Dec 10
BBC (Matt Walker)
One of the world’s most rare and elusive cats, the Sunda clouded leopard of Malaysia, has been filmed up close.
A biologist holidaying in Malaysia has captured unique footage of a young female leopard resting in the forest.
Previously, this top predator has only been filmed fleetingly and at a distance, with the first wild footage to be made public captured in 2010.
WWF
Kuala Lumpur – As the infrastructure growth in the “Asian Century” shows no signs of slowing down, Malaysia has taken a first bold step in addressing how this growth will affect tigers and tiger habitats by holding a leadership forum on including priority tiger habitats into land and infrastructure planning.
The meeting, entitled Cross-Sectoral Executive Leadership Forum on Mainstreaming Priority Tiger Habitats, is being held in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur on February 20 – 22. At the forum, the Government of Malaysia is announcing the construction of viaducts that will promote safe passage for tigers and other wildlife along a busy East-West Highway.
National Geographic (Bryan Christy)
Last week, Anson Wong, the world’s most notorious international wildlife dealer, walked out of a Malaysian prison a free man after a Malaysian Appeals Court reduced his sentence for trafficking wildlife from five years to time served—17 months. Wong, who featured prominently in the National Geographic story “The Kingpin” (January 2010), was also the target of a major U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service investigation in the 1990s. He has made a career of offering for sale many of the world’s most iconic and endangered species and their parts—snow leopards, pandas, rhinoceroses, tigers, rare birds, and endangered reptiles.
But the mistake that got him arrested by Malaysian authorities in 2010 was relatively minor: He was passing through Kuala Lumpur International Airport on his way to Jakarta, Indonesia, when a lock on his suitcase broke, revealing 95 boa constrictors, a couple of African vipers, and a South American turtle.
National Geographic (Bryan Christy)
Update: After this article was published, the Malaysian Parliament passed the Wildlife Conservation Act, the first major wildlife law overhaul in the country since 1972.
On September 14, 1998, a thin, bespectacled Malaysian named Wong Keng Liang walked off Japan Airlines Flight 12 at Mexico City International Airport. He was dressed in faded blue jeans, a light-blue jacket, and a T-shirt emblazoned with a white iguana head. George Morrison, lead agent for Special Operations, the elite, five-person undercover unit of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was there to greet him. Within seconds of his arrest, Anson (the name by which Wong is known to wildlife traffickers and wildlife law enforcement officers around the world) was whisked downstairs in handcuffs by Mexican federales, to be held in the country’s largest prison, the infamous Reclusorio Norte.
To Morrison and his team, Anson Wong was the catch of a lifetime—the world’s most wanted smuggler of endangered species. His arrest, involving authorities in Australia,Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, and the United States, was a hard-won victory, the culmination of a half-decade-long undercover operation still widely considered the most successful international wildlife investigation ever.
Al Jazeera
“Conservationists are warning tigers will become extinct in the wild within the next 20 years unless a major effort is made to protect them. At the beginning of the last century, there were an estimated 100,000 tigers. Today their population is believed to be around 3,000.
But poachers and illegal traders appear to be to break laws protecting the big cats with more ease than policy makers and wildlife experts can uphold them.
Al Jazeera’s Laura Kyle travelled to Malaysia to find out why poaching is rife and why efforts to stop it are failing.”
REAWR | Big-Cat Conservation 