Myanmar wildlife pays the price for Chinese demand

MONG LA, Myanmar (Reuters) - If the market of Mong La is anything to go by, the remaining wild elephants, tigers and bears in Myanmar's forests are being hunted down slowly and sold to China.

Nestled in hills in a rebel-controlled enclave on the Chinese border, the "Las Vegas in the jungle" casino town is clearly branching out from narcotics and prostitution into the illegal wildlife business.

Besides row upon row of fruit, vegetables and cheap plastic sandals, the market offers a grisly array of animal parts, as well as many live specimens, to the hundreds of Chinese tourists who flock across the border each day.

Bear paws and gall bladders, elephant tusks and chunks of hide, tiger and leopard skins, as well as big cat teeth and deer horn are all openly on display next to crudely welded cages of live macaques, cobras, Burmese star tortoises and pangolins.

The live creatures, some of them on the IUCN Conservation Union's "Red List" of critically endangered species, are destined for the cooking pots of exotic animal restaurants in China's neighbouring Yunnan province, or further afield.

Food stalls in the market openly advertise dishes of pangolin or black bear.

The body parts -- some of which will not be real, given the ease with which a pig bladder can be passed off as that of a bear -- will either be ground up for traditional medicine, worn as amulets or simply hung on the wall as trophies.

Most of the specimens come from the former Burma's still vast tracts of virgin forest, wildlife experts believe, although some will have come from as far away as India to be trafficked into China by well-organised criminal gangs.

"Burma is being raped in terms of its natural resources -- trees, plants and animals. They've got to get a hold of the situation quickly before it becomes a barren ground," said Steven Galster, Bangkok-based director of the Wildlife Alliance.