See The Last Clouded Leopard: WildAid’s Wildlife Conservation Goes After The Poachers

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Outside Magazine May 2004

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See the Last Clouded Leopard (Cont.)

GOOD THING, THEN that in Southeast Asia, suppliers don't keep a very low profile.

One day last September, Galster and Tim Redford, director of WildAid's Surviving Together community-outreach project, decided to check out Tachileik, a bazaar just across Thailand's northern border with Myanmar that's infamous for species trafficking. Myanmar is one of China's biggest wildlife suppliers, but to find what they were after, the two men had to wade through long rows of open-air stalls jam-packed with knockoff Nikes and Nikons, pirated gaming CDs and DVDs, mountains of Jockey shorts, porn videos, fishing rods, polyester nightgowns, and fake tiger penises carved from wood. Soon enough, Redford spotted some actual wildlife.

"That's a golden cat skin, and that looks like a clouded leopard skin with a very unusual melanic coat variation. That's pretty damn rare," he said, pointing to a five-foot-long piece of soft beige fur with bold, cloud-shaped gray spots. Because of poaching and habitat destruction, the clouded leopard is endangered all across Asia; according to the Red List, there are fewer than 10,000 of the animals left on earth. Standing in Tachileik, it was not hard to understand why. In a country where the average per capita income is $300, this skin could bring in about $114.

When Galster happened upon a stall with three adult clouded leopard skins on display, he knew he was on to something. The shop girl said her parents owned the stand and kept several dozen more skins back at their house, but that she was unwilling to take a stranger there. An hour later, after inspecting every lane in the market, Galster found the house on his own.

The ground floor was dark and musky, with floor-to-ceiling glass cabinets crowded with 18th- and 19th-century British colonial china and hand-painted wooden bowls piled next to necklaces of yellowing animal teeth. Galster spotted a fearsomely sharp horn from a serow—an endangered woolly-coated wild mountain goat—and Redford offered the family $150 for it, but they weren't selling. They could get much more from gamers who use the horns to make spurs for illegal cockfighting, another piece of information for Galster to add to his jigsaw puzzle.

Because Galster already had spoken to the shopkeeper's daughter, who was now there too, the woman agreed to show him the rest of her stash. She sent the girl up a rickety flight of wooden steps to the family's quarters. A few minutes later, she came back down staggering under the weight of a large plastic box, which she dropped behind the counter. The stench of mothballs enveloped the store as she pried off the lid, revealing a stack of carefully packed skins.

Normally unflappable, Galster looked painfully surprised as he removed the first skin and gently unfolded its limp head and paws on the counter. There were 30 clouded leopard skins in the box, and the merchant volunteered that she received a similar shipment of 30 skins every two months, selling about one skin every other day. "We used to think the traders always had the same skins up all the time, year after year. But she's selling 15 per month, and this is just a small store," Galster whispered. "Even if she is the main dealer in Tachileik, which I doubt, that's a huge amount."

Galster told the woman he would return when he figured out how many skins he wanted to order, then he and Redford crossed back to their hotel on the Thai side for a postmortem. He seemed depressed and distracted. Tachileik had made him realize that WildAid needs to ramp up its Asian operation substantially if it's going to be more than a short-term offensive in the war on poaching.

"This is bad," Galster concluded. "The fact that she was selling clouded leopard skins means they are running out of tiger skins in Burma, because when one species is knocked out, they go on and knock out the next species down. You don't see people every day with animal skins on their floors or up on their walls, so you're not so likely to add the numbers up. I think for once we have been underestimating. The situation with skins is much worse than I thought."

For the first time in a long while, Galster's vaunted intelligence had been wrong. The world's endangered species might yet be protected from black-market traffickers and mom-and-pop dealers, but that day seemed a long way off. He sank back onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling. "It's not about how long you live," he said. "It's about what you get done."

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