Bushmeat smuggling and the illegal Wildlife Trade

Linkhttp://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/12/monkey_meat_cas.php

I have been following the case of Mamie Manneh (aka Mamie Jefferson) in New York who smuggled bushmeat into the USA from Liberia. I first wrote about this extraordinary story in The Trouble With Lions and described how she had used a defense of the right to religious freedom as one of her reason for the smuggling. I again mentioned it in my blog of Sept 22nd.

In a report of Dec 12th from the New York Village News Blog the case seems to have finally come to an end, and the probationary sentence seems utterly trivial for a crime that involved the importation of 720 pounds of baboon and warthog meat. As the judge said, the deliberate circumventing of the law to hide the importation was the problem. It seems he was not swayed by Jane Goodall's written testimony about the severity of the situation, or indeed by the clear evidence of the potential diseases risks involved with such importation.

When I got my copy of the National Geographic magazine of January 2010 the whole thing came into perspective. A story by Bryan Christy, with disturbing photos by Mark Leong, tells about the Kingpin of Asia’s wildlife trade. His name is Wong Keng Liang, known to wildlife traffickers and officials around the world as Anson. His work (if this is the right word) makes Mamie’s crime seem utterly trivial. Christy’s figures are mind-boggling, almost impossible to comprehend, and the fact that Anson gets cooperation from some government officials in Asia just makes it worse. When he as arrested in 1998 Anson managed to plea bargain his way out of a sentence that might have involved 250 years in prison and a $12.5 million fine. He ended up with 71 months, with credit for 34 months already served. By all accounts the smuggling and trading continued throughout his time in gaol and continue to this day, the latest venture being a big interest in tiger farming.

Asian elephants and poaching

Linkhttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31519427/ns/world_news-asiapacific/

The pressure on wildlife is unrelenting, often ugly, and world-wide. This week another story about elephant destruction came across in my email box. It was not the usual African story, but came from Indonesia, where crop-raiding elephants have been creating problems for villagers for many years. There is an excellent video from a few years back about efforts to protect crops from the ravages of these animals, and the ugly role of the pulp and paper and palm oil industries in the decimation of forests that has led to the creatures being crowded into ever-shrinking habitats. This story is different.

It appears that poachers after ivory have turned to a cheap and deadly, but utterly indiscriminate form of killing. In one of my regular group mails from the WDIN - Wildlife Disease News Digest the headline in the accompanying picture appeared.

The link lets one further into the story and it turns out that poachers after ivory have used cyanide-laced fruit to kill Sumatran elephants, an endangered sub-species of the Asian elephant.

This picture appeared with the story.

This is just one of many places where Asian elephants, that used to roam in their hundreds of thousands across much of the continent, have taken massive hits. Current populations, which are the result of a combination of guesswork, old (very old) data and some science, put the entire population of all sub-species at no more than 30,000 to 50,000.

A very comprehensive report came out earlier this year from TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, about the ivory trade in Myanmar (Burma) and the neighbouring countries of Thailand and China. It is 40 pages long, and anyone interested can get hold of a copy of the entire pdf document through TRAFFIC headquarters. The citation reads Chris R. Shepherd and Vincent Nijman (2008): Elephant and Ivory Trade in Myanmar. TRAFFIC Southeast Asia, Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia. ISBN 9789833393169

I have lifted just one small segment from the executive summary of the report.

"Illegal trade in ivory and other Asian Elephant Elephas maximus products remains widespread, especially in markets along Myanmar’s international borders. In 2006,TRAFFIC surveyed 14 markets in Myanmar and three border markets in Thailand and China, and found some 9000 pieces of ivory and 16 whole tusks for sale, representing the ivory of an estimated116 bulls. Illegal killing and capture of elephants for trade continues to be a major cause of decline for Myanmar’s wild Asian Elephant populations."

Wildlife Trafficking - Bangkok

Amidst all the carnage and horror of Mumbai it hardly seems worth running a blog piece about wildlife, but this item, which I cut from the Singapore newspaper The Straits Times of November 8th, shows an ugly side to the entire gamut of wildlife issues round the globe.
As you can easily see I had to get out the scissors and do some chopping in order to get the whole thing on to the scanner. It is one more example of how humans use and abuse wildlife. In this case the market is in Thailand's Bangkok, which is of course under a barrage of political strife right now, so this matter will receive scant attention from authorities dealing with more immediate issues.