it might have been out of pure fear. “I'm not sure,” he said nervously. “I don't know who this guy is.” On January 29, 2019, as Galster and Poolsub looked on in dismay, the judge dismissed all the charges. The suspected Hydra boss was immediately hustled out of the courtroom by two escorts, one of whom veered off and took Poolsub aside.

“I remember you,” he said in a faux-polite tone.

“Oh yeah? How's that?” Poolsub shot back.

The two men exchanged a few more tense words. Then the escort slipped into a vehicle with Bach and drove away.

After that, Bach disappeared from circulation. Meanwhile, Wongprajan was returned to a jail cell to await his own trial for his role in the rhino-horn scheme. Galster wasn't shocked. “They either threatened Wongprajan or promised him money,” he says.

Galster is still chasing Boonchai Bach. But he's refraining, for now, from trying to put him behind bars. Instead he's testing a new approach—a Hail Mary attempt born of frustration. During our stopover in Nakhon Phanom, Galster wrote a message to Boonchai Bach on Freeland letterhead. The note, a quixotic appeal to the smuggler's conscience, invited him to contribute to Project RECOVER, an initiative recently put together by Freeland and IBM. It aims to use confiscated funds from traffickers to set up programs that help beleaguered populations of elephants, tigers, rhinos, and other wildlife recover from poaching. “We would like you to consider joining this program,” Galster wrote in Thai. “Here is a chance to be on the right side.”

Galster dropped the letter with a clerk at the reception desk at Bach's apartments on our way to Nakhon Phanom airport. Three months later, he is still waiting for a reply.

Joshua Hammer wrote about a Ukrainian assassination mystery in the March 2018 issue of GQ.

A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2019 issue with the title "Hunting The Rhino-Horn Cartel."

Holy cats. Hydra (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?65907-Marvel-s-Agents-of-S-H-I-E-L-D&p=1304690#post1304690) is real. And they are super evil. :eek:

[GeneChing]

That's a cool snake wine bottle tho...:o


https://www.sustainability-times.com/wp-content/uploads/thumbs/1200px-Snake_wine_R%C6%B0%E1%BB%A3u_thu%E1%BB%91c_in_Viet nam-392mugalle7r0nijggju9s.jpg

Traditional Chinese medicine is a scourge on exotic wildlife (https://www.sustainability-times.com/environmental-protection/traditional-medicine-is-a-scourge-on-exotic-wildlife/)
By Daniel T Cross on August 5, 2019
Natural preservation Wildlife

The illegal global wildlife trade is a multibillion-dollar business with much of it concentrated in Southeast Asia, according to a new report by the United Nations Office on Crime and Drugs.

Most of the trade in the parts of endangered and exotic species is conducted by international criminal syndicates and is intricately tied to other illegal activities from drug trafficking to people smuggling, the UNOCD says. “Organized crime groups are generating tens of billions of dollars in Southeast Asia from the cross-border trafficking and smuggling of illegal drugs and precursors, people, wildlife, timber and counterfeit goods,” the agency says.

No country in the region is unaffected. Even Singapore, a small island state with little natural habitat left on it, has been embroiled in trafficking operations. International smuggling networks use the country as a logistics hub from where they ship wildlife parts like ivory, rhino horns and pangolin scales from Africa and elsewhere to their intended destinations in China, Hong Kong and Vietnam.

At these destinations many better-off costumers are willing to fork out minor fortunes for these animal parts, often in the atavistic belief that these parts possess awesome curative properties as per tenets of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Yet most of such beliefs are wholly unscientific. Rhino horns, usually consumed in powered form, do not cure gout or rheumatism, much less cancer.

Ground tiger bones or whiskers do nothing to alleviate meningitis or malaria. Nor does the consumption of certain body parts of tigers make men more virile. The bile of sun bears is hardly an effective remedy for hemorrhoids, conjunctivitis or hepatitis. At best such “cures” can provide the benefits of the placebo effect.

https://www.sustainability-times.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/30227026751_a44f2e9640_b-768x512.jpg
A shop in China peddles traditional cures. (photo: Flickr)

And yet millions of people across the region – from China to Malaysia – continue to place stock in the curative properties of exotic animal parts despite no scientifically verifiable evidence of their medicinal worth. These “traditional” cures are throwbacks to a superstitious view of the world that would have us believe that by consuming parts of an animal we can imbibe its natural properties from longevity to vigor.

According to traditional beliefs, for instance, consuming the eggs of sea turtles guarantees a long life, the rationale being that turtles have long lives and therefore eating their eggs will help people live longer too. That’s nonsense, of course. In the same vein, traditional Chinese remedies are frequently used for nonexistent maladies. The horn of rhinoceroses (animals that the ancient Chinese mistook for mythical unicorns) is still at times prescribed for “demonic possession,” an imaginary condition.

Meanwhile, most traditional medicines obtained from exotic animals are useless at best and positively harmful at worst. Anyone treated for venomous snakebite with rhino horn risks a painful death. Nor can rhino horn “purify” putrid water and make it safe for drinking, as many practitioners of traditional medicine would have it. Rhino horn is made of keratin, the same substance that comprises human nails. You might as well be chewing those for the exact same medicinal benefits, which are none.

Several mixtures employed in traditional medicine are known to contain naturally occurring toxins and hazardous contaminants, which can cause a variety of debilitating diseases from kidney failure to cancer. In a study of patients with cancer of the upper urinary tract in Taiwan, where Traditional Chinese Medicine remains widely in use, researchers found that 84% of patients showed prolonged exposure to aristolochic acids, which are known to be carcinogenic yet are common in traditional medicine.

Studies like this, observed Fritz Sörgel, head of the Institute for Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Research in Nuremberg, “show very clearly how dangerous the products of TCM can be. The public needs to be better informed about these dangers.”

Despite all that, Traditional Chinese Medicine is enjoying a renaissance of sorts in Asia and ****her afield with billions of dollars’ worth of quack remedies sold both in brink-and-mortar apothecaries and their online varieties. In China itself, the country’s booming economy has been a boon to traditional medicine with more and more people now having the financial wherewithal to pay for overpriced brews, concoctions, tonics, plasters and ointments in the belief that these are the key to a long and healthy life.

All this is bad enough. What’s worse is that such persistent beliefs in quack remedies have come at a terrible cost to wild animals and their ecosystems from Malaysia to Cambodia and from Indonesia to Thailand. Tigers have been poached to the brink of extinction; wild rhino populations have been decimated; countless sun and moon bears have been condemned to fates of lifelong misery at “bile farms” in Vietnam and Laos, where they are subjected to intolerable abuse.

Poaching, fueled mainly by traditional medicine, has reached epidemic proportions across much of Asia, Africa and elsewhere. Even as the numbers of wild tigers, rhinos and turtles dwindles, the price of any remaining animals increases exponentially on the illegal wildlife market, thereby providing yet more incentives to poachers to hunt critically endangered species.

Even if traditional cures made from animals did have some healing properties, they would still not justify all the pain, suffering and death inflicted on wild and captive animals alike in order to obtain those cures. In their quest to be healthy, many consumers of Traditional Chinese Medicine are making ecosystems very sick indeed.

[GeneChing]

More on seahorses (http://www.kungfumagazine.com/forum/showthread.php?56248-Endangered-Species-in-TCM&p=1314046#post1314046).


Peruvian authorities: 12.3 million dried seahorses seized (https://www.sfgate.com/news/science/article/Peruvian-authorities-12-3-million-dried-14492779.php)
Updated 11:21 am PDT, Friday, October 4, 2019

https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/06/06/74/18378546/3/920x920.jpg
In this Sept. 30, 2019 photo provided by the Peruvian Production Ministry, dried seahorses that were seized by authorities are displayed in Callao, Peru. Authorities said that in an unprecedented operation, they detained a ship carrying 12.3 million dried seahorses with a $6 million export value. (Peruvian Production Ministry via AP) Photo: AP / Peruvian Production Minister
Photo: AP

In this Sept. 30, 2019 photo provided by the Peruvian Production Ministry, dried seahorses that were seized by authorities are displayed in Callao, Peru. Authorities said that in an unprecedented operation, ... more

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Authorities in Peru say they've detained a ship carrying 12.3 million dried seahorses with a $6 million export value in an unprecedented operation.

Peruvian marines followed the Adonay ship for several days before intercepting it about 200 miles (322 kilometers) off the Pacific coast.

On board, authorities found 55 boxes filled with seahorses in what Peruvians say is the largest such capture on record.

Four crew members were also detained and face up to five years in prison each.

Throughout the years, the sea creature has been illegally bought for use in Chinese medicine.

But concerns about declining populations have led many countries to implement export bans.

Authorities announced the latest operation Tuesday and say the seahorses will be donated to investigative centers and local universities for research.

[GeneChing]

Indian 'tiger poacher who ate sloth bear *****es' arrested (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-50154673)
1 hour ago

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/15CA6/production/_109345298_gettyimages-1048916330.jpg
GETTY IMAGES
Bear gallbladders can fetch a high price in illegal international markets

Indian police have hailed the arrest of a notorious suspected poacher who they say killed sloth bears and ate their *****es as a "very important catch".

The man, known as Yarlen, had been on the run for years.

Authorities were first alerted when they found sloth bear carcasses without genitals in a national park.

The nomadic Pardhi-Behelia tribe he is part of believe the animal's ***** is an aphrodisiac, said Ritesh Sirothia of the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department.

But Yarlen, who was arrested on 19 October in the state of Gujarat, was also a major figure in the tiger poaching trade in central India, he said.

He was a suspect in several cases involving the poaching and trading of endangered wild animals, including tigers, in central and western India.

He is alleged to have used several different identities to evade capture.

Yarlen is yet to be charged and neither he nor a lawyer have commented on the allegations. He was produced in court on Wednesday and remanded in custody.

"We created a special cell to track him down and arrest him. It was our longest chase, it went on for six years," said Mr Sirothia, who heads the forest department's special task force.

Found in the southern parts of Madhya Pradesh, the Pardhi-Behelia tribe has traditionally lived in forests and depended on hunting for survival.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/3844/production/_109340441_mediaitem109340440.jpg
COURTESY: MP WILDLIFE ST
Yarlen is alleged to have hunted sloth bears and tigers, among other endangered animals

Hunting of wild animals is illegal in India, including for tribal communities, though ritual forest hunting continues. The Indian government says it is working to provide alternative livelihoods to tribespeople but many continue to live on the fringes of society.

Yarlen was first arrested in 2013 after police found two sloth bear carcasses from the Kanha national park missing genitalia and gall bladders.

He spent a year in jail before being freed on bail and going on the run, police said. Bear bile, which is produced in the liver and stored in the gall bladder, has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for hundreds of years and fetches a high price in the illegal international market.

Mr Sirothia said there were six cases registered against Yarlen in the states of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh under Cites (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora). Three of the cases involve the poaching of tigers.

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