The illicit wildlife trade, second only in illegal profit potential to drug smuggling, is claiming an increasing number of human as well as animal lives. And, so long as forest rangers continue to be outmanned and outgunned, the body count can only rise further. Proof of this came last week when a gang of poachers hunting tigers, and armed with AK-47 sub-machine guns, took the lives of two more rangers in the jungles of Tak province, bringing the number of fatalities to 42 since 2009 with 48 others injured, many of them seriously.
The rangers were murdered while trying to protect the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary, a World Heritage site popular with tourists and home to many endangered species of wildlife. Only a relatively few tigers remain but that has not stopped poachers from trying to hunt them to extinction. Decisive action is necessary to combat the threat these hunters pose. The number of tigers in Asia is plummeting because of habitat loss and the sale of skins and body parts to medicinal and souvenir markets in China, a traditional but illegal activity that Beijing is attempting to stamp out.
Sadly, these efforts are meeting resistance and delegates at a recent wildlife conservation meeting in Kunming told their Chinese hosts that demand for tiger parts persists. Worldwide efforts are also under way to end the trade in ivory and rhino horn with regular seizures made at Suvarnabhumi airport. Clearly a change of mindset is required. Ivory, pangolin and shark fin soup are no longer status symbols; nor is rhino horn an aphrodisiac. There is an abundance of legal modern-day replacements.
A breakthrough was achieved at the 178-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites) meeting in Bangkok six months ago when Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra vowed to end the domestic trade in ivory. It is a pledge the government must be held to as the trade provides a loophole used by traffickers to launder poached African ivory.
The biggest problem is enforcement. Although the National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation Department has a staff of 20,490 on its payroll, it has 411 sanctuaries and protected parks totalling 73 million rai (116,800 sq km) to guard on a meagre budget of 13.87 baht per rai. It cannot match the firepower and financial resources of wildlife traffickers and plunderers of Siamese rosewood. These trans-national criminal gangs are having a devastating effect on endangered flora and fauna and creating massive biodiversity loss. Clearly the balance needs to be tipped in favour of those who will actually protect what remains of our wildlife, while giving the hunters a taste of what it is like to be the hunted.
That goal came a step closer with last week's agreement under which Thailand and the Asean Wildlife Enforcement Network gave an official nod to the US to help curb the trade in endangered plants and animals through greater cooperation and tighter controls and law enforcement. The US, acting on a global initiative launched by President Barack Obama, has already mounted a number of successful online ''buy/bust'' operations and, of course, has financial resources that dwarf regional wildlife crime-fighting budgets.
Our track record is certainly not one to boast about. All too often, the negative has outweighed the positive. There was the disastrous attempt to import 135 wild animals including zebras and giraffes from Kenya for the Night Safari Zoo in Chiang Mai. Although it was partially blocked by the Kenyan courts, an undisclosed number of animals died. The country's image suffered further blows over shady wildlife deals such as the clandestine export of up to 100 tigers to a Chinese zoo, the smuggling of orangutans from Indonesia to a private Thai zoo and the lengthy delay in returning them, and the mishandling of an elephant-koala swap with Australia. Mercifully a plan to import polar bears for Chiang Mai zoo was scrapped; penguins will replace them.
True, there have been successes. The rescue of protected songbirds on Thursday and the two truckloads of pangolins seized this month count among them. And Lin Ping, the cute panda cub who captured the hearts of a nation and created a first by having her own TV channel, will no doubt generate floods of tears when she flies off to the scenic wonderland of Wulong on Saturday to seek a bridegroom. She will be joined on the flight to China by 300 fans and carers and is expected to return to Chiang Mai late next year. Now if we could only harness some of that love and use it to save other endangered species, many of our problems would be over.