PEN!
PENN
21.
In world conservation terms, the most significant casualties of this trade are the raptors. The appearance in Hong Kong shops of single rarer species - tigers or loopards say
tigers or leopards say - would scom almost unimportant beside the volume of eagles and owls.
Since 1973, as we've said, the import of oven one such bird into Britain has been a most difficult matter while this British Colony commits them in thousands a year- conceivably tens of thousands -
to the cooking pot.
In the mid-sixties Fred Hochtal, who's an exceedingly busy businessman, was regularly buying birds of prey from the shops for .rehabilitation in his flat, and then release..
Hechtel.
Young kestrel - it's also got sinusitis - you can see its eyes closing up. All swollen underneath the eyes. One buzzard just about dead underneath. And another buzzard right down the bottom. That one you can see how the tail has gone and the ends of the wings have gone. Absolutely chopped off -
literally by being in a wire cage.
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This one you see these lumps on the edge of the wing? Well,
that is the rubber solution they trap them with.
(Fade on)
This bird here dying literally hardly able to
lift up its head. This buzzard......
A South China device for trapping birds of prey is a set of bamboo sticks dipped in rubber solution which spreads increasingly over the bird's body and wings the more frantically it struggles to
escape.
Hechtel
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If these feathers were very seriously gummed up with rubber I wouldn't touch the bird. On the other hand, I've managed to clean wing feathers which have not been too badly gummed up by catching the bird every evening, or once a day which of course was rather traumatic for the bird and gradually cleaning the feathers, usually with a soft toothbrush - literally mechanically removing it very slowly, using a little bit of talcum powder. And by doing this keeping the talcum powder literally to the rubber solution only we managed to remove quite a bit. And if it only affected a few of the feathers it would still then be possible to release the bird. Of course the great danger with nearly all these birds was that they had already damaged their tails scriously in the baskets in which they came, especially if they were very crowded. And of course
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