In 2014, police officers at the Taiping Town Police Station of the Forest Public Security Bureau in Shuifu County, Zhaotong City, Yunnan Province, received a whistleblowing call from which they claimed to have found a man named Wu Jichao in Taiping Town who was secretly hiding wild animal meat of unknown origin. Subsequently, the police came to Wu Jichao's home and found 8.5 kilograms of bear meat and a large number of unknown frozen wild animals.
This seems to be an ordinary case of trafficking in wild animals, but the experienced police with professional sensitivity, feel that this matter is not simple, out of a cautious attitude, the police will send the stolen goods to the Yunnan Provincial Endangered Science and Technology Commission Identification Center for DNA identification, this identification does not matter, DNA identification results came out, the entire Shuifu County government departments are stunned, the news came out after the alarmed the whole province of Yunnan.
You know, the habitat of giant pandas is mainly in some mountainous areas such as Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu, how can there be wild giant pandas in Yunnan? Giant pandas are wild animals protected at the national level, how can anyone dare to hunt and kill giant pandas? A stone stirred up a thousand waves, and the entire Yunnan Forest Public Security Department took action to detect the hunting and killing of giant pandas.
If you hurt a giant panda, what kind of punishment will you face? Yunnan has said that the peasant brothers appeared, what will be the final outcome? In this article, let's take a look at the case of farmers hunting giant pandas in Yunnan.
As we all know, the giant panda known as "living fossil" is a unique species in the mainland, the number is extremely rare, the Wildlife Protection Law lists the giant panda as a first-level key protected wild animal, we can think so, all acts that harm the giant panda, are regarded as illegal acts (except when endangering personal life and safety).
In addition to a series of laws and policies to protect wild animals, the mainland has also introduced many compensation measures, for example, when livestock are injured or bitten by wild animals, breeders can apply for corresponding subsidies from relevant departments, and the amount of subsidies is higher than their economic losses.
For example, the northward migration of elephants in Xishuangbanna has damaged crops, the incident in which wild Siberian tigers often occur in the northeast region bites and kills livestock, and the case of wild animal attacks on livestock in Goluo... Farmers, herders and farmers have been compensated accordingly.
The vast majority of domestic farmers, after being destroyed by rare animals, will not retaliate against wild animals, but find relevant departments to seek economic compensation, after all, human development has encroached on the habitat of wild animals, and it is necessary to pay a price to maintain the ecological balance.
There are always some farmers, with weak legal awareness, who do not choose to treat them rationally when they are harmed by wild animals, but instead kill these rare and legally protected wild animals, causing serious consequences.
The protagonist of this article, two Yunnan peasant brothers, due to a momentary impulse, mistakenly killed a cute giant panda, and also made it difficult for him to escape prison.
The hunting of wild animals is not a rare thing, why does a wrongly killed giant panda receive so much attention? Let's first understand the history of the giant panda, the giant panda has survived on the earth for more than 8 million years, in the cruel survival competition and natural selection, and the giant panda in the same period of many animals have been extinct, which shows the preciousness of the giant panda, they are known as the "national treasure" of the mainland is not exaggerated.
The giant panda was once considered a new breed or an extinct species by foreign countries, and it was not until modern times that it was really recognized. In fact, the ancients of the mainland have known the giant panda very early, the earliest written record of the giant panda on the mainland, in the "Erya", it was recorded that there was a creature called "tapir" in the Sichuan and Shu regions, people at that time called him tapir, also called him white leopard, in various periods, the title of the giant panda is different, the Book of Poetry calls the giant panda "Cat", "Mao Shi" calls the giant panda a white cat, "Emei Mountain Chronicle" calls the giant panda "cat cat"... Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica calls giant pandas "tapirs."
In the early days, there was no relevant animal protection policy, humans randomly hunted and killed the "tapir", which also made the number of tapirs decrease sharply, many tapirs could only migrate to find new habitats in order to survive, and tapirs in many areas have become extinct, until the giant pandas distributed in Sichuan, Shaanxi, Gansu and other regions in modern times were found.
In modern times, how were giant pandas discovered? There is also a legendary story of the discovery of giant pandas, the earliest giant pandas were found by foreigners. In 1869, a French priest in Ya'an, Sichuan Province, accidentally found the locals called white bear, flower bear traces, through the help of hunters, he collected a specimen of white bear, he has never seen this strange creature, named it "black and white bear".
When the priest sent the specimen of the black and white bear to the Natural History Museum in Paris, it was identified as a new species, and since then the giant panda has begun to enter the field of civilization. This cute-looking, cute, rare species, and high economic value has attracted groups of Western nomads, explorers and biologists to the giant panda production area to capture giant pandas.
Since then, black and white bears have become the preferred hunting object for many hunters, and many Westerners have come to China to participate in the hunting of giant pandas, and it is this flood of hunting that has led to a sharp decline in the number of giant pandas, and the mainland did not introduce policies to restrict the killing of giant pandas until the 1940s.
After the founding of New China, the government began to increase the protection of giant pandas, however, no matter how the government protects, the number of giant pandas has been decreasing, through the investigation to know that giant pandas have been speculated into sky-high prices abroad, driven by huge interests, criminals do not hesitate to take risks, some farmers do not understand the law, often there will be the phenomenon of accidental killing of giant pandas, coupled with the destruction of giant panda habitat by humans, as well as the reasons for the giant panda itself, resulting in giant pandas becoming endangered species.
Let's return to the topic of the article, why do Farmers in Yunnan hunt giant pandas? Wang Wenlin, a farmer in Yunnan Province, who lives in a village in Yanjin County, Zhaotong City, and relies on sheep for a living on weekdays, and one morning in December 2014, Wang Wenlin got up early as usual to go to the sheep pen to feed the sheep. Before he reached the sheepfold, he found that there was a lot of blood on the ground, and he giggled in his heart, and quickly ran to the sheep, counting carefully, and sure enough, a sheep died in the flock.
Who did it? Wang Wenlin was angry, he began to examine the blood stains carefully, and found that the missing sheep was not artificially killed, but was bitten by some large animals. When he thought of this, Wang Wenlin was very angry, you know, the price of a sheep at that time was very expensive, and it was a big loss for people who raised sheep for a living.
Although Wang Wenlin judged that the sheep was bitten by a large animal, he did not know what kind of large animal was bitten to death, in order to prevent the sheep from being bitten to death again, Wang Wenlin installed a trap next to the sheep pen, and then took out the musket that had been hidden before from home, and after loading the ammunition, he waited for the appearance of a large animal at any time.
After everything was ready, Wang Wenlin also called his younger brother and asked him to pay attention to it. The next day, Wang Wenlin came to the sheepfold with a musket, and this time, although there were no fewer sheep, the trap was triggered, but unfortunately, the trap did not catch the animal, and only the clip that had been broken was left on the ground.
When Wang Wenlin was rearranging the trap, his brother called and said that he had found the footprints of a wild animal in the back of the house, which was probably a beast that killed a sheep. After the two brothers met, they began to follow the footprints and traces of the animals all the way to the mountains.
The brothers had lived here since childhood, were particularly familiar with the mountain, and with the sensitivity of the hunters, they soon discovered the animal, and the brothers fixed their eyes on it, only to see a black and gray bear slowly crawling in the tree. Wang Wenlin didn't think much about it, he raised his gun to the old bear, and after the old bear was hit, he did not fall, and the old bear, who was only slightly injured, reacted and immediately climbed to another tree.
Wang Wenlin's heart crossed, and he fired another shot, and after the injured old bear was hit again, he fell directly from the tree and rolled into a ditch, unable to move. The brothers walked over to see that the old bear was not dead, so they directly found a stone to smash it, and finally the old bear was killed by the brothers after being shot twice.
Afterwards, the brothers carried the old bear down the mountain one after the other, and when they returned home, they began to peel and decompose. In the evening of the same day, Wang Wenlin's wife returned home and saw that her husband and uncle were dealing with a black and gray wild "bear", and the wife was worried that her husband had killed the giant panda by mistake, and she also took a careful look and found that the bear was not black and white, so she did not care.
The husband took out a piece of meat and asked her to cook a pot of soup, and that night the brothers wore bear meat, drank small wine, and lived the previous hunter life. Because there is too much bear meat, it will not be eaten for a while and a half, it is better to change some money to make up for the loss of sheep, Wang Wenlin called his friend Li Moumou, saying that he hunted a bear and could sell him bear meat. After the two sides discussed the price, Wang Wenlin came to a friend's house with 70 kilograms of bear meat and four bear paws. After Wang Wenlin handed over all the goods to his friends, he received a reward of 4800 yuan from Li Moumou.
You know, the 4800 yuan in that year was the income of Wang Wenlin's family for half a year, and Wang Wenlin divided half of this money to his brother, and the other half was all given to his wife.
After Li Moumou bought these wild meats, he sold them to Wang at a high price, Wang sold them to Wu Jichao, and Wu Jichao resold the giant panda meat to Wang, Qin, Du and others, just like this, a giant panda was divided up by several people.
But the secret transactions of these people were still discovered. Soon, the police officers at the Taiping Town Police Station of the Forest Public Security Bureau in Shuifu County, Zhaotong City, Yunnan Province, received a whistleblowing call from which they claimed that they had discovered that a man named Wu Jichao in Taiping Town was secretly hiding wild animal meat of unknown origin.
Thus, there is the scene at the beginning of the article.
After the police arrested Wu Jichao, they caught Wang Wenlin's friend, Li Kequan, who sold meat, and the police also searched for panda meat in Li Kequan's home. When Li Kequan heard that the meat was giant panda meat, he immediately sat down on the ground in fear, and then explained the source of the meat.
In the end, the Wang Wenlin brothers were locked by the police, when the police found Wang Wenlin's brother, at first the brother did not know that he was hunting a giant panda, when the police showed him the DNA identification results, Wang Wenlin's brother was frightened and his legs were weak, and he regretted that he kept slapping his mouth, saying that if he knew that this was a giant panda, he would not hunt it.
The case-handling personnel found two shotguns, giant panda skins, flesh bones, and leg bones at Wang Wenlin's brother's home. You know, at that time, it was strictly forbidden to hide guns in China, and they also hid guns, and this "private gun" made it difficult for them to escape prison, let alone hunt and kill the "national treasure" giant panda.
In fact, as early as the DNA identification results confirmed that it was giant panda meat, it attracted the attention of the entire Yunnan Forestry Department, which issued a special order for the provincial, municipal and county forest public security to jointly set up an expert investigation team to investigate the matter. This time, the special case team first arrested the younger brother, but did not catch the main culprit's brother, that is, Wang Wenlin.
At this time, Wang Wenlin was digging bamboo shoots on the mountain, and when his wife told him the news that his brother had been arrested, Wang Wenlin understood that he could not escape, so he called the ranger in the village to surrender himself, and finally Wang Wenlin was captured, and later he handed in a panda bile when identifying the scene.
After Wang Wenlin surrendered himself, he quickly explained the causes and consequences of the matter, and when Wang Wenlin finished speaking, a leader of the Forestry Bureau told him: This situation can be reported to the forestry department, and all losses caused by wild animals can be reported to the forestry department, and compensation higher than the livestock market price will be obtained.
In fact, just half a month after Wang Wenlin hunted the giant panda, the village also held a special meeting: let the farmers have a sense of wildlife protection, if there is an incident of their livestock being injured by wild animals, they can apply to the forestry department for compensation. However, Wang Wenlin did not take this matter seriously.
In November 2015, the local procuratorate initiated a public prosecution in the case, and after a six-month trial, in April 2016, the court announced the verdict of the trial, and Wang Wenlin was sentenced to 13 years in prison and fined 10,000 yuan for illegally killing, hunting rare and endangered wild animals and illegally possessing firearms.
Wang Wenlin's younger brother was convicted of illegally selling rare and endangered wildlife and was sentenced to 11 years in prison. During the trial of this case, Wang Wenlin insisted that the muskets of his brother's family belonged to him, so Wang Wenlin was saddled with the crime of illegal possession of firearms, and several other people involved in the case were also sentenced to several years of imprisonment and fined thousands.
According to the relevant laws, the punishment that the Wang Wenlin brothers should receive should be higher than this, but the court considered that the two did not know the relevant policies, and the two did not premeditate the hunt, so the sentence given by the court was also much reduced.
For the sentencing of the law, the author believes that in Yunnan, especially in the place of the crime, there has never been a wild giant panda, and the Two Brothers of the Wang Family met the Giant Panda, and their hunting and sale were purely accidental, which is essentially different from the crime of deliberately making profits, and when the Wang Brothers hunted the giant panda, they also deliberately looked at the pattern that was not black and white, which was reflected in the sentencing.
After hearing the sentencing results, the brothers said that they admitted guilt and accepted punishment, they originally thought they would be sentenced to at least a few decades, but the result was a light sentence, and the brothers said that they would reform well and strive to get out of prison as soon as possible.
Afterwards, the relevant departments in Yunnan realized that there were likely to be wild giant pandas in Yunnan, and soon, at the behest of the relevant departments, the city and county departments also sent special personnel into the mountains to look for traces of giant panda activities. After investigation, the project personnel only found some hair and feces similar to giant pandas, but due to the long time, these traces could not be DNA identification, and it was impossible to confirm whether these traces belonged to the giant panda that was hunted.
Experts concluded that it was impossible to determine that the pandas were native to Yunnan, perhaps migrating from Sichuan. However, the investigation team did not give up, stationed in the local area for nearly a year, and called for the local people to help find the traces of giant pandas, but a year later, the investigation team still did not find any traces of giant pandas, and finally had to return home.
A few years later, Li Kequan and several others were released from prison one after another, they never engaged in the business of buying and selling wild animals again, among them Wu Jichao did not even dare to approach wild animals, for fear of breaking the law and going to prison again, some of them went to the city to work, and some of them did not dare to return to their old business of hunting wild animals even if they were idle at home.
The Wang Wenlin brothers performed well in prison, were often praised, and their sentences were commuted for meritorious service.
Giant pandas have been hunted, how many Chinese and friends in the world feel heartache, the protection of giant pandas, must once again arouse the great attention of the Chinese people. This beast, known as the "iron-eating beast" in ancient times, due to the needs of survival and development, evolved into a bamboo-eating, cute, harmless and cute treasure of people and animals, they have very harsh requirements for the living environment, mostly living in the dense bamboo forest at an altitude of 2600-3500 meters.
Their numbers are so rare that in 2015, the State Forestry and Grassland Administration released the results of the fourth giant panda survey, and now the number of wild giant pandas has reached 1864, while the number of captive giant pandas has reached 375.
The habitat area of giant pandas has also been greatly improved, and now the habitat area has reached 2.58 million hectares, the potential habitat has reached 910,000 hectares, in 2021, the threat level of the giant panda population has been reduced from endangered to vulnerable, and the reason for its endangerment can be traced, due to the blind exploitation of forest areas by humans, the giant panda habitat has been encroached upon and destroyed, resulting in population segmentation, coupled with the scarcity of the giant panda, which cannot avoid inbreeding, and the final result is species degradation.
The author believes that the low reproductive ability of giant pandas themselves is also the main reason for the threat to the population, and giant pandas will breed once every two years, and only two or so red pandas will be born at a time. After the birth of red pandas, female pandas generally do not have the energy to raise them, which also makes some red pandas die not long after birth, at the same time, giant pandas are too dependent on habitat, poor adaptability to unfamiliar environments, which is also the main reason why giant pandas are endangered.
With the efforts of the mainland government and people, the growth of giant pandas has now shown positive growth, which is also a good thing for us, after all, the giant panda is a national treasure of the mainland and a symbol of the mainland.
bibliography:
CCTV: Yunnan cracked a case of hunting giant pandas and seized 1 panda skin
Xinhua Net: Yunnan police restore the case of hunting giant pandas: the suspect is chased by footprints because the family sheep was bitten to death