Word: wwf
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...ones. Lured by the huge prices that pandas bring -- from $5,000 to $112,000 in a country where the average monthly wage is $29 -- poachers are closing in on this rare animal, tracking it down even in China's nature preserves. During the course of her travels, the WWF investigator saw two panda pelts and was offered 16 more...
That, however, was only a small taste of what was available through clandestine channels. At a village near Quanzhou, the WWF agent was treated to the sickening sight of 28 leopard skins, including six identified as the critically endangered Amur, believed to number only 40 in the world. The price: $380 apiece. Two taxidermy shops in Fuzhou offered more extravagant horror shows. "One had egrets, leopard cats, pangolins, slow lorises and eagles." The other shop contained "at least 100 animal specimens and must have had 500 birds -- kingfishers, hummingbirds, everything." The owner, she speculates, "may have connections in the local...
...slow the poachers. Since the laws were enacted, more than 2,000 illegal killings have been reported, and enforcement of the measures is lax. "The government is interested in protection, but it has too many other things to take care of," explains one exasperated Chinese conservationist. Says the WWF investigator: "There is little effective control. Hunters told me they shoot anything they...
...meet the Chinese on the muddy, gray waters of the Taiwan Strait. Often the pelts, along with Chinese antiques and traditional medicines, are traded by fishermen for Taiwanese electronics and consumer goods. The practice is so universal that when members of the Taiwan Coast Guard were asked by the WWF agent to estimate how many fisherman were engaged in smuggling, they laughed and replied, "All of them...
...WWF hopes its expose will spur China and Taiwan, which has strict regulations that are rarely applied, to greater enforcement of their laws. The report recommends a crackdown on hunters and more funds for enforcement. But even if the governments commit themselves, it could be centuries before the animal populations recover from what has already been done. "It will take 400 to 500 years before any headway is really made," says Hu Jinchu, an expert on pandas at the Nanchong Normal College in Sichuan. "We've wrested too much from nature...