TNAG-0469-FCO40-534-Legislation-for-protection-of-wild-life-in-Hong-Kong-1974 — Page 109

5.

PENN

PENN -

Hechtel

I know that in one particular part of the How Territories it's believed that night jars plucked alive by the light of the moon and then eaten will do wonders for TB. And then lung illnesses

or respiratory diseases - certain Chinese will eat newborn rats alive

for T.

Cantonese fixations about so-called aphrodisiacs deserve a separate study. In Hong Kong, foasts of civet, lcopard cat, and so on bring status or 'faco', and it's puzzling that China is committing its natural heritage to such backward ideas. Many of those creatures, after all, have prosaic but vital ecological importanco. Import figures, such as they are, come from only one section of the trade and shop sightings have proved them to be wildly conservative. Even so, they're rather alarming. In the financial year 1972-73, leopard cats, civets, racoon dogs, and forret badgers were officially numbered at over 5000; Pangolins, thats the Chinese Scaly Anteater, over 4000.

Add to this the several thousand birds of prey, the creatures eaten in China itself and lost or orphaned at capture, and the view from here is that China has serious problems looming. Dr. Brian Morton is an ecologist at Hong Kong University.

Morton

The otters and civet cats, forret badgers, are the carnivores top carnivores. They are the ones which feed upon things like

rats, mice, snails, slugs and so on.

They'll eat large

numbers of these. Very large numbers. And they successfully keep down the pests. Now, when you remove these top carnivores you can expect to see a change in the ecological balance of a particular area. Mature is really a very fine balance. This is what ecology is all about.

Lance

There are published reports from Malaya when they cleared forest areas for growing crops, growing rice, and at the same time wiped out many of the predators in the area - purposely wiped them out - thinking that this would make the land more safe for domestic

species. Then they found that the the domestic species of rats

introduced by Man went up to uncontrollable levels in these areas.

Chinese conservation policy is very difficult to fathom. Official exhortations to hunt animals for their products are tempered with vague warnings about the need to conserve them.

Little if any study has been made by Westerners of these 01d World carnivores as pest controllers, but the implications for Kwantung

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