Tuesday, February 23

Insensitive Malaysia towards tiger poaching.

The clip, which was captured using a mobile phone, was highlighted in a report by Britain’s Channel 4 News and posted on its website on Saturday.

The clip showed several people standing around a tiger carcass and discussing how they had killed the animal.

Complete disrespect to the Year of the Tiger!

http://ping.fm/9Cm5T

Shot on a mobile phone in northern Malaysia towards the end of last year, the video shows four young men gloating and laughing over the carcass of a dead tiger. They stand to make just a few hundred dollars from the animal.

"It's the middle men who make the money," says Sarah Christie who heads the tiger conservation programmes at the Zoological Society of London and who has spent years studying the trade in tiger parts, "the poachers get very little."

The middle men who trade the tiger carcass on into China will make the real profit.It can run into thousands of dollars.

The bones are ground up to make pills or potions to treat rheumatism. The meat is often sold to restaurants that specialise in wild animals; it is believed to have strength-giving properties. The skin is valuable too. Official Chinese medicine practitioners no longer use tiger parts, but a thriving black market remains.

This is the Chinese Year of the Tiger, and last month in a meeting in Thailand, China signed up to a pledge to double the number of tigers in the wild by the next one, in 2022.

The dealer’s network should be broken at National and International level.

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