The Killing Of Endangered Species In Laos

This story was first published in Farang Magazine in 2004.

Bye waves the gun, the signal for us to stop and we all freeze in the center of the path. I don’t notice any change in the jungle soundscape around us, but both Bye and the young Gruto are alert and raise their long rifles. A long way back, somewhere near the village, the dogs are barking. Under the dense canopy, insects and birds sound off intermittently. Bye, his baseball cap pushed to the back of his head, moves ahead on tiptoes along the narrow trail, gently pushing branches and tangled undergrowth out of his way. He nods to Gruto and points to the top of a big tree, growing from a thick cluster of bamboo the morning sun is yet to penetrate. Gruto motions me to sit and we cower at the edge of the trail. Bye removes the safety, a thin cloth between the hammer and the paper ignition pad, and climbs across bamboo, scanning the branches above. The two men are tense, despite the fact that hunting for bush-meat – wild mammals and birds - has been a lifelong necessity and occupation.
Bye raises his gun and tracks an invisible shadow. Boom. The shot reverberates through the foliage, breaking the quiet morning in two. A multitude of small birds rises from the trees. Bye rushes forward and scans the bottom of a tree. A bunch of feathers slowly float down to the forest floor, but there is no bird. Bye has missed.
The two men grab their small packs and we are off running, putting distance between us and the scene of the crime. In some districts in Northern Laos, shooting wild animals is now against the law and both men are scared of the police.

Until very recently the markets of Muang Singh, Luang Nam Tha, Phonsavan and Vang Viang were teeming with live and dead forest animals. Squirrels, civet cats, forest rats, bats, beavers, porcupine and their close relative the ‘sinhawn’ as well as an enormous variety of birds including owls and pheasants were offered from market stalls all over the country. Now, under pressure from foreign NGO’s and wildlife organizations, local authorities have banned some produce from public sale, which might offend foreigners. But the loss of rare species has barely slowed.

We rest in a clearing amongst small patches of cabbage, grown by local villagers.
“The police came to our village recently and tried to take all our guns. They told us that foreigners had complained about shooting animals.” Bye shrugs and reloads his gun.
Gruto is 25 and, like Bye, belongs to the Akha minority, one of 120 tribal groups who make up much of the Lao population. The meat that members of virtually all the ethnic communities shoot has long been a substitute to their modest diet of rice and vegetables.
Bye is 40 and comes from the same village. He crosses his arms over his chest and whispers, “The police search our villages. They make checks in the forest and if we are caught with a gun, they take us away, maybe beat us. We are scared of prison.”
Neither man understands what the fuss is all about. Their fathers hunted the same way. Provided with little education or access to information by the reclusive and corrupt Lao government, they have no idea that endangered species are being hunted to death all over the country and beyond Laos’ borders, all over the world.

In Laos, the killing and trade of protected species has gone underground and continues.
Bye smiles, “Yesterday we shot a beaver, early in the morning, close to the village. I divided it between my family and the neighbors and we ate it the same day.”
Most people in Laos today continue to live off the land. The most sparsely populated country in South East Asia has a population of about 5 million and is the size of Great Britain. There is no large-scale meat or fishing industry to speak of. Hunting and fishing are the traditional ways for most Lao to put some protein on the dinner table. Many of the men living in upland minority villages are excellent hunters and use a whole arsenal of crossbows and antiquated shot-guns.

Bye is reloading his gun with powder, salvaged from UXO (unexploded ordnance) and buck-shot. The long barreled rifle is a front loader. Getting the next shot ready takes several minutes and is a laborious undertaking. The gun is his most prized possession. “We used to take the animals to the market, to make a little money. Now we just take them home and divide them up in the village, so everything is eaten the same day. We have no money to buy chicken or turkey in the market.”
Gruto smiles, “And the forest animals taste better.”

While the police have been confiscating antiquated weapons across the country, there is no shortage of armory in Laos. Tons of buried weapons from a nine-year US bombing campaign during the Vietnam War litter the country side and continue to kill Lao people every month. Hunters are especially at risk. When they open UXO, in order to extract explosives, some lose their hands or lives in accidental detonations. Bye’s gun is an old and tested design, quickly assembled from steel barrels bought in Nam Tha and small parts manufactured in hill tribe villages.
“The gun cost me 85.000 Kip (8.50$), “ Gruto explains. ”We don’t know how to make them, but we know where to buy them. And we all know how to hunt.”

Bushmeat is big business with an annual global turnover of up to 2 Billion US Dollars. In Africa, a multitude of NGOs are campaigning for the halt to the hunting, as primates are continually caught for the cooking pot and gorillas in the wild may soon be a thing of the past. The Orang-Utan in Indonesia faces a similar fate.
The illegal trade of bush-meat and other animal products in Asia, mostly from the South East to China for their assumed medicinal properties, is a substantial part of this business. A Thai minister was recently caught attempting to sell 100 tigers from the nation’s national parks to China.
Poachers and hunters are the first step in a long chain of middlemen, smugglers, wholesalers and shops profiting from ancient beliefs and a desire for taste of the forbidden. 1000 tons of bush-meat are seized at Heathrow airport in London every year and new EU legislation, prompted by a huge petition campaign to European MPs, is pressing for tough measures to halt the trade.
The European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA) and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) state: “The recent explosion in unsustainable hunting for the commercial bush-meat trade, fuelled by the activities of the logging industry, is threatening the very existence of whole populations of endangered animals.”
According to the two NGOs, conservation is only one pressing reason to curb the trade. “Contact with wild meat results in an increased risk of animal-derived diseases, for example HIV, monkey pox (similar to smallpox) and ebola.”

IFAW claims that an uncontrolled increase in logging, mainly carried out by European and South-East Asian companies, has opened up formerly remote forest areas. Regions like the Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia and the North of Laos have been inaccessible to commercial hunters in the past, with little or no infrastructure to shift any captured or killed animals to markets.
This is changing rapidly, all over South East Asia.
In Burma, the military government is handing out logging concessions to the ethnic minorities it is actively fighting in its long running war of repression. The rebels hire thousands of Chinese workers to chop down the forest.
In Laos and Cambodia, previously inaccessible forests, poisoned by land mines and other UXO, are slowly being cleaned up and cut down. Laos ranks 11th worldwide in the amount of forest cover it retains. Only Cambodia, a neighboring nation, forever teetering on the brink of collapse and war, and hence attracting little investment, has retains more forest cover in Asia and faces similar problems.