Wilderness Committee demands removal of all outlawed tiger bone medicines from North American stores
Tiger bone medicines purchased in Vancouver's Chinatown.
A personal plea from Anthony Marr, WCWC's BET'R campaigner
The Chinese have a saying: If you go up the mountain often enough, you will encounter the tiger. Since 1995, when I founded the BET'R (Bear, Elephant, Tiger and Rhino) Campaign to end the use of endangered animal parts and joined the staff of Western Canada Wilderness Committee (WCWC), I have made many trips to Chinatown to seek out tiger bone medicines and try to have these illegal products removed from store shelves. My trip in the summer of 1997 was once too often.
Just four blocks away from WCWC's storefront office in Vancouver's Gastown, a two-person Omni Film crew and I were being pursued down a Chinatown alley by men who wanted to take from us the evidence of their crime.
Their crime was selling Chinese medicines containing the ground up body parts of endangered species. The evidence was five boxes of different brands of pills that I had just purchased from the Ngai Hoi apothecary in Vancouver's Chinatown. Each box listed tiger bone as an ingredient. My purchase of these illegal medicines was filmed by an Omni Film cameraman parked outside the front entrance of the store.
Unfortunately, a camera goof-up meant that I had to return to the store to make a second purchase. It was then that I was recognized. I was told, "We don't want your business. Leave at once." Angered when I didn't immediately respond, he added, "If you don't leave right now, I'll call the police." I said, "Go ahead. I'll show them the illegal stuff you have on your shelves."
He did not call the police. I left. As I reached our van parked in the back alley, two men came up and demanded that I give them the pills I purchased. When I refused, one of them pushed me aside and reached into the van, trying to grab the bag with the store's name and logo containing the boxes of tiger bone medicine. When the video producer said to his cameraman, "Film this!" the two men withdrew, but not before one of them said to me in Chinese, "Watch your step, buddy!"
Early in 1996, as director of WCWC's BET'R Campaign, I launched a media blitz of Vancouver's Chinatown apothecaries, resulting in national media coverage by CBC, CTV and the Toronto Globe and Mail. In March I received a letter from then federal Minister of the Environment, Sergio Marchi: "...The federal government's capacity to deter trade will increase with the proclamation of the Wildlife Trade Act this spring. Under the Act, poachers and smugglers will be liable to penalties of up to $150,000 and 5 years' imprisonment. Corporations are liable to fines of up to $300,000. The maximum fine can be doubled for a second offence."
In May of 1996, four years after the bill was passed in Parliament, the Wildlife Trade Act (WAPPRIITA--the Wild Animal and Plant Protection and Regulation of International and Interprovincial Trade Act) was officially proclaimed. A booklet published in at least English, Chinese and Korean explained: "If you operate a pharmacy, it is up to you to be sure that there are no endangered species parts or ingredients in any of the medicines in your store. If any part or derivative of an endangered species is found in your store, it will be confiscated and you could be charged...." Ignorance of the new law is not a valid excuse for breaking it.
In June of 1997, I was informed by a friend that despite the fact that the Wildlife Trade Act was more than a year old, Toronto's Chinatown was still like "an endangered species parts supermarket." A month later I visited the Chinatowns of Ottawa and Toronto, and found my friend's report to be true.
The Globe and Mail, Toronto Sun, Ottawa Citizen and the Global Television Network all covered my story. Their message: 14 months after the enactment of WAPPRIITA, the law that was supposed to protect endangered species was not doing the job. Apparently campaigning for the enactment of a law is not enough. We have to campaign for its enforcement, too.
"about 39,000 individual tiger- containing products were seized in B.C. in 1996".
Today, Vancouver's Chinatown is a little cleaner than Toronto's, perhaps due to more diligent enforcement. In a cover article of the Georgia Straight magazine (April 24,1997) entitled Bloody Superstition (about WCWC's BET'R Campaign to stop the use of tiger parts in Chinese medicine), a Canadian Wildlife Service enforcement officer for WAPPRIITA said that "about 39,000 individual tiger- containing products were seized in B.C. in 1996". This is commendable.
But he was also quoted as saying that enforcement officers are concentrating on wholesalers and large importers since "...We started off going to retail stores and we took a lot of heat and criticism from the community for doing that...We don't want to be too heavy. We have got too many new Canadians here, and it takes a while to assimilate. We're dealing with something that is thousands of years old. You don't change that overnight."
I appreciate his sensitivity, but Canada's soft enforcement approach can only engender a disrespect for the law and continue to place poaching pressures on the world's dwindling number of tigers.
We should learn a lesson from England. British police, assisted by TRAFFIC, cracked down in February of 1995 on the illegal sale of traditional oriental medicines containing or purported to contain tiger bone, rhinoceros horn and bear bile. The police carried out simultaneous raids on 12 oriental pharmacies. Canadian officials claim that prosecutions under the Wildlife Trade Act are difficult because it is very expensive to verify that medicines claiming to contain tiger parts actually do. However under United Kingdom law, the sale of such products is illegal, "even if the product does not genuinely contain derivatives from these species but claims to do so..." I say, if our law doesn't work, change it to match the British one that does.
The world trade in tiger parts and tiger bone derivatives is vast. TRAFFIC research indicates more than 27 million items claiming to contain tiger derivatives were recorded in international trade between 1990 and 1992. To produce these, China has hunted the South China tiger from an estimated population of 4,000 in the 1960s down to a pitiful 20 today. It is estimated that China is importing 300-400 poached Bengal tigers a year from India, when the total tiger population there is less than 3,000. South Korea is also believed to import another 200-300 from India & elsewhere.
A letter to the editor published in the Georgia Strait states: "...would we allow other cultural practices, such as incest, female genital mutilation, bestiality or polygamy to be imported into Canada? The trade in endangered species-based products needs to be stopped now, instead of at some fuzzy later date when, to save some feelings, we're allowing a magnificent species to be destroyed."
I am a Chinese Canadian myself, and I sawy to the Canadian enforcement officers: "Go for it! Uphold the law and protect endangered species. If you don't act, you're helping condemn the tiger to extinction!"
