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Posted on 04/12/2012 10:30:28 AM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – Chinese workers in Zimbabwe are buying up the local wildlife for dinner, feasting on endangered tortoises, pythons, leopards — and even village dogs.
Viewed as prestigious dishes, they would be expensive to serve at banquets back in China. But in Zimbabwe they are relatively cheap. Worse yet, in this cash-strapped country there’s a lack of resources to thwart the appetite for endangered game, conservation groups say.
China is investing significantly in mining, agriculture and construction, and its companies bring along thousands of workers.
Where there are Chinese in Africa, illegal trade in rare animals inevitably increases, according to experts. In Kenya, elephant poaching rose sharply along roads built by Chinese construction crews, and markets in Ethiopia cater to the Chinese demand for ivory chopsticks and other illicit souvenirs.
One recent case in Zimbabwe involved the gruesome discovery of meat and skeletal remains of 40 tortoises, during a raid on Chinese workers' homes in Masvingo province. The endangered Bell’s Hinged tortoises had been dropped into boiling water while still alive in order to separate the meat from the shell, police and animal welfare officials said.
(Excerpt) Read more at globalpost.com ...
I hear that the darker Zim natives taste like chicken...and are easier to catch.
I’ve been to East Africa as well as southern Africa and am a huge supporter of saving their wildlife (and no,I’m not “animal rights”).Leave it to the Chinese to do this.They live in a huge cesspool themselves but that’s not enough...they have to destroy far off lands.
China invests in China. If there is no $$$ or natural resources in it for them (+potential customers) they are not interested in that other country.
The US invests in war torn hell-holes asking nothing in return from the people that hate us there and eventually abandoning them anyway after spending lots of $$$.
Which strategy you think will pay off the most in the long run?
I knew dogs would be in there somewhere.
mmmmm.....Zebra Lo Mein......
I agree, I am a supporter as well. It urks me when Freepers thing it’s funny to come into threads like this and make jokes about Bar B Q elephants or whatever. As being a conservative means you have to support reckless destruction.
I think a balance is needed. The Chinese are just foul when it comes to this sort of thing.
I agree, I am a supporter as well. It urks me when Freepers thing it’s funny to come into threads like this and make jokes about Bar B Q elephants or whatever. As being a conservative means you have to support reckless destruction nature or else you’re a Peta member or something.
I think a balance is needed. The Chinese are just foul when it comes to this sort of thing.
Spend a trillion, then Obama turns over each country to terrorists. And Obama is just getting warmed up.
The Australian Aborigines loved the taste of Chinese
If there truly is a market for these animals, there soon will be as many of these ‘endangered’ species as there are cows and chickens in the United States.
Supply and demand. Unless the people of Zimbabwe are to stupid to see a way to make millions.
Not likely since Mugabe and his morons probably have Chinese-made AK47s (what irony) handy.
Like some of the others here, I was also appalled at this. I don’t think the market can create sufficient supply quickly enough to address demand. Both the white and black rhinos’ numbers remain critical despite allowing limited hunting or shooting. I learned as a Ruffed Grouse Society volunteer that reproduction rates and the habitiat of hunted animals have a lot to do with their success as game species.
As a hunter, it has been really sad to see Chinese (my ethnicity) behaving so irresponsibly. When I was in Asia, I was taken to some caves where workers collected birds’ nests for that over-the-top delicacy. When birds returned to their nests, the nests and just-hatched chicks were gone.
Here in the US, Chinese pay Canadian and American poachers for bear paws and gallbladders. I was out west mule deer hunting with friends and we found a bear carcass missing its paws and cut open for the gallbladder. What a waste!
Sadly, money will always win when there’s a demand and there are greedy people wanting the money. The African game suffers accordingly. The tribal cultures have absolutely no concept of the resources they are literally killing off. Worse yet, they don’t CARE one whit.
China's. (rimshot)
What’s news about Godless heathens acting like animals?
“Addio Africa” was a mondo-explotation film (from the makers of “Mondo Cane”).
Filmed right as colonial rule was being devolved to the locals, it has sickening footage of massive zebra & elephant slaughter as the locals went wild.
Sad, and sickening.
...Massive dams are being built, flooding nature reserves. The land is scarred with giant Chinese mines, with 'slave' labourers paid less than £1 a day to extract ore and minerals.Pristine forests are being destroyed, with China taking up to 70 per cent of all timber from Africa.
All over this great continent, the Chinese presence is swelling into a flood. Angola has its own 'Chinatown', as do great African cities such as Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. Exclusive, gated compounds, serving only Chinese food, and where no blacks are allowed, are being built all over the continent. 'African cloths' sold in markets on the continent are now almost always imported, bearing the legend: 'Made in China'.
From Nigeria in the north, to Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Angola in the west, across Chad and Sudan in the east, and south through Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, China has seized a vice-like grip on a continent which officials have decided is crucial to the superpower's long-term survival. 'The Chinese are all over the place,' says Trevor Ncube, a prominent African businessman with publishing interests around the continent. 'If the British were our masters yesterday, the Chinese have taken their place.'
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