Thai post office nabs tiger skin shipment

9 Jan 2012

Thai customs officers intercepted a consignment of tiger skins and bones at Bangkok’s central sorting office last week. Officials swooped on the four boxes of big cat parts after receiving a tip-off.

Each of the five kilogramme boxes was said to contain a tiger’s skull, skin and some bones. Royal Thai Customs boss Somchai Poolsawasdi said his investigators believed the boxes had been shipped from Indonesia and would have fetched millions of Baht on the black-market.

They were in transit for Mae Sai, on Thailand’s northern border with Myanmar, and would probably have been dispatched onwards to China. There is a large market in China for wildlife products which are used for ornamentation or medicines.

Mr Poolsawasdi said the style in which the tiger remains had been processed and packaged indicated they would have been used as decorations. Many people in China believe medicines created from different rare species cure a multitude of ailments and also act as aphrodisiacs.

A spokesperson for anti-wildlife smuggling organisation Freeland put the value of the tiger parts at $US60,000 (1.9 million Baht) and said that the interception of the illicit shipment would be a blow for tiger poachers. Tim Redford added that poaching and smuggling was one of the principle reasons wild Asian tigers were facing extinction.

Mr Redford said that while stopping this smuggled tiger part load was praiseworthy, it was vital that other tigers did not end up in pieces as there was now only three per cent of the amount of the big cats left when compared to 100 years ago.

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