12 November 2015•Update: 12 November 2015
By Max Constant
BANGKOK
Police have apprehended two men smuggling a tiger's bloody carcass and its individually boxed internal organs to the Thai capital from the country's border with Myanmar.
The Bangkok Post reported Thursday that Niphon Suksombot and Luethai Diawchaoren told police the shipment was bound for Bangkok restaurant dinner tables.
Their car was intercepted at a checkpoint while travelling from Mae Sot -- a city near the Myanmar border -- to the provincial capital of Tak.
The tiger's body was found in a black bag while its organs were packed in Styrofoam boxes filled with ice.
Thailand was once a major supplier of protected animal parts to China, but having butchered most of its own it has since become a transit center, where middlemen buy and sell wildlife from neighboring countries.
End users are often consumers in China who hold traditional beliefs that parts of wild animals -- rhino horns, bear paws, bear gallbladders, tiger meat or tiger bones -- can be used as alternative medicines to improve health and enhance sexual power. However, some restaurants -- mostly located in Bangkok's Chinatown -- also offer exotic dishes such as pickled vipers or shark fin soup.
With the sale of non-native species in the domestic market not covered by Thai law, police have to prove that they were illegally imported in order to take punitive action.
“This loophole is clearly what illegal wildlife dealers find so attractive about Thailand," Chris R. Shepherd, regional director for Southeast Asia at Traffic -- an anti wildlife smuggling NGO -- wrote in a study published Dec. 2014.
"It is the reason why Thailand is a major hub for the global illegal wildlife trade."
