Thursday December 25, 2008
Caught with bear meat in fridge
By HAH FOONG LIAN
IPOH: A rubber tapper has been detained for allegedly poaching an endangered Malayan sun bear in the wild for his own consumption.
The 56-year-old tapper, who has a wild boar trading permit for the past three years, was arrested following a tip-off to the Selangor Wildlife and National Parks Department.
Grisly find: Shabrina and Perak Wildlife and National Parks Department officer Sufian Ahmad (left) checking the carcass of the sun bear at the department’s office in Ipoh yesterday. Perak Wildlife and National Parks Department director Shabrina Shariff said her officers raided the rubber tapper’s home at Jalan Ketoyong in Tanjung Malim at 11am on Tuesday after receiving information from her Selangor counterpart.
“We found the head and four limbs of the protected animal in a refrigerator.
“There was also 15kg of the animal meat stored in a plastic bag in the freezer,” she said at her office here yesterday.
She added that pellet marks from a shotgun could be seen on the animal’s head.
Shabrina said she believed that the Malayan sun bear was an adult animal weighing some 95kg but its sex could not be determined because all its organs were removed.
The suspect, she said, had told her officers that he had poached the endangered sun bear for his own consumption.
Explaining that the sun bear was a protected animal, Shabrina added that the general belief was that the sun bear was used as an aphrodisiac for men and that its meat fetched some RM200 per kg.
She said her officers had lodged a police report and the suspect would be prosecuted under the Wildlife Protection Act 1972/76.
The case would be mentioned in court next year, she added.
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