TNAG-0470-FCO40-535-Legislation-for-protection-of-wild-life-in-Hong-Kong-1974 — Page 130

WOT

REF.

NEW

KEP.

нкод

RECEIVED REGISTRY No.5 16 JUL 1974

to be rest

การ

Dear Mr Callaghan,

pse.

ванет

152.

n.

R & R E

woltes pre spack

with wildlife papers

9 St. Helen's Avenue, BENSON,

Oxon.

12 July, 1974

During March of this year I was in touch with you indirectly, via my MP Mr Michael Heseltine who very kindly gave me every assistance in my protest against the Hong Kong trade in China Wildlife. At the same time I contacted the Hong Kong Government Office in London to make the same point. I must now thank you for what was achieved as a result of consultations with the Governor of Hong Kong and the Peking Embassy.

I am writing to you again as I have since been in touch with people both resident in, and newly returned from, Hong Kong, and what they have to tell me makes me realise that there is a lot more yet to be done. Mr Michael Webster of Nathan Road, Kowloon, Hong Kong, is one of the people campaigning on the spot against this trade. He tells me that the Code of Practice for animal traders is so vague that it could not be made to stand up in court. Also that whilst some Government pressure has been applied to the smaller traders and hawkers, nothing has been done to improve conditions in the big wholesale dealers' premises. He states that his organization now has extreme difficulty in gaining access to these shops, which fact alone makes one wonder about existing conditions therein. He also claims to have two dated pricelists emanating from the China Wildlife Co. between May 14 and June 11 in both of which the Giant Salamander, a protected species, is named and priced; one definitely states that these salamanders are in stock. This appears to conflict with reassurances from the Hong Kong Government.

Whilst I am grateful for any action which has been taken as a result of protests, I feel from this latest information and from telephone conversations I have had with Patricia Penn (whose broadcast "Who's Killing the China Animals?" brought my attention to this matter in the first place) that any reassurance I felt was slightly misplaced. If protected species are still being traded then their extinction is a matter of course, and nobody can yet predict what might eventually happen to threaten the existence of mankind itself from the extinction of one, apparently unimportant, species. If we upset the environmental balance in this way the results could be catastrophic. Those of us who look to the future if such a thing were allowed to happen cannot but be alarmed by it.