SPECIES ARE THREATENED WITH EXTINCTION IN VIETNAM

An article was published on Vietnamnews.vn about 15 monkeys were hunted and traveled in Nghe An province, Vietnam. A month ago, an elephant was killed in Dak Lak province. If you read the news frequently, you will see there was a lot of animals were hunted, killed, and many of them are threatened with extinction. How people manage the hunting in Vietnam, and why so many endangered species are hunted?

The first reason is people get much benefit from this business. There are more and more restaurants open to serve those kinds of foods, which they call special foods, so the prices for them are pretty high. People make benefits from that business, so they ignore the law and continuous hunting. People believe that bear bile or bear hands are good for their health, so they try to buy it even though how high of the price. Because of the demand of rich people, and they ready to pay for high price, the hunter ignore the fact that they will hurt bears, they can make the bears become extinction. I read some news about bears was shot, and when people find it, those bears lose hands. Or there is news about how cruel people do bear bile businesses. They raise bear and take the bear bile every year; some bears lose their behaviors because they have been taken bile for 20 years. To avoid bears can hurt themselves and die during the time people take bile, they put bears in steel frame so that bears can’t move. This is not ethical, and people argue about that. Many controversial about this kind of businesses, however, it still exists because there are demands for it.  

Another reason for that hunting is coming from the poverty and lacking of knowledge. The poverty and lacking of knowledge in Vietnam still remains highly, especially in minority ethnics. People in these areas are easy to be affected because they don’t know the important of preserving endangered animals, and they don’t know the laws either.

As news “time running out for endangered species” indicated that Vietnam is ranked top 16 countries in the world in term of richness of biodiversity. However, our country has not been able to protect this. The WWF (World Wild Fund for Nature) confirmed about the Javan rhino extinction in Vietnam in 2011, and they warned about the extinction of other species if Vietnam doesn’t have any better management and any policies to protect the wildlife. The laws of Vietnam now about buying and selling wildlife are not enough strict to prevent people from doing that. More details, hunters or people who kill wildlife animals were fined 3 millions to 5 millions VND. If it is more seriously, they can sentence 3 months to 3 years in prison. Those laws are not strict in comparison with the benefits they get from the businesses, that is the reason why hunting and transaction wildlife animals still happens in Vietnam.

In my opinion, one of the most important and necessary solutions to preserve the wildlife is revising the laws of protecting endangered animals. People who hunt and kill wildlife animals should be fined strictly to prevent the situation of selling and buying animals. Moreover, people who buy and use products from endangered species should be fined too. If we can reduce the demand for it, the supply will also reduce. By these ways, we can protect the diversity of nature, and preserve the endangered species for future generations.