ENVIRONMENT-JAPAN: Exotic Pet Habit Hits Back, at Home

By Suvendrini Kakuchi Reprint | | Print |

Suvendrini Kakuchi

TOKYO, Feb 12 2003 (IPS) - New domestic regulations may do for Japan what years of international effort have not – convince its consumers of the urgent need to curb their appetite for exotic and endangered animal species.

The country continues to be one of the biggest markets for illegally trafficked wildlife: one estimate places the lucrative Japanese pet market at around 58 billion U.S. dollars. But after years of uncontrolled purchase of endangered animals and products derived from them – like tiger bones and ivory – the threat now comes from within.

"The spread of animal-borne diseases is finally prompting the Japanese government to deal with the import of animals and other species. The issue is long overdue," says Hisako Kiyono of Traffic East-Asia Japan.

Traffic is the wildlife trade monitoring programme that works in cooperation with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), to which Japan is a signatory.

Recent reports of outbreaks of foreign diseases and environmental destruction linked to imported fauna have led the Health, Welfare and Labour Ministry to draw up new regulations to restrict imports of species linked to certain diseases.

"Japan faces the threat of dangerous diseases from foreign animals. New laws will be in place to curb the risks," said Masahito Kato, director of infectious diseases section at the Ministry.

The new regulations – which could include raising fines, requiring ownership to be registered, longer quarantine periods, and closer monitoring of pet shops – are scheduled to come into effect by end-2004.

For activists in Japan who have struggled for years to prod the government into a position of more responsibility about its role on wildlife imports, the measures may be too little, and hopefully not too late.

A list compiled by the Ecological Society of Japan contains more than a hundred species of foreign fauna and flora that are already affecting Japan’s environment.

"The species destroy the local environment and threaten native species. We want people to recognise the dangers of importing species through the list," says Professor Izumi Washitani of Tokyo University and one of the group which compiled the list.

The pattern is depressingly familiar to Prof Washitani – once their novelty wears off, animals imported as pets in large numbers are abandoned by owners who either no longer can or want to care for them, and then multiply in an environment devoid of their natural enemies.

The Javanese mongoose, for example, was imported in 1910 to Okinawa to control rats and the ‘habu’, a venomous snake native to the southern island. When released in the wild however, the mongoose preyed on other native animals but ignored the snake.

Today there are estimated to be tens of thousands of the Javanese mongoose, which multiply rapidly and cause havoc by destroying local crops.

That is just one example. On the list are other species, also originally alien to Japan and which quickly thrived – reptiles, amphibians like snapping turtles, and black bass.

Feral snapping turtles are bad-tempered creatures with jaws powerful enough to chop off fingers. They were discovered last October in the wild in the swamps of Chiba, outside Tokyo. The amphibians were imported as pets from Central and North America in the 1960s. The black bass from North America meanwhile is reported by researchers to have inundated parts of Japanese rivers, making up 99 percent of the fish population in some areas.

It is not just Japan’s wilds that are under threat from imported fauna. The government recently identified the Lyssa virus – a type of rabies that paralyses the nervous system, making breathing difficult and causing death in many cases – which is suspected to have entered Japan via four species of bats imported from the Congo region and Madagascar.

The bats are reckoned to have been sold for around 300 dollars each and were imported over a period of two years. In Japan, bats are exempt from quarantine but the National Institute of Infectious Diseases has asked the Health, Welfare and Labour Ministry to take urgent action, including placing restrictions on importing bats.

Exotic bats are not the only suspected carriers of rabies – racoons are too. The animals became popular pets following the success of a 1970s television story about a boy and his pet racoon, and were imported from North and Central America.

The racoons inevitably found their way into the wild, and officials said they too could spread rabies and ringworm among children. That, last January, alarmed residents of Kamakura, a historical city close to Tokyo that was reported to be overrun by hundreds of racoons.

Incidents such as this seem not to deter wildlife buyers and smugglers. This year, two Japanese tourists were caught at Sydney airport trying to smuggle more than 1,000 rare insects – including butterflies and beetles – in their baggage.

Their detention exposed the loopholes in Japanese laws which permit about 400 beetle species, including protected ones, to be imported live.

According to Traffic East Asia-Japan, at least 680,000 beetles were imported into Japan in 2001, as pets or rare specimens for collectors with some of these – whose export is prohibited – from the Philippines, Nepal, India and Bhutan.

Japan’s penchant for exotic wildlife as pets includes iguanas, fish and rare spiders. The scale can be overwhelming. In 1999, about two million reptiles were imported into Japan, according to the Yamauchi Iguana Laboratory, which is often asked by owners to take their iguana pets off their hands.