The ECO-MERCENARIES By JACK HITT; NEW YORK TIMES

"The woman in charge of the place screams at the armed police. Her five waitresses, all girls in their early teens, fan out to distract us."

"One of the officers cries out, and we all rush to the backyard where several long-tail macaques sit in small cages. In another room are turtles the size of car tires and a pile of yellow see-through nylon bags, each squirming with a cobra. One hisses and strikes constantly, its bag darting insanely across the wooden floor. Another cobra sits up in classic charmer fashion but remains perfectly still, unable to hiss because the old woman has taken a precaution common in wildlife restaurants. She has stitched the cobra's mouth shut with string."

"As we load the animals into the veterinarian's truck, the woman screams at the officers because they are taking the chains she bought to hold the monkeys."

"Through a translator, I learn the full range of delights available here. The ''waitresses'' are 13- and 14-year-old prostitutes. This restaurant is where a workingman goes for a big night of complete virile satisfaction. Dinner is served at one of the tables. Then afterward, a special dessert is presented to increase potency. This might mean bringing a live cobra to the table, where a group of men can enjoy tormenting it into a state of complete rage. The belief is that if the animal is violently agitated, more of its powerful sexual hormones will be released. The snake is then beheaded and the body squeezed of its blood like a dishrag until it fills a whiskey jigger. A man drinks it in a single swallow and then chooses one of the girls to accompany him to one of those tidy back bedrooms."

"In a country where there is little help for the people, a new generation of environmentalists is trying to protect the ebbing populations of wildlife in the Southeast Asian bush. And they are doing it the way so much gets done these days: with troops and guns.'Look, there,' says Mark Bowman, the man in charge of training the 10 armed Cambodian park rangers standing behind me. The men chatter in Khmer, lighting one another's cigarettes, dangling their banana-clip AK-47's. Bowman points to a tiny white thread far off in the forest below, a column of smoke. 'Poachers,' he says."

WILDAID WEB SITE: http://www.wildaid.org/
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