High-end Laos resort serves up illegal wildlife for Chinese tourists
Lying on the banks of the Mekong River, the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone is a large resort city catering especially to Chinese tourists and run by the Hong Kong-based Kings Romans Group. The luxury casino provides the main draw, as gambling is illegal in China; but the resort also includes a shooting range, more than 70 shops and restaurants, gardens, spas, and a bustling trade in endangered species’ parts, at least according to a new report by the Environment Investigation Agency (EIA) titled Sin City.
The report calls the zone a “lawless playground” with “not even a pretence of enforcement”. Indeed, even in a region of the world where wildlife trafficking is rampant and consumption of endangered species common, the report’s findings are shocking. Customers “can openly buy endangered species products".
Eat a bear, drink a tiger
At the God of Fortune restaurant, for example, undercover investigators viewed a live, caged bear cub and python – both of which were “available to eat on request,” according to the report. The menu also openly included such fare as bear paw, monitor lizards, pangolins, geckos, and a variety of snakes and turtles. And one could wash all that down with a jar of purported tiger bone wine. At another restaurant, Fantasy Garrett, one can order something dubbed “sauté tiger meat”. The restaurant also displayed a large aquarium, but not filled with fish. Inside, was a fully mounted tiger skeleton with a sign advertising the restaurant’s tiger wine, where crushed tiger bones are added or steeped in rice wine.
Even the casino brandishes wildlife products, namely ivory. Investigators found “carved whole tusks, bangles, beaded bracelets, pendants and other trinkets” openly-displayed where gamblers hoped for luck.
Echoing Piff’s research, Debbie Banks, the Head of the EIA’s Tiger Campaign, said “wealth and status are definitely the drivers of demand”.
Golden Triangle: Drugs to wildlife trafficking
The Golden Triangle is a region in Southeast Asia criss-crossing three countries (Laos, Burma, and Thailand) and known for its massive opium and heroin production with a number of feuding drug lords to go with it. But the region has also become a tourist draw.
Just a two-hour drive from China, tourists don’t have to feel like they’ve left home. Signs are in Mandarin, yuan is the main currency, and most workers are Chinese, according to the EIA. The place even runs on Beijing time.
Moral conundrums
Even if governments step up the fight against wildlife trafficking, there is still the problem of seemingly insatiable demand in the region. A demand so great that today China has more tigers in captive farms – bred solely for killing – than there are wild tigers on the planet: around 5,000 versus 3,200.
But it’s hardly just tigers. Experts estimate that somewhere between 22,000-35,000 elephants were slaughtered annually for their tusks in Africa in the last few years. Also, four of the world’s six rhino species are on the precipice of extinction, pushed, in part, by current or historic demand for their horn.
TheGuardian (Full Story)
These stories annoy me to no end. Be it some shooting range in Cambodia where tourists can shoot animals for fun or some luxury resort with prostitutes and gambling (possible human trafficking elements). I just cant comprehend the appeal of these resorts.
