pet wildlife in thai temple, snakes skins, bali turtles & cambodian wildlife

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The Star 16.6.01.

Thai conservation officials confiscated more than 300 wild animals being

kept illegally at a Buddhist temple in western Thailand. The Luang Ta Bua

temple in Kanchanaburi province became famous when Thai newspapers published

photos of its monks frolicking with eight tigers being kept as pets. But

the story took a grim turn on Tuesday when one of the tigers died,

apparently after being poisoned with chicken meat laced with pesticide.

Three other tigers fell seriously ill after eating the meat, given to them

by a man whose identity or motive remains unknown.

Royal Forestry Department director-general announced that his agency had

confiscated the 300 animals held at the temple - including deer, wild boars

and rare birds - but was keeping them there until plans could be made to

resettle them or free them into the wild. The director-general suspected

the temple was being used to " launder " wild animals, according to a report

by the official Thai News Agency. The temple was suspected of being used as

a sort of halfway house to facilitate the trade in endangered species. He

said one of the temple's followers was a businessman who invested in a zoo

in Laos, and sought to stock it with three tigers from the temple.

 

The Star - 23.6.01

Singapore authorities raised S$75 000 in an auction of 25 000 pieces of

illegally imported snakeskin belonging to an endangered species.

Custom officials confiscated the contraband after an Indian man who was

caught with 691 pieces of snakeskin led authorities to a warehouse where

another 25 000 pieces were found, the Agri-food and Veterinary Authority

said in a statement.

The company which imported the skins was fined for not having a valid permit

to trade in the skins. The skins belong to the banded rat

snake, classified under international convention as a species in danger of

decimation if trade in its skin is not regulated. Snake and reptile skins

are favourite materials for luxury goods such as bags, belts and shoes.

 

 

Police save 130 turtles from cooking pot.

 

Indonesian police have rescued 130 live turtles in a raid on a

slaughterhouse on the resort island of Bali where they were being readied

for the cooking pot, the Jakarta Post reported. Police raided the turtle

abattoir, described as one of Bali's largest, on the outskirts of the

capital Denpasar on Tuesday.

The owner, I Made Kodi, 67, said an average two turtles a day were

slaughtered at the site to meet demand for turtle delicacies across the

island, guaranteeing a daily profit of some US$50.

Bali's Special Crimes Unit chief Gede Artawan said the seized creatures,

most of them endangered green turtles, were expected to be released back

into the sea.

Kodi and his nephew who managed the slaughterhouse, face charges of

violating nature protection and conservaton laws.

 

 

Cambodian Wildlife on the brink of extinction. -

Within eyesight of a sign urging " Don't sell wildlife, " a roadside vendor is

peddling four slow lorises - little primates with sad luminous eyes - to be

burned alive and churned into purported Chinese medicine.

 

A gibbon, says wildlife vendor Sem Sovan, can be ordered for US$200 and

delivered while customers wait at his ramshackle hut, squirming with snakes,

mynah birds and other illegal products from nearby Kirirom National Park.

 

Once an Eden for primates, Cambodia along with neighbouring Vietnam and

Laos, are being rapidly emptied of these creatures by meat poachers,

traditional medicine merchants and villagers encroaching on their ranges.

Remarkably, not a single species of primates, man's closest relative in the

animal kingdom, was lost in the last century. But global extinction is

looming, and it is likely to occur first in Indochina, says Frank Momberg of

Fauna and Flora International (FFI).

 

Four of the 25 apes, monkeys, lemurs and other primates listed by the United

States based Conservation International as possibly facing extirpation are

found in Vietnam.

 

Only some 100 individuals on a single island remain of the Cat Ba Island

golden headed langur while less than 200 Tonkin snub-nosed monkeys, hunted

for the medicine trade, hang on in two areas of Vietnam, Momberg says.

Almost as vulnerable are Delacour's langur and the grey-shanked douc langur.

 

" The chances of them seeing the end of the century are slim, " he says of the

Hainan gibbon, perhaps the world's most endangered primate which lives in a

few scattered places in Vietnam and on the Chinese island of Hainan. A tiny

gene pool - less than 50 individuals - survives.

 

To avert extinction, conservationists stress, there must be active

population management, including captive breeding and, above all safe,

sufficiently large natural habitat to a shrinking commodity throughout

Indochina.

 

Even the Cardamon Mountains of south western Cambodia, long protected by

war, malaria and their remote location, are threatened with what is probably

the world's largest population of pileated gibbon.

 

Preliminary surveys show the mountains shelter several hundred to 1 000 of

these gibbons, whose haunting songs once frequently resounded through the

jungles of Cambodia, Thailand and Laos. Now they are often death warrants.

 

Ian Baird, a Canadian conservationist, recalls hearing a female singing one

dawn in the Cardamons, a hunter tracking the sound, then silence.

 

Baird witnessed the subsequent " processing, " the animal's skin sold, the

meat eaten and the bones used for so called medicine. Adult gibbons are

also killed so their babies can be easily snatched for pets.

 

" A reserve is not enough. We need the communities. If the community

doesn't want to care for them, that's the end, " Momberg says.

 

Momberg wants the villagers around the Che Thao forest to establish the

boundaries of the reserve and select the rangers. A weekly radio programme,

which includes conservation news, has been started and former wildlife

traders have been converted to teachers.

A mortal danger to these gibbons and other primates in Indochina is the

area's proximity to China, where the appetite for exotic meat, medicine and

aphrodisiacs seems in satiable, and growing as the country's economic

prosperity increases.

 

Thousands of primates which once chattered and sang in Indochina's jungles

are reduced to powdered bones, dried feet, blood and wine concoctions and

monkey brains on Chinese plates.

 

Sem Sovan, the wildlife vendor, says he sells about the skins of slow

lorises (about 10 a month) to Chinese medicine traders in the Cambodian

capital for US$50 a piece.

 

He says that burning them alive increases the potency of the medicine, and

drinking their blood mixed with rice wine is great for stomach aches.

 

For more information visit these websites: http://www.ippl.org and

http://www.faunaflora

 

 

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