A new project paying poachers not to hunt tigers in Cambodia has piqued the interest of a bear protection group, which wants to make sure the hunters-turned-conservationists are watching out for bear poaching, too.
The International Free the Bears Fund, based in Perth, Australia, is asking wildlife protection officials to include bear hunters in a program that pays poachers a monthly salary to keep them from hunting, said Ray Wallace, the fund’s treasurer.
Last month, the Cambodian Wildlife Protection Office and Cat Action Treasury announced an ambitious country-wide anti-poaching campaign, to be funded by the Exxon Corp.
Under that program, poachers will be paid $50 per month, plus $2 for each day spent in the field, to work as rangers looking for other poachers or teaching villagers why poaching is wrong.
The program is aimed at turning poachers, with their detailed knowledge of wildlife and forest conditions, into rangers who focus on conservation. Cambodia is home to a number of threatened species, including tigers, the Malaysian sun bear and the Asiatic black bear.
One difficulty any anti-poaching program faces is that hunters who bag a rare animal can sell it for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
“There’s a fair market in trading live sun bears,’’ Wallace said, noting the bears are kept as pets; slaughtered for meat and fur; or imprisoned on Chinese “gall bladder farms.’’
The bears’ bile is considered a potent medicine by traditional Chinese healers, who have developed a method for extracting bile from living bears, he said.
Wallace said the bears have also been hunted for their paws, which were used to make expensive bear-paw soup. Chinese restaurants would keep the bears alive, amputating one paw after another to make the soup, which sold for about $100 a serving.
When the bear ran out of paws, it would be slaughtered, Wallace said.
“But fortunately, that has been all but eliminated,’’ he said.
(Additional reporting by Ana Nov)
