Traditional Chinese Medicine News

On Monday, June 13, Singapore crushed -- for the first time -- nearly 8 metric tons of confiscated elephant ivory worth about 13 million Singapore dollars (~$10 million). The ivory…

Wildlife trafficking is a global problem, revealed the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in their first-ever World Wildlife Crime Report. Released late last month, the report finds,…

Update: 22 people have been charged with wildlife trafficking as of June 3. More dead animals, including a bear and a leopard, have been discovered and removed from the temple.…

The world’s most endangered cetacean is quickly inching towards extinction. In 1997, about 570 vaquita porpoises (Phocoena sinus) were estimated to occur in the world. Now, only about 60 vaquitas…

Tomorrow, Kenya will set fire to more than 105 metric tons of elephant tusks, representing several thousand dead elephants. This ivory burn is believed to be the largest-ever destruction of…

Pangolins, the armor-clad mammals found in Asia and Africa, are perhaps best known for being the world’s most trafficked animal. Every year, thousands of pangolins get illegally hunted for their…

An illegal trade in the swim bladder of the rare totoabas has placed both these fish and the world’s smallest and rarest marine mammal -- the vaquita -- at risk of extinction,…

On December 31, 2015, Peru’s Ministry of Production passed a resolution banning fishing of manta rays, according to a release by WildAid, a nonprofit organization. The regulation also mandates, among…

Some scientists are saying conventional bear relocation may be doing more harm than good in northern India.

WARNING: graphic image below. White rhino in South Africa. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler. South Africa has surpassed last year's grisly record for slaughtered rhinos—1,004—more than a month before the…

Confiscated tiger parts and suspects. Photo by the WCS Wildlife Crimes Unit. Two online merchants of tiger parts have been arrested in Indonesia. The bust was the result of a…

Exports of now-black market industry net $30M per year Writing this from a hotel room in Indonesia’s second-largest city, Surabaya, I realize that I am filled with trepidation as I…

Police in Langkat, North Sumatra, Indonesia, seized 55 porcupines from smugglers preparing to ship the animals to China. Three suspects were detained during last week's operation, while their accomplices remain…

Growing population and traditional mindset fueling demand for wild turtles, driving some species towards extinction For thousands of years turtles have been used in Chinese traditional medicine to treat a…

WARNING: graphic image below. Last week, visitors in Kruger National Park came on a horrifying sight of the poaching trade: a rhino, still alive, with its horn and part of…

Since the first of the year, South Africa has lost 146 rhinos to poachers or approximately 2.5 rhinos every day. This is a slight dip from last year's poaching rate,…

In another sign that Africa's poaching crisis has gotten completely out of control, South Africa lost 1,004 rhinos to poachers last year. According to the numbers released today by the…

The rhinoceros is one of the largest and most iconic animals to roam the earth. However, poaching for their horn, erroneously believed to have medicinal value, has led the IUCN…

Raoul du Toit will be speaking at the Wildlife Conservation Network Expo in San Francisco on October 12th, 2013. With its collapsed economy, entrenched poverty, and political tremors, one would…

Six men have been sentenced to a year in jail after being convicted of smuggling 150 pangolins in peninsular Malaysia, reports Annamiticus. The men were also given fines totaling over…

In another sign that the rhino poaching crisis has gone out-of-control, Kenyan officials announced late last night that a pregnant rhino was poached in Nairobi National Park, which sits on…

Warning: some photos may be disturbing or graphic. In a single night in March, a band of heavily-armed, horse-riding poachers slaughtered 89 elephants in southern Chad, thirty of which were…

Demand for scales, meat, and even fetuses of pangolins have pushed all eight species of this unique mammalian order—Pholidota—toward extinction, according to the world's first ever pangolin conference with the…

A new study in the open access journal PLoS ONE estimates that manta rays are worth $140 million a year in tourism across 23 countries, significantly outweighing the worth of…

Prince Charles has warned that criminal gangs are turning to animal poaching, an unprecedented slaughter of species that can only be stopped by waging war on the perpetrators, in the…

Rhino poachers have killed 232 rhinos during 2013 so far in South Africa, reports Annamiticus, which averages out to 2.1 a day. The country has become a flashpoint for rhino…

Koos Hermanus would rather not give names to the lions he breeds. So here, behind a 2.4-meter high electric fence, is 1R, a three-and-a-half-year-old male, who consumes 5kg of meat…

What do you do when you're smuggling 22,000 pounds of an endangered species on your boat? Answer: crash into a protected coral reef in the Philippines. Last Monday a Chinese…

World Pangolin Day is celebrated this weekend: Saturday, February 16th, 2013 Last year tens-of-thousands of elephants and hundreds of rhinos were butchered to feed the growing appetite of the illegal…

Sun bear in a cage in Indonesia. Photo by: Chris R. Shepherd/TRAFFIC Southeast Asia. In the forests of Asia, bears are being captured. These captives will be sent to bear…