Animal Farm

Mong La, Special Region 4, Burma The man keeps seven bears in seven small cages beside his house. Every day, he sprays the black-haired creatures with a hose and feeds them their sloppy gruel, which they lap up fiercely. He says that the bears are for rich Chinese people, who like to show off by roasting them at weddings. When a Chinese person puts in an order, the man will shoot one of his bears and have the meat transported across the border--in fact, through a hole in the border fence that stands about 20 feet away. As the man speaks, I can see people passing back and forth between China and Burma, stepping right through the hole, which is just about big enough for two people and one disassembled bear to pass through simultaneously.Mong La is the unofficial capital of one of the eastern independent provinces of Burma, an area bordering China's Yunnan Province with a name straight out of an old Bond film: Special Region 4. The region, governed semi- autonomously by the local National Democracy Alliance Army, used to be a nexus for the Asian drug trade, producing 9,000 kilograms of raw opium per year. In 1997, however, at a ceremony attended by former speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, Special Region 4's leaders declared it drug-free. To encourage legal commerce, the generals began catering to a new addiction: gambling. They turned Mong La, which used to be a modest Buddhist village, into a mini Las Vegas. Gaudy casinos, discos, and hotels sprang up, Eastern European prostitutes flocked in, and someone established a Thai transvestite revue known informally as "The Ladyboy Show." Money followed: Some 600,000 Chinese tourists swarmed over the border annually, bringing along several billion dollars worth of yuan. But the boom soon busted. Reportedly, the beloved relative of a Chinese official lost $100,000 in the casinos and returned home humiliated. Strings were pulled, troops were called out, and the army began policing the border. Mong La's cash economy was devastated. I visited Mong La with a photographer friend earlier this year, around the time of the tenth anniversary of the drug ban, while researching a book on elephants. With the gamblers out and the tourist industry all but dead, Mong La is a ghost town. The hotel stinks, literally. "The Ladyboy Show" is gone, as are the European prostitutes. The flashing lights no longer flash, and the palatial casinos are closed. I saw a dead cat floating in the scummy green pond of the once-resplendent Mong La amusement park, Mongla National Paradise. But, even without the big-time gambling and opium, Mong La still manages to get by. As before, it subsists on illicit wares for Chinese visitors. Instead of sex, gambling, or drugs, however, Mong La now relies on a different resource: endangered animals and their various parts, sold for alimentary and medicinal purposes. Walking through the markets of Mong La, my friend and I were confronted on all sides by animal penises. At a prosperous pharmacy, for example, a woman showed us deer penises gift-wrapped in red-and-gold paper. "For the man energy, " she explained helpfully. The pharmacy also sold tiger wine--steeping ginger root and tiger bones in 20-gallon fish tanks. The concoction is bottled in fancy glass flasks and sold to Chinese visitors. Bear gall, too, is renowned for its healing properties: According to a pharmacy pamphlet, bear gall will "protect the liver and brighten the eye, clear up and remove evil heat, diminish inflammation and relieve pain, benefit the gall and remove stone." Pharmacists at a Mong La "bear farm" embed catheters into their 50 live, caged bears. Every day, a technician walks from bear to bear, while the hungry animals are lured by food to the narrow end of their cages. Once a bear is trapped and immobilized, the technician, crouching under the cage, inserts a syringe into the catheter and milks away the gall. All of this takes place under a wall mural showing wild bears playing gaily in a forest. Actually, the animal business works as a giant vacuum cleaner hoovering through the forests of northeastern Burma. Wild elephants are long vanished; tigers are about gone. Bears are in danger of extinction--one trader told me that wild-caught bears are no longer coming into the markets. The trade is as indiscriminate and wide-ranging as it is illegal: Both China and Burma have signed the international treaty known as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which is meant to protect threatened species, such as tigers and bears, from trade across international borders. Beyond the serious biodiversity and moral reasons for such legislation is an equally alarming public health reason. On a table in the Mong La meat market, I noticed a pair of dead civet cats, one of the animals responsible for the spread of sars to humans in 2002. But, even knowing all of these larger ramifications, what really disturbed me in Mong La was the simple cruelty of it all. One evening toward the end of our stay, we wandered up an avenue creatively known as Live Animal Restaurants Street, where restaurants displayed their live menus in cages outside: fluffy brown-and-white slow lorises, cobras, fat blinking owls, a baby raccoon, a tiny rhesus monkey on a chain, a writhing monitor lizard, several chubby white dogs, large toads in plastic bags, an eagle. At the last restaurant, a waitress was sweeping the sidewalk out front. We bent down to look at the curbside menu, including four white puppies, and, in another cage, a diamond-scaled pangolin trembling and hugging a turtle. As we stood there, the woman began jabbing at the pangolin with her plastic-tipped broom handle through the wires of its cage, as if she intended to kill it on the spot. "Stop it. Stop it!" I said, but she didn't understand English and, in any event, didn't care. It took a physical act--grabbing the broom--to finally make her stop.

By Dale Peterson; Dale Peterson's latest book is Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man.