[Illegal wildlife is one of the world’s largest contraband
trades, netting an estimated $19 billion a year, not including illegal
fisheries and timber. While all Southeast Asian countries and many others
outside of the region are involved, Vietnam plays a paramount role. The country
is a major thoroughfare for wildlife goods bound for China, which arrive
overland from Cambodia, Thailand and Laos; by ship from Malaysia and Indonesia;
or by air from Africa.]
By
Rachel Nuwer
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A woman holding a rhino horn she bought on the Vietnamese black
market in hopes
of curing a tumor.
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U Minh, Vietnam —
Ho Van Luc slips through a tangled thicket of jungle, graceful as a dancer. A
blanket of dried bamboo and melaleuca leaves on the forest floor barely
crackles beneath his bare feet. Only the smell of cigarette smoke betrays his
presence.
A poacher, Mr. Luc, 45, set out at dawn from his family’s
bamboo-thatched home in Vietnam’s U Minh forest to check a half dozen homemade
traps rigged along animal trails in the underbrush and on canal banks
frequented by snakes and turtles.
He stops at a snare trap made of wood and bicycle break wire,
nearly invisible beneath leaves. The trap is empty, not unusual.
“Before, this forest was very different,” Mr. Luc said. “Now,
the animals are so few that most hunters are changing their jobs.”
Still, in the previous two weeks, Mr. Luc had caught
nine Southeast Asian box turtles and Malayan snail-eating turtles, five
elephant trunk snakes, a handful of water birds and two rare Himalayan griffon
vultures. For safekeeping, Mr. Luc stashed the vultures in his brother’s house,
leaving them tethered in the bedroom until he can figure out what to do with
them.
In the past, Mr. Luc’s hunting trips often yielded wildlife
bonanzas, including prized pangolins. Also known as scaly anteaters, they are
among the most trafficked mammals
in the world. Mr. Luc works with traders willing to buy live pangolins
for $60 a pound.
Although he caught just two pangolins last year, that price
makes it well worth the effort to keep seeking them out. He knows, however,
that this lucrative resource is finite.
“Pangolins will be extinct soon,” he said. Still, he expresses
no plans to retire.
Mr. Luc is one of thousands of illegal hunters draining Vietnam,
one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, of its animals. Its
rhinoceroses have already gone extinct, and conservationists estimate that just
a couple of its tigers, if any, remain. Even lesser known species like
soft-shell turtles and civets are sought out for traditional medicines, food,
trophies and pets.
Illegal wildlife is one of the world’s largest contraband
trades, netting an estimated $19 billion a year, not including illegal
fisheries and timber. While all Southeast Asian countries and many others
outside of the region are involved, Vietnam plays a paramount role. The country
is a major thoroughfare for wildlife goods bound for China, which arrive
overland from Cambodia, Thailand and Laos; by ship from Malaysia and Indonesia;
or by air from Africa.
“After China, Vietnam is the next port of call in terms of where
to look to figure out what’s going on with wildlife trade,” said Dan
Challender, a co-chairman of the pangolin specialist group at the International
Union for Conservation of Nature.
Vietnam is also a significant consumer of wildlife, especially
those yielding the ingredients for traditional medicine, such as rhino horn,
which is used to treat everything from cancer to hangovers. The exotic meats of
rare animals are seen as luxuries by a rising middle class eager to advertise
its prosperity.
“Pangolin is frequently the most expensive item on the menu, so
ordering it is an obvious way to show off to friends and colleagues,” Dr.
Challender said. “The fact that it’s illegal isn’t played down and is even
attractive, because it adds this element that you live beyond the law.”
International concern about the trade have never been greater,
but conferences, new enforcement strategies and ivory crushes have yet to make
a dent.
In February, the Obama administration issued a plan to curb illegal wildlife trade
by strengthening enforcement, reducing demand and sending a handful of agents
abroad. The United States is the second-largest market for illegal wildlife
products, but only an estimated 10 percent of traffickers are caught because of
inadequate resources supporting enforcement, as well as legal loopholes
pertaining to certain products, such as ivory.
“Wildlife trade is higher profile now than it’s ever been, and
that’s great,” said Chris Shepherd, regional director in Southeast Asia of Traffic,
a wildlife trade monitoring network. “But all of the talk about this issue by
world leaders is not trickling down to the ground yet.”
In January of this year, officials intercepted more than 7,500
protected pig-nosed turtles in Indonesia, a frozen tiger in Vietnam and 190
endangered black pond turtles in Singapore. As wildlife disappears in Southeast
Asia, poachers increasingly turn to Africa.
More than 1,500 pounds of ivory and two tons of pangolin skins
were intercepted in Uganda in January. Last year in South Africa alone, a
record 1,215 rhinos were killed for their horns.
The illegal wildlife products that officials manage to interdict
account for an estimated 10 to 20 percent of the total trafficked.
“We may be disrupting criminal networks, but we’re certainly not
dismantling any of them,” said Scott Roberton, Vietnam country representative
and regional coordinator for wildlife trafficking programs for the Wildlife
Conservation Society. “The situation is going to get worse before it gets
better.”
While China recently increased its arrests and prosecutions for
wildlife crimes, those caught trafficking wildlife in Vietnam or other transit
countries almost always escape punishment. Dealing in protected species is a
criminal offense under Vietnamese law, as is selling wild-caught animals of any
kind.
But even when trafficking kingpins are taken into custody,
prosecution often depends on finding unrelated charges that are taken more
seriously than wildlife crime, such as car smuggling. Poachers like Mr. Luc —
who says he has never run into legal trouble — are rarely reprimanded, and
punishment, if any, usually entails a small fine.
“Very few criminals caught for major violations like tiger or
rhino horn possession ever do a day in prison,” said Douglas Hendrie, chief
technical adviser for Education for Nature-Vietnam, a nonprofit
organization based in Vietnam.
Wild-caught and protected animal products are easily procured in
Vietnamese cities. “It’s not an enforcement priority yet, largely due to
corruption, collusion and an absolute lack of concern,” Dr. Shepherd said.
“People just do not care.”
Thien Vuong Tuu (“The Alcohol of the Gods”), a fancy restaurant
in Ho Chi Minh City, advertises pangolin, bear, porcupine, bat and more on its
illustrated menu. Customers interested in pangolin — sold for $150 a pound —
must order it two to three hours in advance and place a deposit based on its
weight.
When the customer returns for dinner, the manager presents the
live pangolin to the table, then slices its throat on the spot to prove that
the meat is fresh and has not been substituted.
“Pangolin is very popular with customers, because it treats a
lot of sicknesses,” said Trung Quoc, the restaurant manager. His staff will
also dry and package pangolin scales left over from dinner — a popular
ingredient in traditional medicines that are still covered by Vietnamese health
insurance.
On a Sunday night, families with young children and groups of
middle-aged men fill the restaurant. At one table, two French-speaking men
order a cobra to the delight of their female companions. Two young servers
bring out a large, writhing snake, its mouth bound tightly shut with plastic
twine.
As the customers film with their smartphones, one server holds
the snake taut. The other carefully feels along the animal’s abdomen until he
locates the heart, then opens it up with a pair of scissors and removes the
beating organ with his bare fingers.
As the servers wring out the animal, the blood drips into a
ceramic bowl to be mixed later with alcohol and drunk.
“The government doesn’t allow exotic meat, but we have our
sources and good connections with the police,” Mr. Quoc said after the show
concluded. “The demand is so high for these things, so we have to supply them.”
Given the widespread lack of enforcement, grass-roots
conservation organizations in Vietnam increasingly find themselves on the front
lines. Education for Nature-Vietnam recently conducted a survey of restaurants,
hotels and shops in 12 districts in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, recording each
violation of wildlife laws and insisting that authorities follow up.
Several months later, the group repeated the survey and found
the availability of illegal products ranging from snake “wine” to bear bile had
fallen by nearly 60 percent in eight of the districts. “When authorities put us
out of work by doing their job effectively and consistently, then we’ll no
longer have to do this,” Mr. Hendrie said.
Save Vietnam’s Wildlife, a nonprofit based at
Cuc Phuong National Park, organizes training sessions across the country for
park rangers and the police, conducts community education programs and operates
one of the country’s only rehabilitation centers for confiscated animals.
In Vietnam, much of the wildlife intercepted from illegal
traders is sold by officials back into the black market. Thai Van Nguyen, Save
Vietnam’s Wildlife’s founder, often must race to the sites of recent
confiscations to try to recover animals before that can happen.
“Corrupt rangers still want to sell animals back to the trade,”
Mr. Nguyen said. Even if the animals are not sold, very few return to the wild,
because of a lack of rehabilitation facilities.
Animals not sent to a specialized rescue center often “just sit
around until they die,” Dr. Shepherd said.
Over the last three months, Mr. Nguyen has helped rescue 20
pangolins, but the maximum capacity at his center — one of only two in Vietnam
that can care for pangolins — is less than 50. With a budget of just $90,000 a
year, he has few resources with which to expand the center and hire additional
staff.
Mr. Nguyen says he is not confident that attitudes will change
in time to spare his country’s wildlife.
“The problem in Vietnam is that conservation is a new way of
thinking,” he said. “Vietnamese people need to learn to take seriously what we
have now. We need to take care of our own environment and wildlife if we want
it to be around in the future.”
