Tigers, elephants, pangolins, sun bears, rhinos, serows, helmeted hornbills, gaurs, leopards, turtles. These are, according to the anti-trafficking watchdog TRAFFIC, the most commonly trafficked endangered species that pass through the so-called Golden Triangle. A small area wedged between Laos, Myanmar and Thailand, the Golden Triangle has long been notorious for…
Some people see no difference between consuming chicken meat or the meat of protected animals like pangolins. Others positively seek the gastronomic thrill, as they see it, of consuming the meat of rare and “exotic” animals. One can make the argument, as many people have duly done, that ethically speaking…
The World Wide Fund for Nature wants to have all the 200 or so tiger farms in Asia closed. That august goal, however, may have just suffered a major setback. Last year the notorious “Tiger Temple” in Thailand was closed down by local authorities after it had transpired that the Buddhist monastery’s…
If you are an animal and have a day to your name, you should be worried. Very worried. And so it is with pangolins. Those placid and quirky mammals have had the third Saturday in February designated as World Pangolin Day for the sixth straight year. The day serves to raise…
Traditional Chinese medicine – or most of it at any rate – is utter tosh. Rhino horns, whether consumed in powered form or any other, 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…
The ruthless murder of wild tiger continues, this time in neighboring Indonesia. Three men, who are believed to have been members of a wildlife smuggling ring, were arrested for poaching critically endangered Sumatran tigers in the protected forests of Mount Leuser National Park in Sumatra. Police officials found tiger bones,…
Just when you thought that poachers and wildlife traffickers couldn’t get any more blatant, they do. A case in point: a man was arrested by rangers in the town of Gopeng, in Perak state, for illegally possessing the carcass of a tiger, which he was caught carrying . . ….