China: Tainted Food

Everything you’ve always wanted to know about tainted food? Well, maybe not everything. Tainted food does, after all, have a long and storied history in China. Ever since the country opened up to foreigners, the stories and scandals have been flying out like cardboard-filled hot buns (more on that later). But let’s get started at […]

Africa: Bounty hunting

Namibia is home to almost 2,000 endangered black rhinos, and in order to finance conservation efforts they have been auctioning off permits to hunt one of the animals. They auction off 5 permits a year, and hunting permits have long been a source of income for Namibian conservation efforts. The most recent permit was auctioned […]

China: Leizhou, where they butcher tigers

Something I recall having seen on Xinhua (新华网) last year (2014) was a report of tigers being butchered on the street in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, in a town called Leizhou (雷州市). The pictures you can find if you search 雷州市宰杀老虎 (Leizhou City slaughter tigers) are particularly shocking, with the corpses of tigers […]

China: Panda numbers – not black and white

The Giant Panda is something of a political animal – though not through choice, it must be said – with ‘panda diplomacy,’ the practice of giving pandas to other countries as gifts, having been around since the Tang dynasty, some 1,400 years ago. Where the pandas were once proudly given as gifts to the people […]

China bans ivory imports … for 1 year

China has released a notification via CITES that it intends to suspend the import of ivory carvings from February 26th 2015 to February 26th 2016. This affects the ivory that is legally imported into the country – an apparently negligible amount – and the measure has no bearing on the massive illegal ivory trade that […]

Spilled Water

覆水难收

Author: ourmaninpeking