Viagra not working? Try some rhino horn
“He was aware that a wise man should always respect the folkways of others, to use Carrot’s happy phrase, but Vimes often had difficulty with this idea. For one thing, there were people in the world whose folkways consisted of gutting other people like clams and this was not a procedure that commanded, in Vimes, any kind of respect at all.”– (Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant)
Throughout the various humanities courses I’ve taken during my college career, the loss of culture experienced by some societies due to Westernization has always been shown as a tragedy. Shark hunters in the Pacific are spending money on cigarettes and alcohol, native people starting to sell milk from their cows commercially to earn money, etc. In fact, I do have a deep respect for many cultures and am saddened that old ways are giving way to the desire for cholocate, booze, and television, but is change always bad? Are we always suppossed to look at another culture and say “Well, I guess that’s what they believe. Who am I to say they’re wrong?” I surely don’t think so, especially when it comes to TCM, or Traditional Chinese Medicine.
There are some aspects of TCM that I doubt, but have no problem with. Accupuncture, massage, and many holistic remedies may hold some value and don’t seem to be harming anybody as far as I can tell. The problem is the ongoing practice of harvesting animal parts, often for use as aphrodesiacs, that may eventually wipe species of tiger, rhino, seahorse, etc. off the planet. It seems odd to me that so many different animal parts are suppossed to help sexual potency, I assume the more powerful the animal the more powerful the effects of the “medicine” are suppossed to be.
Because of the demand for tiger penis (and other parts for decoration or medicinal use) poaching is a constant problem where tigers remain. One park in India had only 70 tigers left, and the next year there were none. Who are the poachers? Well, many of them are the poor. It’s hard to care about ecology when you can’t feed yourself or your family, so if you can bag a tiger and make a few bucks, you get a leg up and things get (at least temporarily) better for you. Often, only the parts desired for the medicine are kept, leaving mutilated carcasses of the animals behind. In the case of sharks, there is a process called “finning” where a shark has its fins cut off and thrown back into the ocean, often still alive, to bleed to death.
Shark fin soup can fetch a high price and is (of course) considered an aphrodesiac, and is also a status symbol. It used to be only the rich who could afford such a delicacy, but with economic growth now many more people want it to strut their stuff at the dinner table. Some have cried out against the practice, but it seems that the Chinese public cares more about image than ecological consequences of removing an apex predator, and the practice still continues.
It almost seems that these animal parts are more status symbol than remedy. In Yemen, if I remember correctly, when young men come of age they receive a traditional blade, the handle made of rhino horn. Now up until recently only the rich could afford real rhino-horn blades, but with heightened economic success because of the oil trade, more people can afford the real deal and there is a higher demand, putting pressure back onto rhinos (who have been facing extinction by poaching for quite some time). Tradition seems to rule over rationality, although I doubt many people in China or Yemen have good concepts of ecology to begin with. There will always be more tigers to hunt, right?
Another abominable practice involves Chinese black bears (or moon bears, after a cream-colored crescent patch on their chest). These bears are put into cages no bigger than themselves and “milked” for their bile twice a day, the fluid believed to reduce fever and fix other health problems. When the bear stops producing, it is often left to starve or killed for it’s paws (a delicacy) and gall bladder. While there has been something of a crackdown on the practice, it still continues in Asia. Earlier this year the Chinese government called for more human bile-farming practices, but I seriously doubt this will cause any major change.
It is indeed sad when certain cultures are lost to a constantly advancing world, relics of a time long gone when people were intimately connected to the land they lived on. Now, there are just too many people with too much money, and our “wants” (vastly greater than our actual needs to survive) are destroying many of our greatest natural resources under our noses. Perhaps some cultures should step away from traditions that are no longer sustainable.
Centuries ago it may have not done much harm for an emperor to dine on shark fin soup, but today an ecological crisis is caused because every businessman wants to show how powerful or influential he is. I acknowledge that is their cultural system, but I by no means respect it, and simply shrugging my shoulders saying “Well, they have to do what’s right by them” isn’t constructive. Still, with an ever-growing, ever hungry population I continue to worry that it is the organisms we share the world with that will pay the price first, but eventually our line of credit will run out and we’ll be ecologically bankrupt.
