Thais Crack Down on Wildlife Trafficking
Search for Endangered Species Nets More Than 33,000 Animals in Six Weeks
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, December 10, 2003; Page A18

BANGKOK -- Raids at private homes and zoos here during the past six weeks have exposed Thailand as a major gateway for a thriving international trade in endangered species, police and wildlife activists said.

More than 33,000 animals, including tigers, bears, orangutans and birds, have been recovered. The animal smuggling industry, police say, is second only to drug trafficking in profitability. A pair of live orangutans can bring up to $25,000, police said.

Spurred by the discovery in October of a house crammed with tiger carcasses and bear paws, along with starving animals, police have cracked down on wildlife smugglers, taking them to court, seizing animals and vowing to wipe out the practice.

"I don't know of any other country in the world that's mobilized their national police force to hit wildlife traders," said Steven Galster, director of the regional office of Wild Aid, an animal rights organization.

The animals, prized for their meat, medicinal value and putative sexual healing powers, are illegally imported from Indonesia, Malaysia and other countries, and sent to China, Korea, Japan and elsewhere, police and activists say. Sometimes, as in the case of tigers, they are bred or captured here, then illegally sold to wildlife traders.

"We are one of the biggest wildlife animal smuggling centers in the world," said Maj. Gen. Sawake Pinsinchai, a veteran police officer. His three decades of tangling with drug smugglers and gangsters, he said, did not prepare him for what he saw when his team of forestry police officers entered a house on Bangkok's outskirts in late October: tiger carcasses, quartered and on ice; 21 bear paws, severed at the joint; six starving tigers in damp, cramped cages; five live bears; and four baby orangutans, one so weakened that it soon died.

"A tragic scene," Sawake said. "It boggles the imagination."

One tiger had just been skinned, revealing a .22-caliber bullet hole just above the eye. "Nobody shot a tiger like that in the forest," Galster said. Investigators also found notes listing restaurant orders for bear paws and tiger meat, he said.

Two weeks later, Sawake's team raided an open market, seizing more than 1,000 protected species of birds. At another house, they found civet cats, pythons and a baby orangutan, dead in a freezer.

Then in quick succession, police raided a private zoo in Bangkok, a private tiger zoo in a province east of here and a zoo-entertainment complex in southern Thailand. In each, they found many more animals than the zoos had registered. At Safari World here, for example, police found 114 orangutans though the zoo had registered only 44.

Police and activists said they did not know how much the trade is worth, or how many animals are illegally bought and sold. But Thailand's 1,800 miles of porous borders; easy access to Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia; and its culture of corruption make it an attractive place for illicit trade, officials said.

The crackdown follows a 90-day government amnesty, during which 60,000 people registered more than 1 million birds and animals listed as protected by the Thai government. For those who did not register during the amnesty, owning protected animals is illegal. Sawake, who said he was inspired by Queen Sirikit's birthday message in August urging greater wildlife protection, surveyed the wildlife black market in Bangkok, where traders come to make deals. He drew up a list of 240 suspect traders. Now, he said, he has a network of more than 70,000 informants, and a hotline for tips.

But he said his task was complicated by a weak law that gives convicted wildlife traders sentences of up to four years in jail and fines of $1,000. Police have been using customs laws to charge orangutan smugglers, a strategy that can bring a penalty of four times the animal's value and up to 10 years in prison. In some cases, they use money-laundering laws to confiscate a convicted smugglers' assets.

The animals are smuggled by syndicates, Sawake said. An orangutan could be sent from Sumatra in Indonesia to Malaysia or to southern Thailand by boat, then trucked up to Bangkok, he said. Bears are often smuggled in from Burma and Cambodia.

Tigers are protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which bans their trade for commercial purposes, but allows them to be kept for breeding and research. Most of the tigers seized here were probably bred in captivity, police said.

What's new about the Thai crackdown is that Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra himself is intent on ending illegal wildlife trading and that smugglers are no longer being protected by corrupt officials, Sawake said.

Zoo officials declined to comment on the issue, but as a group have issued a letter of protest, saying the crackdown was scaring off tourists.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

These two orangutans were recovered in Bangkok, where police have begun efforts to dismantle a thriving illegal market in endangered species. (Photos Ellen Nakashima -- The Washington Post)