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 TradeTraditional Medicine Trade: Primates, Pangolins and Fruit Bats Slow Lorises (Nycticebus coucang), nocturnal primates with huge eyes and thick fur, are gentle and shy tropical forest dwellers. Thousands are captured in Southeast Asia for Traditional Medicine. They are killed and cooked in lemon leaves in China to provide tonics. In Cambodia, hunted with crossbows, they are among the commonest wild animals sold in markets, with racks of hundreds of dried lorises exhibited for the buyer (Martin and Phipps 1996). Live lorises are often sold in Chinese markets to be killed later, or kept as pets. These nocturnal animals suffer in the bright daylight, blinking and cowering in their tiny cages. Educators from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), headquartered in New York City, visited a Chinese market in Yunnan province with local schoolteachers to show them the many endangered species being offered for sale, and saw two threatened Pygmy Lorises (Nycticebus pygmaeus). A mother and her young cringed in a tiny wire cage with barely enough room to turn around; the mother loris wrapped her body around her tiny infant, shielding it from the noise and dazzling sunlight (Naiman 1997). In all likelihood, they would die from malnourishment, disease or dehydration, and one teacher suggested that the educator buy them to save their lives, but the WCS representative believed that this would only have resulted in more lorises being captured. This species is considered Vulnerable, a category for species only slightly less threatened with extinction than endangered species, by the 2000 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
The very rare and beautiful Golden Monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana) is killed so that its brain may be used for Traditional Medicine. Macaques from Southeast Asia are being captured in Vietnam and shipped across the border to China, where they are kept alive in tiny wire cages and killed on order for the Traditional Medicine trade.
Pangolins, scaly armored mammals of Africa and Southeast Asia are so heavily hunted for their scales, which are used in various remedies, that all three species (Manis genus) are now listed on Appendix II of CITES.
Fruit bats are collected in Southeast Asia for sale in Traditional Medicine markets. The BBC filmed their capture for a PBS Nature special, “Castaways of Sulawesi” (1995). In Sulawesi, Indonesia, the island formerly known as Celebes, young boys fly kites with hooks that entangle the fruit bats as they fly off to feed in the evening. The fruit bats scream and squeal as they are hauled in and placed in boxes with rods for perches. Trappers ship them for four days, often without food or water in extreme heat, to tradesmen who kill them for use in Traditional Medicine. This trade is having a disastrous effect on the island's fruit bats. The loss will be significant if these bats are eliminated, because of their enormous value as pollinators of numerous species of trees, many of which provide economically important fruit. Fruit bats and flying foxes throughout Asia and the Pacific are killed for food and TM. Nine species of fruit bats have been placed on Appendix I, and the entire genus Pteropus of flying foxes on Appendix II of CITES, but this has had little effect on the trade.
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