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Police say pair confess to killing beast after being approached by Karen man

Phetchaburi police have asked the provincial court for permission to detain without bail two suspects accused of killing an elephant in Kaeng Krachan National Park while they search for the person who hired them and the intended buyer of the elephant's ivory and other parts.

After a 9am press conference at police headquarters, suspected wild-elephant poachers Lukkaew Chan-upatham, 28, and Chan Kuanphu, 28, were taken for interrogation at Phetchaburi Police Office at 11am.

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Police are gathering evidence against a tiger zoo they suspect is the source of 400kg of tiger meat found in a house in Bangkok's Min Buri district on Saturday.

Pol Col Kiattipong Khawsamang, deputy commander of the Natural Resources and Environmental Crime Suppression Division, said police believed the carcasses of two male tigers found at the house came from a tiger zoo in Chon Buri's Si Racha district, but they have not yet obtained evidence.

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Officials today seized the freshly butchered bodies of several tigers and arrested 5 people in a house at 64/5 Soi Payasuren 12, Bang Chan, Klong Samwa.

The tigers were being prepared to be stuffed when concerned locals reported bags of suspicious looking meat and a tiger head in plastic bags at the address.

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Natural Resources and Environment Minister Preecha Rengsomboonsuk has vowed to solve within a year issues related to Thailand's elephants.

Preecha planned to build a DNA database on 4,000 or so domesticated elephants in order to stop people taking over identity papers of deceased pachyderms and replacing them with elephants taken in the wild.

After a Wednesday press conference to discuss the February 35 elephant fair at the Elephant Conservation Centre in Lampang's Hang Chat district, Preecha said he would contact the Interior Ministry, which is in charge of issuing elephant identification papers, for information about the beasts living in camps and elsewhere nationwide.

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Are pangolins being farmed for China’s traditional medicine industry?

Project Pangolin has uncovered disturbing information which strongly suggests that “medicinal use” pangolin farms are already operating in China.

The emergence of pangolin farming may help provide insight into why the world is losing its pangolins at such an alarming rate (an estimated 40,000 killed in 2011) and why China’s appetite for pangolins continues to increase.

Project pangolin discovered pangolin farming is promoted as an investment opportunity due to continued high demand from the traditional Chinese medicine industry, and we also located photos and videos of a pangolin farm on a Chinese business website.

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Researchers working in Northern Myanmar have captured the first photographs of the recently discovered Myanmar snub-nosed monkey.

Announced today in Yangon, Myanmar, a joint team from Fauna & Flora International (FFI), Biodiversity And Nature Conservation Association (BANCA) and People Resources and Conservation Foundation (PRCF), caught pictures of the monkey on camera traps placed in the high, forested mountains of Kachin state, bordering China.

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Thailand’s wild elephants are at an increasingly higher risk of extinction than ever before despite being officially protected. On average three of the giant animals have been hunted down and killed in each of the past two years, according to statistics from the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation.

The carcasses of four male pachyderms were found only a few days after the New Year in the western province of Phetchaburi's Kaeng Krachan district, where the incident took place close to the road. Hunters shot the animals with a powerful gun in their foreheads, while destroying  evidence by cutting out the front of the skulls, burning bullet holes, and the elephant corpses themselves. Ivory tusks, tails, and sexual organs were taken.

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Ivory poachers have apparently slaughtered at least one elephant from Phetchaburi's Kaeng Krajan National Park.

After a 3pm report of the discovery of a carcass in tambon Pateng, police, park officials and villagers rushed to the scene near the Krarang 3 Reservoir and found an elephant burned on a pyre of rubber tyres.

Officials suspect the hunters took the tusks and then tried to conceal the crime.

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For the past five years, Museum scientists, in collaboration with the Panthera Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting big cats in the wild, have been tracking tigers, lions, jaguars, and snow leopards through DNA in scat, or fecal specimens, gathered in the field. Now, through a generous grant from the Leslie and Daniel Ziff Foundation, the Global Felid Conservation Genetics Program can accelerate the pace of this important work by expanding the program’s laboratory component.

“We’re very excited about it,” says George Amato, director of the Museum’s Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics and the Center for Conservation Genetics, which is responsible for sequencing the big cats’ DNA and analyzing the results. “In terms of scale, it is now the largest project of its kind in the world.”

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A growing number of Japanese environmental and consumer groups are joining in protest against the use of disaster recovery funds to subsidise the loss-making whaling fleet.

The government recently gave the whalers 2.28 billion yen ($28.5 million) as part of a special budget for recovery from the March 11 triple disaster.

Much of the extra funding will go towards security forces for the whaling fleet, which left Japan yesterday for the Antarctic, where conflict is expected with Sea Shepherd activists.

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Sales of such products are forbidden – but buyers turned up in droves and uniformed police were conspicuous by their absence

One-year-old cubs at Xiongsen bear and tiger park where tigers are bred to produce tiger bone wine. Photograph: Sinopix/Rex Features

Is China serious about ending the trade in tigers and other endangered animals?

The question posed itself last Saturday as I sat at an auction in Beijing watching the hammer go down on cases of spirits and tonics fortified with tiger, rhino horn and pangolin.

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TRAFFIC in Enforcement, Mammals - rhinos, Smuggling in Africa, Smuggling to Asia

Forensic analysis of the 33 rhino horns and 885 ivory pieces seized in Hong Kong could provide vital clues as to their origin Click image to enlarge © Hong Kong Customs & Excise Cambridge, UK, 16th November 2011—Tuesday’s seizure by Hong Kong Customs of 33 rhino horns, 758 ivory chopsticks and 127 ivory bracelets concealed inside a container shipped to Hong Kong from Cape Town, South Africa, provides a unique opportunity to gain insights into the criminal syndicates trafficking wildlife goods between Africa and Asia, according to TRAFFIC.

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The conservation community mourns this week as the extinction of the Javan rhino subspecies (Rhinoceros sondaicus annamiticus) was confirmed.

DNA testing determined that a female rhino, found shot to death in Vietnam’s Cat Tien National Park in 2010 with her horn missing, was the very last of her kind.

A report released last week by WWF noted that Vietnam’s illegal wildlife trade is “rampant” and there was a glaring lack of political will and very little, if any, accountability for the protection of its critically endangered rhino population.

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Increasing pollution of the Yangtze River and the threat this poses to the finless porpoise is also a warning for a third of the nation's population that depends on these waters. Wang Ru reports.

Growing up in Huanggang, a city by the Yangtze River in Central China's Hubei province, He Dan had heard from elderly fishermen about a rare fish, dubbed the "river pig" by locals.

The fishermen described them as shy animals that often chased their boats, making a whistling sound. However, the term "river pig" was not really appropriate for the clever animal, that fishermen recall leaping out of the water in pairs or as a group.

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An elephant conservation centre in Nakhon Ratchasima gives blind children a rare chance to get up, close and personal with these animals

Tall, dark, handsome and always smiling, 39-year-old Alongkot Chukaew, on first glance, looks like any other happy-go-lucky guy. That is, until he is with his elephants.

A blind student feels the elephant’s tusk and skin, along with elephant conservationist Alongkot Chukaew. PHOTOS: YINGYONG UN-ANONGRAK

His personality immediately changes once he's with his elephants at the Thai Elephant Centre for Conservation in Nakhon Ratchasima. He gently touches them, smiles at them, murmurs in their ear and even sings to them, no matter if there's an audience present or not.

"Elephants can be human's best friends. I love them, just as my mother does."

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An endangered Philippine eagle, one of only a few hundred left in the world, has been shot dead, a conservation group that had previously rescued the bird said Friday.

The two-year-old female raptor was found last month with a bullet embedded in its carcass in a forest in the southern island of Mindanao, according to Dennis Salvador, head of the Philippine Eagle Foundation.

Villagers who found the carcass -- which had been tagged with a radio transmitter by the foundation -- turned it over to Salvador's group this week, he told AFP.

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Genetic analysis of rhino dung samples revealed that there was only one individual left in Vietnam

The WWF and the International Rhino Foundation said the country's last Javan rhino was probably killed by poachers, as its horn had been cut off.

A critically endangered species of rhino is now extinct in Vietnam, according to a report by conservation groups.

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Thailand is witnessing an ever-increasing legal and illegal exploitation of local wildlife and marine life

Dolphins have been kept in captivity in Thailand since 1986. The first wild pink dolphin was caught and kept at Laem Singh in Chanthaburi by Mr Vichai Wattanapong, which later became Oasis Sea World. But it wasn't until recent years that interest in new dolphinaria has developed within Thailand.

Several attempts to start up aquariums containing wild-caught dolphins in Phuket and Koh Samui did not eventuate. One involved a Danish scientist who tried and failed to win the support of local politicians and businessmen to start a dolphinarium in Phuket in order to treat autistic children, three years ago.

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Environmentalists have warned the Thai government that newly proposed dolphinariums, including the Pattaya Dolphin World and Safari World, featuring dolphins caught in the wild, threaten both the health of wild dolphin populations and Thailand's reputation as a dolphin-safe country.

Ric O’Barry, a leading global dolphin activist whose efforts to save dolphins is documented in the Oscar-winning film, The Cove, holds ‘Stop’ and ‘Keep Out Except Persons Concerned’ signs as he arrives at Taiji Community Centre in Taiji, western Japan. The tiny seaside town in Japan whose annual dolphin slaughter gained notoriety through the gruesome film hosted an unprecedented meeting between local officials and foreign environmentalists. But the carefully organised event was given a jolt just before its scheduled start when O’Barry said he would not participate due to ‘severe restrictions on the Japanese and international media’ and headed off on the short walk to the ocean cove where the town conducts its dolphin butchery. 

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Local prostitutes conscripted by gangs to pose as hunters are at the centre of an alleged Southeast Asian smuggling network that South African authorities are scrambling to stop

• Fetching US$2,500 (76,700 baht) for 100g in some Southeast Asian countries, it comes as no surprise to the man tasked with trying to stem the international illegal trade in rhino horns that it is now a major organised crime.

"At the moment rhino horn is worth a lot more than heroin or cocaine," says John Sellar, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) chief enforcement officer based in Geneva.

Some estimates put the price of rhino horns as high as 2.85 million baht per kilogramme, but many conservation bodies are unwilling to quote prices for fear of increasing trade in the endangered species.