Except that the report is blaming China for their turtle
decline but fails to provide any evidence for that claim. They are
not targeting overseas Chinese restaurants but China the country.
Do you see the point?
Yes and if you think this is another propaganda please look at
the numbers and numerious article on this topics.
National Geographics
International
Turtle Soup
As Chinese
turtles become increasingly rare, Parham said, farmers have been
turning to non-native species. Sliders and snapping turtles from
the United States are a growing part of Asia's farming
trade.
Commercial-scale
harvest of wild turtles in the U.S. for export to China is a
growing phenomenon, subject to only minimal regulations in many
areas, he noted.
"Some of these
turtles inevitably escape into the wild, potentially spreading
disease or competing with native Chinese species," Parham
said.
Impacts are
also expected at the other end of the supply chain.
The nonprofit
World Chelonian Trust documented exports of more than 700,000
wild-caught U.S. turtles from 2003 to 2005. The majority went to
Asian turtle farms and food markets.
China's
appetite for turtle soup has already reduced populations of
Maryland's state reptile, the diamondback terrapin. The state
legislature is now considering bills that would permanently ban
commercial terrapin harvests.
"This is
definitely a growing trend, and we are very concerned about it,"
van Dijk said.
Parham also
points to a more recent example from Texas. As reported in several
newspapers, a local businessman has been recruiting assistants to
help capture 300,000 wild turtles a year for export to
Asia.
Data from
Country
Total Shipments
Largest Shipment
Total Animals
Average Shipment Size
China
129
5 shipments of 100,000 Trachemys scripta
elegans
1,365,687
10,587
Hong
Kong
1,392
250,000 Trachemys scripta
elegans
13,625,673
9,788
Taiwan
465
200,000 Trachemys scripta
elegans
6,238,300
13,416
A week or
so into a new job in Beijing not many months ago, young American
journalist Wendy Lee joined friends for a meal at a popular
restaurant in the Chinese capital.
The
California native's Chinese was a bit rusty, so when time came to
order her meal she let one of her friends pick the dish.
"The waiter
came back carrying a live turtle in a bag and showed it to us," Lee
recalled last week during a gathering of journalists.
The turtle
was to be the main course of the group dinner, she
learned.
Later, in
Hong Kong, Lee discovered a popular dessert, often sold on the
street, that "looks like brown Jello, but doesn't taste like it,"
has ground turtle shell as one of its ingredients.
Turtle, as
Lee came to realize during her stay in China, is a hugely popular
dish in this largest of Asian nations.
And that
popularity coupled with a thriving China's integration into the
world economy has created trouble for Texas turtles.
Many of the turtles being
consumed in China today come from Texas waterways. And that drain
on Texas turtle population has wildlife managers, biologists and
others with interest in natural resources concerned about the
impact of the nearly unregulated harvest on the state's wild
turtles.
Demand for
turtles as food has stripped China of its wild turtle populations.
So, while commercial turtle farms are springing up in the country,
much of the demand for food turtles is being met through importing
turtles.
Texas has
become a source of that supply.
For the
past several years, tens of thousands of Texas turtles have
annually been collected from the wild and shipped, live, to the Far
East where they've ended up on plates.
According
to admittedly imprecise data collected by the Texas Parks and
Wildlife Department through its eight-year-old non-game permit
system, an average of about 95,000 wild-caught Texas turtles
annually are being collected or purchased by dealers.
Some of
those turtles — diamondback terrapins, box turtles — are destined
for the domestic and international pet trade.
But the
majority — common snapping turtles, softshells, musk and mud and
map turtles and red-eared sliders — are fated for the food
market.
Data
collected by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which monitors
export of wildlife, documented 256,638 Texas turtles exported
through the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, alone, from
2002-05.
The
majority of those quarter-million turtles were "food" turtles.This
development of the turtle trade caught Texas wildlife officials
somewhat by surprise.
"We are
moving into an area where there is a demand — a seemingly unlimited
demand — for a resource that wasn't there, before," Matt Wagner,
director of TPWD's wildlife diversity program, told the Texas Parks
and Wildlife Commission at an April 4 meeting.
Turtles —
with the exception of a handful of species, such as sea turtles,
designated as endangered or threatened — fall into the broad
category of "non-game" wildlife under Texas law.
And Texas
law long has put few, if any, restrictions on taking of non-game
wildlife.