A belief that their skins can ‘cure’ certain diseases has led to an unprecedented surge in poaching. Elephants, including mothers and calves, are shot with poisonous darts and die slow and gruesome deaths before being skinned.
The result – poaching rates have already surpassed the yearly average with 20 elephants found skinned since the beginning of 2017.
It’s early February two days before the Chinese New Year. I am in Hong Kong and there are shark fins everywhere, to suit all types of consumer. You can buy them in general food stores, pharmacies and fishing villages. You can buy small ones in plastic bags, multipacks or single large ones with festive red bows tied around them.
The cartilage in the fins is usually shredded and used primarily to provide texture and thickening to shark fin soup, a traditional Chinese soup or broth dating back to the Song Dynasty (960-1279). The dish is considered a luxury item embodying notions of hospitality, status and good fortune.
one of those things that's a delicacy simply because it's been around for ages
Demand in the Socialist Republic of Viet
Nam, a Southeast Asian nation of nearly
87 million people and the world’s 13th
largest nation, is believed to be driving
the rapacious illegal trade in rhino horn
today. As a new generation economic powerhouse,
Viet Nam’s increasingly politically-unfettered economy
is projected to be one of the world’s fastest
growing markets by 2025. Over the past decade,
unprecedented levels of disposable income and lax
government policy have awakened the trade in rhino
horn. At the same time, rapidly changing attitudes in
modern Viet Nam, where 65% of the population is
under the age of 30, are fuelling a booming market
for luxury products and giving rise to behaviour predicated
upon conspicuous consumption.
When the impoverished West African nation of Niger imposed a ban on donkey exports last year, a small community of traders just over the border in Nigeria was devastated.
“Before the ban, you could see thousands of donkeys here,” said Mohammed Sani, a 45-year-old trader in the Nigerian town of Jibiya, as he wiped the sweat off his brow. “Now look at them: there’s no more than 50, crippling the business.”
Donkey ski
Donkeys are being slaughtered at an alarming pace to feed a global trade in donkey hides that’s fueled by soaring demand in China, where the skins are used to manufacture a gelatin believed to have anti-ageing and libido-enhancing properties. The gelatin, known in China as e’jiao, is so popular with middle-class consumers that a Chinese producer has created a donkey exchange to help companies find enough hides to keep their factories busy.
With its large donkey population and close trade relations with China, Africa is a key target for donkey buyers. Annual global sales of the cooked gelatin may be worth as much as $2.6 billion, based on the 2014 per-kilogram sales price in China, according to the U.K.-based charity, The Donkey Sanctuary.
“The skin trade is really something that just came out of nowhere, and it’s the biggest, fastest crisis we’ve seen,” said Alex Mayers, a program manager at The Donkey Sanctuary. “People in poor communities can no longer replace donkeys if they’ve been stolen or slaughtered because the prices are just too high.”
Export Ban
Like the poaching of Africa’s rhinos and elephants, and deforestation caused by the largely illicit trade in rosewood timber, the slaughter of donkeys is an unforeseen consequence of rising Chinese incomes and an expanding middle class. While the global donkey population is estimated at 44 million, demand is currently thought to be at least 4 million per year, The Donkey Sanctuary said in a report this year.
Donkeys are essential to tens of millions of farmers in Africa’s driest regions, often also the most impoverished, and the skin trade is threatening to upset rural economies that rely heavily on the animals for transporting everything from produce to cattle feed.
“In Kenya, the net economic value of a working donkey is $2,300 a year. If you sell it for slaughter, you get a fraction of that: it will give you an income for a single month,” Mayers said. “A donkey is worth a hell of lot more alive than dead.”
That’s why Niger halted exports of the animal and completely prohibited their slaughtering after it found that donkey exports in the first nine months of 2016 had almost tripled compared to the whole of 2015. In neighboring Burkina Faso, the doubling of the price of a donkey and the slaughter of 45,000 donkeys out of a population of 1.5 million prompted the government in August last year to impose an export ban.
Mali, Senegal and Gambia followed suit. Zimbabwe, where donkeys are less common, turned down an application to build a donkey slaughterhouse, while Ethiopia closed its only functioning donkey abattoir after residents complained about the stench and pollution.
But large-scale slaughtering continues in many African countries, including Tanzania, Ghana and Kenya, and online sales ads for donkey hides are especially easy to find in Nigeria.
Packed Truck
Donkeys don’t reproduce easily and are difficult to breed commercially. “They’ve never been good at being a reproductive species,” Mayers said. “It’s not where their value lies.”
In Nigeria, some traders have turned to smuggling the animals from Niger. A trader-turned-smuggler said he was recently caught with five donkeys when trying to “sneak into” Nigeria. Border officials from Niger seized the animals and fined him the equivalent of $650, but he said he planned to stay in the trade because “it’s the only business I know.”
“Before the ban, I imported a truck packed with donkeys from Niger almost every week and sold them at $44 per donkey,” said the trader, whose full name was withheld because of fear of being caught. “Now, the price has risen to $150 or higher.”
Pangolins are indigenous to the jungles of Indonesia, parts of Malaysia and areas of southern Thailand, and their meat is considered a delicacy in China.
They are classified as a protected species under the UN's Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and international trade in any Asian pangolin species is banned under the convention.
The shy pangolin's brown scales are made of nothing more than keratin—the same substance as fingernails—but are highly prized in Vietnam and China where they are misleadingly touted as bearing medicinal properties.
Soaring demand for the products has seen an estimated one million pangolins plucked from Asian and African forests over the past decade, shunting them onto the list of species at the highest risk of extinction.
Wildlife officials have said pangolins face a serious threat from poachers and smugglers in Southeast Asia with inadequate punishment and lack of information encouraging the burgeoning trade.
Malaysian customs officers have seized more than 700 kilograms of pangolin scales, the country's largest haul of the scales considered by some to have medicinal properties, officials said Monday.
The 712kg (1,570 pound) haul worth 9,184,800 ringgit ($2.12 million) was made last week in two separate seizures.
Every year, in Taiji, Japan, dolphins are chased into a small cove and butchered in the most horrific and cruel way imaginable. The hunts are subsidized by the dolphin captivity industry, which pays top dollar for a few “show quality” dolphins that are ripped from their families. The rest of the pod is killed for meat laden with mercury and PCBs. Most Japanese don’t even know the hunts exist. The Japanese government supports the dolphin killers and denies any health issues. The Taiji dolphin slaughter continues. The government claims the kills are part of Japan’s traditional culture when, in fact, they only started in 1969. Many Japanese who oppose the hunts are afraid to speak out publicly because of threats from the government and the extremist anti-foreigners groups. http://savedolphins.eii.org/campaigns/sjd
From the outside, it is not possible to know and comprehend the thinking of a people numbering some 48,000 persons. The best one can do is to listen to what individual members of the population say and read what the officials post in an effort to understand.
What we can all agree upon is that, in most years, Faroese people intentionally kill hundreds of pilot whales, dolphins, and other small cetaceans in the Faroe Islands. We can also agree that this slaughter has been going on for hundreds of years.
What we are unable to agree upon is why this slaughter occurs
