Thais fight animal smuggling

More than 33,000 animals have been recovered, including tigers, bears, orangutans, and birds. The animal-smuggling industry, police say, is second only to drug trafficking in profitability. A pair of orangutans can bring up to $25,000, police said.

Spurred by the discoveries, police have cracked down on wildlife smugglers, taking them to court, seizing animals, and vowing to wipe out the practice.

"I don't know of any other country in the world that's mobilized their national police force to hit wildlife traders," said Steven Galster, director of Wild Aid, an animal rights organization.

The animals, prized for their meat, medicinal value, and putative sexual healing powers, are illegally imported from Indonesia, Malaysia, and other countries, and sent to China, Korea, Japan, and elsewhere, police and activists say. Sometimes, as with tigers, they are bred or captured here, then illegally sold to wildlife traders.

"We are one of the biggest wildlife animal smuggling centers in the world," said Major General Sawake Pinsinchai, a veteran police officer. His three decades of tangling with drug smugglers and gangsters, he said, did not prepare him for what he saw when police officers entered a house on Bangkok's outskirts in late October: tiger carcasses, quartered and on ice; 21 bear paws, severed at the joint; six starving tigers in damp, cramped cages; five bears; and four baby orangutans, one so weak that it soon died.

"A tragic scene," Sawake said. "It boggles the imagination."

One tiger had just been skinned, revealing a .22-caliber bullet hole just above the eye. "Nobody shot a tiger like that in the forest," Galster said. Investigators also found notes listing restaurant orders for bear paws and tiger meat, he said.

Two weeks later, Sawake's team raided an open market, seizing more than 1,000 protected species of birds. At another house, they found civet cats, pythons, and a baby orangutan, dead in a freezer.

In quick succession, police then raided a private zoo in Bangkok, a private tiger zoo in a province east of here, and a zoo-entertainment complex in southern Thailand. In each, they found many more animals than the zoos had registered. At Safari World here, for example, police found 114 orangutans, though the zoo had registered only 44.

Police and activists said they did not know how much the trade is worth, or how many animals are illegally bought and sold. But Thailand's 1,800 miles of porous borders, easy access to Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and its culture of corruption make it an attractive place for illicit trade, officials said.

The animals are smuggled by syndicates, Sawake said. An orangutan could be sent from Indonesia to Malaysia or southern Thailand by boat, then trucked to Bangkok, he said. Bears are often smuggled in from Burma and Cambodia.

Tigers are protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which bans their trade for commercial purposes but allows them to be kept for breeding and research.

What's new about the crackdown is that Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is intent on ending illegal wildlife trading and that smugglers are no longer being protected by corrupt officials, Sawake said.