(KH) A Poacher's Paradise in Cambodia

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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/20

01/01/30/MN125742.DTL

Black market in animals, parts threatens to strip jungles of wildlife

Susan Postlewaite, Chronicle Foreign Service Tuesday, January 30, 2001

 

Sre Khlong, Cambodia -- At a roadside market in this tiny village, Sen

Sovann is doing a bustling business selling live monkeys and parrots and

wild boar meat and porcupine stomach. And, for $1,000 each, he claims he can

deliver a baby tiger or a bear cub in just two weeks. " It's the going rate in

China, " he explained.

A few huts away, a young couple offered a gray and white civet for $5, a

pair of small nocturnal primates called lorises for $20 and a bear's gall

bladder for $200.

The eight huts in this roadside village halfway between the capital of Phnom

Penh and the coastal city of Sihanoukville have long been known as a market

for illegal wildlife. But if international conservationists are successful,

these traffickers will soon be out of business.

After being cut off from much of the world during three decades of civil

war, Cambodia has become a new hot spot for wildlife advocates who are

determined to keep Cambodia from becoming another Vietnam, where the only

forests left are on tiny islands.

Armed with substantial budgets, the activists are betting they can save

Cambodia's pristine jungles and endangered tigers, bears, elephants, exotic

monkeys and birds that are being relentlessly hunted for their skins, bones

and organs.

" Cambodia was known as a wildlife paradise before the war, so everybody

wants to know what is left, " said Hunter Weiler, who has been working to

save the nation's remaining 500 to 700 tigers through the Cat Action

Treasury Cambodia Tiger Conservation Program. " The word has gotten out that

Cambodia has something to save. "

Most experts agree that the biggest threat to the nation's endangered

wildlife is the black-market demand for animals used in Chinese medicine,

although many are also routinely smuggled across Cambodia's porous borders

to be sold as exotic pets.

Elephants are slaughtered for ivory, skin and bones. Bears are sold

principally for their gall bladders, whose bile is used to produce shampoos,

aphrodisiacs and " miraculous " remedies.

Tigers are killed for an array of uses: the penis is cooked in a soup, which

can sell for as much as $300 a bowl and is believed to enhance virility;

whiskers are said to prevent nightmares, and the animal's bones are said to

ward off arthritis.

" There is a hemorrhage of wildlife out of this country. It is everywhere,

every day, all the time, " said Suwanna Gauntlett, the president of San

Francisco's WildAid.

Until recently, conservationists focused on saving the nation's rain forests

from uncontrolled logging.

But when the government's conflict with the rebel group Khmer Rouge ended in

1998, the world's major ecological groups asked scientists, wildlife

specialists and lawyers to survey Cambodia's elephant populations, track

tigers with cameras (70 to 100 are killed each year), draft wildlife

protection laws, train hunters to become park rangers and teach villagers

about the virtues of species conservation.

More specifically, the U.S. group Conservation International has offered the

government $500,000 a year to halt logging contracts and create a wildlife

sanctuary in the 6,000-square-mile Cardamon Mountains, which had been made

inaccessible by the presence of Khmer Rouge guerrillas and countless land

mines.

The Cardamon forest is one of the last great wilderness areas in southeast

Asia. In recent years, illegal logging and roads have spread into the

mountains, bringing poor peasants who move in to eke out a livelihood off

the land.

The former rebel stronghold near the border with Thailand is home to some

200 of the nation's estimated 500 elephants and such rare species as the

blue- winged butterfly, which is the size of a human hand, and the rare, doc

ile Siamese freshwater crocodile, which has been wiped out in other parts of

Asia.

The World Wildlife Fund has also sent its representatives to Cambodia,

spending about $400,000 a year on training and research to develop Virachey

National Park, a 3,000-square-mile area near the borders of Vietnam and Laos

that is home to elephants, tigers, exotic birds and wild cattle called gaur

and banteng, which can weigh as much as 2,000 pounds.

Moreover, the U.S. Wildlife Conservation Society, with a budget of about

$250,000 a year, is drafting a new wildlife law and providing training for

park rangers in the scenic Tonle Sap lake area, where there are about 20

species of endangered large water birds, including the spot-billed pelican

and the Bengal florican. A lack of resources has meant that nature reserves

are not marked and have no management.

WildAid is training park rangers to stop poachers and nab traffickers in

sting operations. It is also financing shelters for confiscated animals at

the Phnom Tamao Wildlife Refuge near Phnom Penh.

Recently, the San Francisco group sponsored two " stings " that netted seven

tigers and two Asian sun bears. WildAid paid the food bill of about $2,000 a

month, an exorbitant sum for the government agency in charge of protecting

wildlife.

" It is very expensive and hard to readapt the tiger to the natural

environment, " said Sun Hean, deputy director of Cambodia's Wildlife

Protection Office. " Our priority has to be to prevent people from taking the

tigers from the wild. "

In the future, WildAid's Gauntlett says, she hopes to build a sanctuary in

the Cardamon Mountains where captured tigers can be reintroduced into the

wild. " This has never been done with tigers, although it is being done in

Borneo with bears, " she said.

Critics say that reintroducing captive tigers into the wilds can't be done

once the animals have become accustomed to being fed by humans. They say

they will either die or turn to easier prey such as livestock or humans.

Gauntlett acknowledges the challenges: " Definitely one of the concerns is

that they can become man-eaters after having been in touch with humans. "

Yet another risk is poaching. If the sanctuary is not regularly patrolled,

the tigers will be easy prey once again for traffickers. Gauntlett hopes the

project will eventually be funded by wildlife foundations with deeper

pockets that are dedicated to saving endangered wildlife in developing

countries.

Meanwhile, the wildlife sellers at Sre Khlong village are well aware of

these new efforts to stop their trade.

" I am worried about getting in trouble with the police, " said a woman who

refused to give her name as she hawked a loris and a bear's gall bladder.

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page A10