City rangers wipe out trade in wild animals
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A forest management team comprising just three members has helped curb the illegal trade in wild animal in Ho Chi Minh City.
Le Thanh Thanh Liem, Nguyen Van Khanh and Le Dai Ve used to be rangers at the Can Gio Forest Park before the City set up the team in July 2008.
It was a time when traders would gather on Nam Ky Khoi Nghia Street in downtown HCMC and peddle their wares.
“Initially, we struggled, chasing them around the street. Some would snatch back animals we had confiscated or opened cages to release them right on the street,” Khanh said.
“We then collaborated with the local police to track down the traders’ suppliers and wiped out the street trade for good.”
At the Cu Chi Animal Rescue Center in the outlying district of the same name, Liem was happily looking at three baby otters his team rescued when investigating illegal trading in District 11.
“We found V of District 11 selling otters on the internet for VND3.5 million (US$175) for a pair of babies. We called him and paid VND500,000 in advance. He called back a month and a half later to say he had the otters,” he recalled.
The team and the local police caught V red-handed at his house, he said.
“We also found a third otter and an iguana. The case went to court since these animals are in the 1B list of rare animals, which are forbidden from exploitation and use for commercial purposes.”
The team’s biggest bust last year was of a gang supplying snakes and iguanas in District 12.
Liem said: “A source tipped us off about big snake sellers in the district. However, they were very cautious initially, only offering to sell common snakes.”
Eventually, with information collected over nearly a month of surveillance, the team seized 43 kilograms of rare snakes and iguanas, including three cobras that weighed more than 10 kilograms apiece.
Among the team’s hardest tasks is to convince people to hand over rare wild animals.
Last November it tried to persuade a family in District 12 to release two gibbons they had kept for years.
“We told them they could witness the gibbons’ release back into the wild. The wife still cried a lot, saying the animals were a gift from a relative in the mountainous province of Dak Lak and the family was strongly attached,” Liem said.
Another family in Phu Nhuan District had a southern pig-tailed macaque.
“The 80-year-old father agreed to give the animal to us but the daughter, a 50-year-old intellectually challenged woman, cried a lot. Then she came to the Cu Chi Animal Rescue Center every week to see it,” Liem said.
