Killed for a cure

Natural History, April, 1998 by Alan Rabinowitz

The "wall" I had walked into in the gathering darkness was an extended trapline made of sticks and small trees, no more than four feet high, that snaked its way for a quarter of a mile across the valley and up the nearest hillside. I could tell the structure was man-made, but I had no idea what it was made for until I reached an opening that was partly blocked by the skeleton of a barking deer. Then, at regular intervals along the wall, I discovered more openings, each with a snare hidden beneath the forest litter. Some openings were large enough for deer, bears, and tigers, while others were small and low to the ground, just right for catching civets, small cats, and ground-dwelling birds. At certain points, little stick ladders leaned against the wall. These, I was told later, were to enable forest spirits to surmount the wall without disturbing the traps.

As I walked along the wall, I saw that it was abandoned. Later, I learned that most of the larger animals in this valley, such as deer, bears, and wild pigs, had been wiped out by this "wall of death" during the previous dry season. A new wall was being built in an adjacent valley, but no one had bothered to dismantle these traps. A few final carcasses were of little consequence.

In the past, indigenous peoples hunted largely for personal consumption. Even when wild meat was sold or traded, transactions took place locally, and wildlife populations were not endangered. Conservationists who were familiar with these practices, and who subscribed to the erroneous notion that indigenous peoples always lived in harmony with their environment, developed the concept of "sustainable" hunting. This concept was popular with wildlife managers, who believed that if you protect large enough areas of forest, preventing habitat destruction within them, you will also protect the animals living in the forest, even in the face of poor management and ongoing local poaching. The last two decades have been a time of growing realization in Asia that wildlife populations and even entire species are disappearing, or their numbers plummeting to unprecedented lows. This awareness, combined with changes in hunting practices and in market demands, has forced a reexamination of these concepts of protection and sustainability. Increasingly, biological surveys throughout Asia are revealing that preserves are often merely forest facades - areas of beautiful foliage on the outside with many of the larger animals gone from the inside.

Behind all this new devastation is a resurgence of interest in an ancient practice: the use of wildlife parts in traditional Asian medicine. With the burst in economic growth throughout much of Asia during the 1980s and early 1990s, traditional cures became more affordable, and using them became both a status symbol and a way to hold on to tradition in a rapidly changing society. Added to other commercial uses of wildlife - such as the growing local demand for wild meat and trophies for the tourist trade - the renewed interest in old-fashioned cures has had a devastating effect.

In remote villages throughout Asia, wildlife took on a value far beyond anything that had been known in the past. The carcass of a sambar deer or a bear, for example, no longer simply put meat in the pot or provided a mat to sit on. Now the animal could be traded for clothes, kitchen utensils, and maybe even a new gun. Better still, animals that had never been hunted were now of value, and the condition of the carcass didn't matter. Traders canvassed villages, willing to pay for almost anything: tiger bones, leopard fat, tapir skin, elephant eyeballs, porcupine stomachs, wild boar teeth, bear gallbladders, deer tendons, monkey paws, civet glands, rabbit skulls, otter penises, rodent flesh. It didn't take long for hunters to figure out that a single, freshly killed animal was not nearly as valuable as the parts of many animals. Thus began the slaughter.

Over the last decade, while searching for tigers, clouded leopards, and Sumatran rhinos, I traveled to some of Asia's largest, most remote forested areas. Despite differences in cultures and politics across national borders, inside the forests the story was always the same. Unprotected forests all showed signs of the same debilitating illness: too few large animals in habitats where they had once been abundant. And the situation was not much better within most protected areas.

The reasons could be found hidden on the forest floor, unseen until they had done their work - wire ground snares that tightened as the frightened animal struggled to escape, neck snares that choked, spring snares that lifted an animal into the air and held it upside down, jaw traps that bit to the bone, falling-weight traps that crushed skulls and bodies, and bamboo or wooden spike traps that skewered. The lone hunter and his gun were now replaced by traplines that sometimes ran for miles and were checked only every one to two weeks. I accompanied hunters as they retrieved traps containing only a leg or toe or the barely identifiable rotting carcass of an animal that must have lived for days before its death. The hunters were never disappointed. No matter how little was left in the trap or what shape it was in, there was always something of value to salvage.