TNAG-0468-FCO40-533-Legislation-for-protection-of-wild-life-in-Hong-Kong-1974 — Page 117

PENN

This is the inside of one of the Hong Kong animal shops which handles a staggering volume of wildlife from China: birds and small mammals; snakes in literally hundreds of thousands a year, and rare species in smaller numbers.

Some years ago Hong Kong, which is of course a British Colony

was a major re-export centre for animals and birds from other Asian countries. Local seamen and dealers did a flourishing trade in Indonesian orangutangs until international pressure on London stopped this in the mid-sixties. The trade in orangs and a few other species - pandas and rhinos, for example was prohibited after that as a concession to regional conservation. But trade in other endangered specios continues unabated, and there is a huge legitimmte trade in rare animal parts. Hong Kong is said to consume most of the aphrodisiac horn for which the unfortunate rhinc is slaughtered; and rare cat skins such as cheetah, leopard and tiger now banned in Britain, are openly sold in Hong Kong shops. When Britain complied with the World Wildlife ban on vicuna skins it's probably quite true they all came here.

There's still a moderate re-export trade in live fauna, and a lot of it goes to Japan. The Colony's bird fanciers provide a huge and market for caged birds from elsewhere- much of it unrecorded imports - again by Hong Kong seamen.

In international conservation circles, Hong Kong's image is a very dark grey, and the Government has been formally rebuked for cruelty to wild life by the World Federation for the Protection of Animals. Most of these problems arise from the collosal and quite legal wildlife trade from China which is dominated by local Communist companies.

A small group of people has been watching this over the past year, and all of them except myself are either professional scientists or quasi-professional animal people. Our most sig- nificant finding, we think, is the phenomenal traffic in birds of prey and owls - which we shall sometimes, like the Cantonese, refer to collectively as 'eagles', and also the Hong Kong Government's compliance with this trade. These birds for example have been virtually prohibited entry into Britain in the interests of world conservation since 1970, and yet this British Colony is seemingly the world's biggest consumer of these birds, which, like a wealth of other Chinese wildlife, are consigned to the cooking pot.

There are no statistics for imports of raptors into Hong Kong so the task of assessing them was undertaken by a Hong Kong University zoologist, Valentine Lance, who had to avoid producing resistance in the Communist shops.