TAIPEI: In a press release, the Taiwan Coast Guard announced that the Tainan-based mobile investigative division of Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration raided the property of a suspected smuggler in the Guanyin district of the northern city of Taoyuan.
Authorities found a stash of protected animal and plant life, including 3,676 wild turtles, a collection of yellow-margined box turtle eggs, 14 snakes, five pangolins, 533 kilograms of stout camphor wood and 33 kg of Taiwan cypress wood.
The animal species found on the raid included 469 Chinese pond turtles, 2,286 yellow-margined box turtles, 920 yellow pond turtles, 1 side-necked turtle, 12 cobras, 2 beauty rat snakes and five frozen pangolins. The figure has set the record for the largest number of turtles ever to be uncovered in a smuggling raid in Taiwan.
Asian pond turtles and yellow-margined box turtles are sold in China not to be eaten as food but generally to fuel a speculation market where wealthy Chinese buy the turtles and hold on to them as a sort of valued commodity. This same speculation led to a crash in the golden coin turtle in the mid-2000s. China has nearly wiped out their local population, with only about 1,000 or so able to be caught in the wild there each year. Under such circumstances, they have increasingly turned to Taiwan for the animals. In 2010 alone, 20 tonnes of yellow-margined box turtles were illegally shipped from Taiwan to China and annual shipments have reached an estimated 4 tonnes since.
This bust is also the first recorded time that either pangolins or camphor were seized by authorities to be sent to China for sale. Pangolins are the most heavily trafficked mammals in the world, with all 8 species being considered endangered, mainly due to China. There it is viewed as a delicacy by the middle class and the embryos are looked at as a way to promote virility in males. The scales are also said to have medicinal qualities in Chinese Traditional Medicine. All of these claims have yet to be proven through peer-reviewed research and scientific testing methods.
According to Taipei-based Great News, the suspected smuggler, surnamed Wu, was captured in early morning on July 16 with four others, after an anonymous tip that claimed Wu and others had been capturing category I endangered species and category II rare and valuable species in Taiwan. The animals that fall into these categories, such as the Chinese pond turtle and the yellow-marginated box turtle, were later to be put on fishing boats and shipped to China for sale.
A task force was created with coast guard investigation squads in Hsinchu and Taoyuan, as well as Coast Guard patrol brigades, the Kueijen district police office in Tainan, the Forestry Division of the Council of Agriculture and the Hsinchu branch of the Seventh Special Police Corps of the National Police Agency. The units coordinated with the Tainan District Prosecutor’s Office on the investigation.
Upon his arrest, Wu did not deny that he had been smuggling protected wildlife to ship to China.
