For a while it seemed that the condition of Malaysia’s last female Sumatran rhino was touch-and-go, but it appears now that Iman is now on the mend. According to a senior wildlife official in Sabah, she has regained some of her appetite and is responding well to treatment at the…
Recently 4,515 hectares of a permanent forest reserve was degazetted in Terengganu, allowing for it to be turned into an oil palm plantation by a government-linked company, TDM Berhad. That means that on an area the size of more than 4,500 football fields where now trees stand will soon be lost,…
In vying for votes, political parties in Malaysia routinely tout similar agendas on their platforms: boosting the economy, eliminating corruption, helping their constituents in various ways. Few of them, though, campaign seriously on pledges to protect local environments better. In Penang, that should change, insists the homegrown conservationist group Pelindung…
Prominent Malaysian animal rights activists say that conditions at Kemaman Zoo in Terengganu are appalling. Members of the NGOs Malaysian Friends of the Animals and Friends of the Orangutans (Foto) have recently provided photographic evidence indicating that several resident animals, from orangutans to elephants, were being neglected and mistreated at…
One of the world’s most notorious wildlife traffickers is now behind bars. Boonchai Bach, a Thai Vietnamese man who operated out of Thailand for more than a decade, has finally been arrested by Thai authorities. “It is like catching one of the Corleones,” enthused Steven Galster, the founder of the…
Malaysia’s own giant panda couple, Liang Liang and Xing Xing, have just welcomed their second cub. The female newborn, which weighed a mere 190gm at birth, is the second daughter and the younger sibling of the two adult pandas’ first cub, Nuan Nuan, who was born on August 18 in 2015…
“Crop apartheid.” It is with this strange neologism that Malaysia’s plantations minister Mah Siew Keong has branded the European Union’s decision to ban on the use of palm oil in biofuels from countries like Malaysia, where the mass cultivation of the crop has inflicted grave and irreversible harm on the natural…
Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM) is astounded at the death of yet another wild elephant in Gerik, Perak. The incident occurred on January 3rd when a 40-year-old female elephant was electrocuted by a live wire on a roadwork construction site. Herds of wild elephants come into populated areas while foraging for…
The pictures of several animals at Kemaman Zoo in Pahang are heartrending. The images, which have been shared widely on social media, show chimps, a juvenile orangutan, an elephant, and a tiger kept in what appear to be dismal conditions. Animal rights activists say the photographs, which were taken recently…
Cornered by Malaysian authorities who were in hot pursuit, the Indonesian wildlife smugglers decided to act: They drowned the 300 songbirds in their possession, presumably in a bid to rid themselves of the incriminating evidence of their trafficking activities. Malaysia’s Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) officers managed to apprehend the three…
As wind power is coming into its own across Europe, ever newer records are being set on the continent. The latest record involving wind power comes from Denmark: Wind power accounted for a record high of 43.4% of the Scandinavian nation’s total electricity consumption last year. Denmark, a northern European…
Why do elephants keep crossing roads in Peninsular Malaysia? That’s the question a team of researchers set out to answer in order to help find solutions to the growing risk of pachyderms being killed or injured on Malaysian roads. To do so, the researchers equipped 17 wild Asian elephants with…
Iman, Malaysia’s very last female Sumatran rhino, has been sick for over a month now. In mid-December her keepers discovered that she had been bleeding from her uterus and the elderly female rhino was soon diagnosed with a uterine tumor. Vets are keeping a close eye on her, but her…
Plastic waste is everywhere, but several countries, from Malawi to Morocco, have made plans to phase out plastic shopping bags and other disposable items. Now, following in their footsteps, Great Britain is planning to enact new measures aimed at weaning customers off disposable plastic products that are chucked out after…
In 2010, scientists identified an as yet unknown species of snub-nosed monkey in Myanmar, the country formerly known as Burma. The then only known specimen of the newly identified species did not fare that well, though. It had been caught by local hunters in the mountainous state of Kachin and…
One hundred forty-eight kilograms. That’s how much African elephant tusks confiscated by customs officials at an international airport in Bangkok weighed. The large haul of ivory, which is worth around 15 million Thai baht (RM1.9 million), was comprised of three large tusks and 31 tusk fragments. They had been flown…
