Porcupine Laundry
Commercial farming appears to hurt, not help, Vietnam’s spiny mammals
It’s a longstanding idea: Take pressure off wild animals threatened by overexploitation by encouraging farmers to raise and sell them. A new study from Vietnam, however, suggests that commercial farming is doing more harm than good for a porcupine that’s popular on the dinner plate. That’s partly because some farmers appear to be “laundering” porcupines – buying wild-caught animals and then passing them off as captive-bred.
The Southeast Asian porcupine (Hystrix brachyura) is one of the 11 species of the spiny mammals found in the Old World. It’s a relatively common animal, but since the 1990s populations have dropped by at least 20%, in part due to rising demand for its meat, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. In Vietnam, entrepreneurial farmers have started to tap the growing market by raising porcupines. Porcupine farming has become especially popular in Son La province, along the border with Laos in northwestern Vietnam. Some government officials have encouraged the farms — there are more than 400 — as a way of protecting the region’s porcupine populations, which appear to be in big trouble due to illegal hunting.
To get a sense of how the boom might be influencing wild populations, researchers from Vietnam and the United Kingdom teamed up to interview farmers and restaurant owners in Son La, and government officials responsible for regulating farms and wildlife. In a bid to get the farmers to talk openly, the interviewers said they were studying the use of porcupine farming to alleviate poverty. Overall, 58% of the 67 farm owners interviewed admitted to purchasing wild porcupines (which is illegal) to start their breeding programs, and at least 19% said they continued to buy wild animals.
Most farmers said they sold their animals to other farms, not restaurants, which favor cheaper, wild-caught animals. A majority also reported that wild porcupines could no longer be found locally, and that many now came from across the border in Laos. One farmer, who also served as a border guard, told researchers that smugglers brought 20 pairs of wild-caught porcupines across the border every night – potentially an annual rate of 14,000 animals. And profits are high: Selling just two pairs of porcupines can earn a smuggler far more than the average Vietnamese earns in a year.
“Commercial farming is driving hunting,” the team, led by Emma G.E. Brooks of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, conclude in a paper published online on 19 August by Biological Conservation. “The greatest threat to the wild populations is not from demand for founder stock, but from farms laundering wild animals, and selling them across the country.” Since the trade encourages more farmers to get into the business, but doesn’t provide consumers with enough captive-bred meat, it is “akin to a pyramid scheme, and is an unsustainable model… (C)ommercial farming could potentially cause local extirpations of even relatively common and fast-breeding species like porcupines.” Solving this spiny problem, they say, will require education, greater oversight of farms, and tighter enforcement of wildlife laws. – David Malakoff
Source: Brooks, E., Roberton, S., & Bell, D. (2010). The conservation impact of commercial wildlife farming of porcupines in Vietnam. Biological Conservation DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2010.07.030
Image © Anke Van Wyk | Dreamstime.com
