It’s past time that the barbaric and backward chinese culture of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) was recognised by the world’s civilized countries for what it is, an evil cult against wildlife, and so criminalised along with Female Genital Mutilation forthwith.  Neither serve any purpose except barbaric harm.

TCM superstition claims that rhino horns cure typhoid fever, convulsions, cancer, rheumatism, gout, snakebites, hallucinations, headaches, carbuncles, vomiting, food poisoning, and ‘devil possession’.   What backward quackery!   Even the the rhino’s skin and faeces is used by TCM witchdoctors.  Being superstitious and backward is one thing, but such ludicrously is driving and perpetuating the chinese illegal wildlife poaching of rhinos and elephants for their horns.  Is this why the chinese regime is spreading its influential tentacles across Africa?

Dried Tiger bone, Moon Bear bile, ground Elephant horn

All packaged and sold in an innocuous TCM grocer,

belying the world’s most barbaric cult against wildlife

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Today we learn that the last Javan rhino subspecies in Vietnam was found poached for its horn.  It is now extinct.

The Javan rhino is Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.  In 2009 only ten individuals of the subspecies Rhinoceros sondaicus annamiticus remained in South Vietnam’s rainforest region.

Javan one-horned Rhinoceros extinct as from yesterday due to poachers paid by the TCM witchdoctor cult

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‘Vietnam has lost its fight to save its rare Javan rhinoceros population after poachers apparently killed the country’s last animal for its horn, pushing one of the world’s most endangered species closer to extinction, a conservation group (World Wildlife Fund) said Tuesday (25th October 2011).

Vietnam’s Cat Tien National Park has had no sightings, footprints or dung from live rhinos since the last known animal living there was found dead last April, shot through the leg with its horn chopped off, the WWF said.  Genetic analysis of rhino feces had confirmed in 2004 that at least two rhinos were living in the park, raising hopes that Vietnam’s population might survive.

Only 40 to 60 Javan rhinos now remain in Ujung Kulon National Park in Indonesia. They are the last known living members of the species, with none in captivity.

Vietnam’s Javan rhino population had been shrinking for decades as land conversion and a rising local population threatened the animal’s habitat, but poaching and a lack of effective park management and patrols hastened the decline, said Christy Williams, coordinator of WWF’s Asian Elephant and Rhino Program.

“It appears that protection is not being given a high priority by the Vietnamese government,” he said.  Park director Tran Van Thanh said that while some of his rangers failed to fulfill their duties, it is impossible for them to stop all of the estimated 100,000 people living near the park from hunting exotic animals when the average farmer there earns around 150,000 dong ($7.50) per day.’

[Source:  ‘Javan rhino goes extinct in Vietnam after last rhino poached‘, by Mike Ives, Associated Press, 20111026, ^http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2011/1026/Javan-rhino-goes-extinct-in-Vietnam-after-last-rhino-poached]

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The subspecies Rhinoceros. sondicus inermis once found in Bengal, Assam, and Myanmar is now extinct.  The subspecies Rhinoceros sondaicus sondaicus lives only in Ujung Kulon National Park, Java, and has less than 60 individuals remaining.

All these TCM potions and remedies contain a small amount of Rhinoceros horn
© Esmond Bradley Martin

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The Yin and Yang philosophy may suggest a wholesome healthy balanced approach to alternative medicine, but according to the Australia Herbal Medicine Centre (a Chinese run practice in Sydney’s Chinese-centric Ryde)..”Chinese Herbal Medicines are mainly plant based, but some preparations include minerals or animal products.”

“Some of the conditions which may be treated by Chinese Herbal Medicine include:

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TCM is an evil backward cult inciting wildlife poaching and the key driver of wildlife extinctions around the globe. TCM ethically needs to be immediately banned, its barbaric practices made illegal and its products containing animal parts declared illegal wildlife trafficking and so an illegal import.   Poaching endangered animals is far worse than mass slaughter of non-endangered animals or even the mass slaughter of humans.  Species Extinction is the worst crime on the planet, because a whole species is threatened with extinction, not just a few million humans or so out of 7 billion.

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The Sydney Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine [http://www.sitcm.edu.au/] needs to immediately and publicly renounce any use of wild animal parts in its practice, else be immediately criminalised as an ecologically destructive cult.

Rhino Horn is not medicine – chew your nails instead.   Go and see a real doctor!

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Further Reading:

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[1]  ^http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2011/1026/Javan-rhino-goes-extinct-in-Vietnam-after-last-rhino-poached

[2]  ^http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2009/11/23/dogs_sniff_out_rhinos_of_vietanm/

[3]  ^http://www.asianscientist.com/topnews/wwf-traditional-chinese-medicine-rhino-horn-cancer-cure-cites-meeting/

[4]  ^http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2011/oct/25/javan-rhino-extinct-vietnam-wwf-video?newsfeed=true

[5]  ^http://www.rhinoconservation.org/2010/01/15/is-surge-in-illegal-rhino-horn-trade-linked-to-chinas-designation-of-tcm-as-strategic-industry/

[6]  ^http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/01/does-protecting-endangered-rhinos-conflict-with-traditional-chinese-medicine.php

[7]  ^http://www.greenfudge.org/2011/08/22/tcm-quackery-fuels-brutal-rhino-poaching/

[8]  ^http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/asian-bear-bile-remedies-barbarism-or-medicine/

[9] ^http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-02-06/female-circumcision-happening-in-australia/2594496

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This article was initially published by Tigerquoll 20090514 on CanDoBetter.net:

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Australia’s Defence Minister, Joel Fitzgibbon MP, has just been handed AUD$26,950,000,000 to unjustifiably escalate Australia’s military aggression, at a time when Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan says the world economy is gripped by the worst recession in 50 years.

Labor’s 2009 Defence White Paper indulges to the extreme, planning for so-called “Defence” (against what?) to receive some $146 billion in additional funding across the life of the White Paper to 2030.

Hypocritically at the same time, Fitzgibbon has rejected spending just $3.5 million to save thousands of Australia’s grey kangaroos fenced in on Defence land at Majura training range just outside Canberra. And at a time when Federal MPs have just awarded themselves another pay rise of $4000 pa for ‘electoral allowances’. It all stinks like British Parliamentary abuses.

Australia’s kangaroos, stressed from people altering their habitat, have been denied their freedom to roam their traditional grazing lands due to it being bulldozed for selfish property development, due to drought, consistent shooting and from uncontrolled bushfires.

Despite wildlife ecologist Dr Dror Ben-Ami telling the review tribunal that the Defence Department has no assessments of any impacts caused by the kangaroos nor that the kangaroos pose any threat to any threatened species on the Majura range, Fitzgibbon has condoned the senseless slaughter of 4000 of a population of 9000 trapped kangaroos be shot in secret, just last Saturday, 9th May 2009. Fitzgibbon approved a similar massacre just on a year ago at the same place – it must be some idea of a sick sport to him!

Fitzgibbon says it is to reduce the kangaroos to ‘sustainable levels‘.

How’s the language?

How is this mass killing different to April 1994 when the Hutu militia hacked thousands of Tutsis to death in Rwanda, or July 1995 in Srebrenica when Serb General Ratko Mladic systematically selected and then massacred 8,372 men and boys ‘of fighting age’ (between the ages of twelve and sixty), or in May 2000 when the Sri Lanka Army used banned cluster bombs from China, multi barrel rocket Launchers killing 2,000 Tamil civilians in the island’s north?

Just four days ago, 378 Tamil civilians were killed after Sri Lankan forces fired a massive barrage of artillery shells at Tamil Tiger rebels. Again the UN stands by – bit like how Pope Pius XII stood back while Hilter’s Nazis massacred millions of Jews during WWII.

In these human massacres, the killers use propaganda to describe their victims such as ‘terrorists’, ‘militants’ and justfity the massacres as ‘ethnic cleansing’. In each of the above human massacres, the UN has stood back and watched.

Like these human massacre, thousands of Australia’s iconic kangaroos, have just as much right to life as humans, yet they are been similarly slaughtered in secret. Defence uses fabricated propaganda like the kangaroos being in “plague proportions” and “hordes” and “pests”, that their “populations have exploded”; that they “compete for pasture”; and the latest ludicrous example; “they are eating endangered species of grass”. All so as to spin the sick aim of “sustainable culling”.

It’s simply a ecological massacre. It has just been done in secret with approval of Joel Fitzgibbon. How is he any different to Sri Lankan Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa?

This tragic massacre deserves to be written into Australia’s history as……’Fitzgibbon’s Massacre‘.

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Further Reading:

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[1]  ‘Roo cull eases pressure on reserves‘, by Margaret Burin,  ABC Local, 20110628, ^http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/06/28/3255317.htm?site=canberra

‘Nearly 2,500 kangaroos were killed during the three week cull in Canberra’s nature reserves….’
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[2]   ‘Kangaroo Shooting: the largest land-based commercial wildlife slaughter in the world‘, by Animals Australia, ^http://www.animalsaustralia.org/issues/kangaroo_shooting.php

‘Each night in remote areas of the Australian outback thousands of kangaroos graze peacefully, stand up on hearing an approaching vehicle, stare into a blinding spotlight, and are shot for their meat and skins.

The commercial kangaroo kill ‘quota’ for 2009 (the number permitted to be killed) is just under 4 million kangaroos….’

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[3]  ‘New Report Exposes the Grubby Reality of the Kangaroo Industry‘, by Animals Australia, ^http://www.animalsaustralia.org/issues/kangaroo_shooting.php

‘A new report ‘A Shot in the Dark – a report on kangaroo harvesting’, commissioned by Animal Liberation (NSW) was released in May 2009

outlines problems of hygiene in the kangaroo meat industry, sustainability of kangaroo populations and animal welfare.  The report estimates some ‘440,000 dependent young kangaroos are either clubbed to

death or left to starve after their mothers are killed’.  Read Report: ^http://www.kangaroo-protection-coalition.com/shotinthedark.html

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[4]  ‘Australia officials want to kill 3,000 kangaroos‘, by Rob Griffith, Associated Press, 20070514,^http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18656748/ns/world_news-

 

asia_pacific/t/australia-officials-want-kill-kangaroos/#.Tqb-pbKLNhU

‘CANBERRA, Australia — Authorities said Monday they want to shoot more than 3,000 kangaroos on the fringes of Australia’s capital, noting the animals were growing in population and eating through the grassy habitats of endangered species.’

A cull of about 800 kangaroos in the Canberra area in 2004 also brought a large outcry from animal activists.  In 2003, authorities ordered the killing of 6,500 eastern grays at the Puckapunyal military base, 62 miles north of Melbourne. A year earlier,

 

a similar shooting operation killed more than 20,000 kangaroos on the base.’

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[5]   ‘The life and death of Kangaroos‘, by Ray Drew May 2008, ^http://www.kangaroolives.com/inhumanity.htm

‘On Monday May 19, 2008, government contractors started killing the kangaroos on a former naval base in Canberra, Australia. By May 29 they (514) were dead. This, in a diary in reverse, is their story and the fight to save them. ALL OF THE KANGAROOS IN THE PHOTOGRAPH ABOVE ARE NOW DEAD. THEY WERE NEEDLESSLY KILLED IN THE LAST WEEK OF MAY 2008, following a world wide campaign to save them….’

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