Tuesday, February 27, 2018

That troublesome Chinese belief

I complained once before that one of the worst things to come out of China (or Asia more generally?) is the belief that certain animal parts carry certain health benefits.   (I keep thinking there must be a single word for that, but what is it?)  Nature reports:
The jaguar was found floating in a drainage canal in Belize City, Belize, on the day after Christmas last year. Its body was mostly intact, but the head was missing its fangs. On 10 January, a second cat — this time, an ocelot that may have been mistaken for a young jaguar — turned up headless in the same channel.

The killings point to a growing illicit trade in jaguars (Panthera onca) that disturbs wildlife experts. The cats’ fangs, skulls and hides have long been trophies for Latin American collectors who flout international prohibitions against trading in jaguar parts. But in recent years, a trafficking route has emerged to China, where the market for jaguars could be increasing because of crackdowns on the smuggling of tiger parts used in Chinese traditional medicine.

Wildlife trafficking often follows Chinese construction projects in other countries, because Chinese workers can send or take objects home, says ecologist Vincent Nijman of Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, UK. “If there’s a demand [in China] for large-cat parts, and that demand can be fulfilled by people living in parts of Africa, other parts of Asia or South America, then someone will step in to fill that demand,” he says. “It’s often Chinese-to-Chinese trade, but it’s turning global.”
Does no one at the top of Chinese government (hello, dictator elect Xi) think that it might be useful to have a government backed campaign to stop the population believing in quasi magical "traditional medicine", at least if it involves animal parts?

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