Raids reveal Myanmar poachers’ indiscriminate bloodthirst

A series of targeted raids by Forestry Department agents on Tuesday ended with the arrest of six poachers Mandalay, Ayeyawady, and Bago regions and the seizure of a vast array of wildlife products. The diversity of the haul offered a glimpse into the voracious bloodthirst of Myanmar poachers and their customers.

Among the seized items were elephant hides, antlers of numerous deer species, bison horns, turtle shells and flesh, porcupine quills, bear bones, claws, and paws, and skulls of a variety of wild animals.

“Due to the market demands of neighboring countries, there are many people storing and trading these [wildlife parts],” Ayeyawady Region Forestry Department director Khin Maung Myint, told the Myanmar Times. He explained that one facility that was raided in his jurisdiction was used for making decorative hangings, jewelry and accessories, and traditional medicines out of animal skins and other parts.

The six suspects have been charged under Myanmar’s Protection of Wildlife and Protected Areas Law, which carries a prison sentence of up to five years for the killing or wounding of a protected animal.


Research from the last year has showed a spike in elephant killings as demand for elephant skin has risen across the region. Whereas ecological damage from the ivory trade has been limited by regulations in China and by its specific targeting of elephants with tusks, elephant skin hunters are indiscriminate in their killings, and skin products, which often lose their resemblance to natural elephant skin after they are processed, are more difficult to detect.



Myanmar’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation reported last year that poachers in Myanmar kill one elephant every week. If the killing continues at the same rate, the country’s elephant population could be extinct within a few years.


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Online skin trade fuels Burma elephant slaughter: conservation group

An emerging online market for elephant skin in China is threatening the survival of the creatures in neighbouring Myanmar as poaching intensifies to meet demand, conservationists warned Tuesday.

Myanmar has watched with alarm as the number of slain elephants found in the country’s forests rises each year, with many blaming the trade in the mammal’s hide.

The biggest market for the products is in China, where the tough skin is ground up and used to treat stomach or human skin ailments, or sold as jewellery in the form of blood-red beads and pendants.

The items are increasingly advertised and sold on the internet, according to the UK-based charity Elephant Family, which outlined the findings in a new study called “Skinned: The growing appetite for Asian Elephants”.

Unlike poaching for ivory, the skin trade does not discriminate between genders and ages in elephants, making them far more vulnerable.

“This means that no elephant is safe,” said the group’s acting conservation director Belinda Stewart-Cox. “Myanmar is losing too many elephants too fast.”

Elephant Family monitored multiple internet forums and interacted with traderswithout making purchasesto learn more about the supply chain.

Out of eleven online sellers who said they knew the product origin, nine cited Myanmar and two Laos.

One China-based trader who claims to have “invented” elephant skin beads said she gets the material from a Myanmar border town, calling the sourcing “long-term and nonstop,” the report said.

Some 2,000 wild elephants are thought to be left in Myanmar, the second largest population in the region after Thailand.

But a combination of weak oversight and lawless border regions outside central government control has made Myanmar a key hub in the global wildlife trafficking trade.

Last year 59 elephant carcasses were found in the wild, a jump from four in 2010, according to government statistics cited by the report.

While the INGO said it was hard to prove with certainty whether the rise in skin product sales was directly linked to the rise in poaching, the parallel surge leaves few other explanations.

The researchers also documented the sale of elephant skin powder through China-based traditional medicine and pharmaceutical platforms, though it remains unclear whether African or Asian elephants were used in the goods.

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‘No elephant is safe’: China’s online market for animal’s skin has decimated Myanmar population

An emerging online market for elephant skin in China is threatening the survival of the creatures in neighbouring Myanmar as poaching intensifies to meet demand, conservationists warned on Tuesday.

Myanmar has watched with alarm as the number of slain elephants found in the country’s forests rises each year, with many blaming the trade in the mammal’s hide.

The biggest market for the products is in China, where the tough skin is ground up and used to treat stomach or human skin ailments, or sold as jewellery in the form of blood-red beads and pendants. The items are increasingly advertised and sold on the internet, according to the UK-based charity Elephant Family, which outlined the findings in a new study called “Skinned: The growing appetite for Asian Elephants”

China imposes total ban on elephant ivory sales

Unlike poaching for ivory, the skin trade does not discriminate between genders and ages in elephants, making them far more vulnerable.

“This means that no elephant is safe,” said the group’s acting conservation director Belinda Stewart-Cox. “Myanmar is losing too many elephants too fast.”
This means that no elephant is safe. Myanmar is losing too many elephants too fast.

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ASIAN ELEPHANTS ARE NOW BEING KILLED FOR THEIR SKIN

A lawless zone in northeastern Myanmar has cornered the market in a gruesome good: elephant skin jewellery.

The smell was ghastly and the sight even worse. Twenty-five elephants lay dead in a riverbed in the Ayeyawady (Irrawaddy) delta in southwestern Myanmar. “The stench is what led villagers to the bodies in the first place,” says Aung Myo Chit, the Smithsonian Institution’s Myanmar country coordinator, who also leads a local NGO, Growth for Prosperity, that helps rural residents avoid deadly conflicts with elephants.

It was the trust Aung Myo Chit’s outreach workers had earned that led villagers of Nga Pu Taw Township to reveal the dead elephants. Ordinarily, local people avoid reporting poaching to the authorities for fear they’ll be blamed.

By the time Aung Myo Chit’s filmmaker colleague Klaus Reisinger got there in early May, the giant carcasses had deteriorated badly. “Their bellies were bloated,” Reisinger recalls with a shudder.

Captive elephants are often used to drag carcasses of elephants slain for their ivory out of riverbeds where they’re commonly found. But that wasn’t possible this time. The skin had been stripped from the bodies, leaving them to tear apart if moved. So staff with the Myanmar Forest Department who came to investigate burned them in place to prevent their contaminating the downstream water supply.

Such spectacles are familiar on African savannas, where elephants are more numerous and poachers have stalked their ivory for decades. Not so in the thick forests of Myanmar, where the country’s remaining 1,200 to 1,400 endangered wild elephants are elusive and only the males (and not all males) have tusks.

But this and other, smaller recent slaughters in the Ayeyawady delta were not ivory raids. Poachers had killed males, tuskless females, and calves alike in pursuit of a different prize: their skins.

Using elephant skin and other body parts is nothing new in Southeast Asia. In Myanmar and elsewhere—particularly in tribal areas—the skin is dried, ground, mixed with oils, and applied to treat eczema and other skin conditions.

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