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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark Bruce" data-source="post: 1357748" data-attributes="member: 23565">Signed !  Just a few general comments. Firstly, think of the risks taken in shooting this footage. If the person or people are locals consider the risks they are taking in trying to expose this type of thing. The wrath of those in their community making a living from this. Local law enforcement officials sympathetic to or having interests in the trade and governments that view exposing this stuff as damaging to their regimes so they regard activists as unpatriotic traitors. Activists, their friends and families are often assaulted, abused, isolated by their communities often suffering unemployment etc and even imprisoned for trying to expose this type of thing. Very often their only chance is the voice of the international community.  If you are a foreigner and get caught, you can expect to be roughed up, locked up for a short period and deported. If your life's work is in that country that's quite a blow. There have been cases in East Asia of families being split up where the spouse is a foreigner married to a local and the foreign spouse gets deported or more often denied re-entry after a trip abroad.  Secondly, many large mainstream environmental, wildlife or animal welfare groups don't want to tackle this stuff. The fur trade can get in the way of say their Panda work so they just don't go there. Many large foreign NGOs are very selective in what they tackle because rightly or wrongly they don't want to get thrown out so they turn and blind eye to this type of thing. Often local NGOs have no choice but to work with the more radical foreign organisations because the mainstream ones just wont help them. Looking at the footage I see EAST was involved. I have a pretty good idea of the identity of the couple that shot some of this then. A very brave East Asian couple that have suffered greatly personally to bring practises like this out into the open over the last decade.  The China-Taiwan issue would be another example. Work with a Taiwan NGO or in Taiwan and you can't work in China. China is bigger so that's where the big organisations go but usually on set agreed terms. The smugglers and the wildlife/fur trade know this so they send their stuff across the Strait so policing it becomes difficult because of the politics. Too often one hears comments like 'charity starts at home.' 'We have our own environmental problems so I can't get involved with things on the other side of the world.' With global trade what you consume has a direct impact on the other side of the planet. There is a more than 90% chance that the very computer you are using to read this post was, or has parts made, in factories on Taiwan's west coast that are destroying the the critically endangered Taiwan Humpback Dolphin. Now the planet's most endangered cetacean after the functional extinction of the Baiji or Yangtze River Dolphin in late 2006. The water-needs from those factories has resulted in the destruction of the the Fairy Pitta's most important breeding area globally. These are just two species. I could write you a list several pages long of threatened species resulting from the destruction of habitat in western Taiwan in the manufacture of parts for 90% of the world's PCs.  People in this part of the world are taking tremendous risks to shoot this type of footage and bring it to the attention of the rest of the world. Change is only going to happen when the world speaks out against it.</blockquote>

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