Youth battles poachers and prejudice in Vietnam
HANOI: As a girl, Trang Nguyen saw a bear stabbed through the chest with a giant needle at her neighbour’s house in northern Vietnam.
The bear, flat on its back, was being pumped for its bile, a fluid drawn from its gallbladder that has long been used in traditional medicine to treat liver disease.
“I had seen visitors to Hanoi zoo who brought sticks to poke animals and it really made my blood boil,” said Trang, founder of local conservation group WildAct. “But conservation wasn’t something I really wanted to do until I saw what happened to this bear.”
It was the first of her many encounters with a global multi-billion-dollar illegal wildlife trade that devastates species the world over, fuels corruption and threatens human health.
The 31-year-old — named by the BBC in 2019 as one of the world’s most inspiring and influential women — has spent much of her time since then trying to end the scourge. She has gone undercover in South Africa to snare traffickers and secured a PhD in traditional medicine’s impact on wildlife.
She set up Vietnam’s first postgraduate course for aspiring conservationists to help more people make it to the top of her field.
In the 1990s, decades of war and isolation meant environmental awareness was a new notion in Vietnam. Trang recalls her parents saying: “Only rich people from western countries do that work.”
Now, there are more local conservationists, wildlife protection laws have been enacted, if patchily enforced, and the number of bears kept in captivity for bile farming has dropped by 90 per cent in the last 15 years, according to Education for Nature Vietnam.
But as the country grew richer, demand for exotic wildlife dishes soared and animal parts sought for their perceived health benefits became a status symbol.
Today, Vietnam is a key producer, consumer and transit point for trafficked wildlife, said WildAct.
Through courses at Vinh University in central Vietnam and community initiatives in wildlife trade hotspots, Trang is trying to empower Vietnamese people to resolve these problems themselves.
Trang said the responses of some global wildlife organisations to the coronavirus pandemic, widely thought to have begun at a market known to sell wild animals in China’s Wuhan, were hugely unhelpful for campaigners in Asia and Africa, said Trang.
One called for a complete ban on “wet markets”, even though the term is used in Asia and Africa to describe any market where fresh produce is sold, while another termed them “unhygienic”.
“When things like that are said, it’s very difficult for conservationists to ask people to participate in our work,” she said, as they were seen as “prejudiced”.
Trang’s story is one of remarkable determination. From age 8, she pestered wildlife groups with requests to intern and learnt English by watching the BBC documentary Planet Earth at night.
She won scholarships to study in Britain, including for a masters degree in conservation leadership at Cambridge University, and founded WildAct in her mid-20s.
Wildlife traffickers are in prison because of her.
Trang wants more women in conservation and has written a book to inspire young girls.
Loosely based on her personal story, Saving Sorya tells the tale of a Vietnamese conservationist who must prepare a rescued baby sun bear for life in the wild.
Already published in Vietnamese and due out in English this year, the children’s book has a female protagonist, something she insisted on despite being told “no one would read it” if she did.