While 90 percent of the rare animal trade ends up across the border in China, local demand is strong too. Extracts of python bile are sold at the provincial airport gift shop in Daklak while the city's biggest state- owned hotel, the Thang Loi, features tiger bone paste. Town restaurants feature giant jars of monkeys, foxes and lizards immersed in alcohol which are popular for their supposed medicinal properties. It's a thorny problem. In Gia Lai province for example, the reception hall of the People's Committee is a veritable trophy room featuring a stuffed baby elephant, a tiger and the walls adorned with a profusion of smaller animals.
Most enforcement focuses on intercepting illegal traders at borders.
Between June 1996 and June 1997 the FPD nabbed traders on 1,270 occasions, confiscating some 69,000 live animals. But while the government claims those arrests stemmed more than one quarter of suspected illegal trade, international wildlife figures say they represent a fraction of the actual volume. Hunting and poaching of any animal without a permit has been under a total ban since 1973, and the government has also passed a battery of laws aimed at protecting nearly 350 different species of birds and animals. But enforcement is a joke, wildlife experts say. From Daklak to the Chinese border there are potentially 50 checkpoints.