On this follow up visit we arrived in Boten in the afternoon of Nov 9th and spent two days in town. We had a look around to establish the status quo, compared to our earlier visit and the one by Jude Osborne of Free the Bears.

• the casino still had the display of tiger wine, tiger leg bones gall bladders, gall bladder products, etc.
• the one restaurant still held two monkeys and two large bears with extremely greasy coats (they were now hidden behind the restaurant)
• in the main street we found two baby clouded leopards in a corner playing with each other. The owner then came along, once we started filming and put them in a Styrofoam box and then covered them up with a plastic bag. (there were also two more monkeys in cages)

While this was going on the driver of a lorry approached our guide and informed him that he knew of two baby tigers for sale in a village half way between Boten and Luang Prabang and that some Vietnamese buyers were negotiating the price down from the $2000 asked for by the villagers/hunters, We managed to get the details of the exact location.

• We visited the bear farm and the guard dogs outside, described by Jude in his report, had gone, One bear was lying in a ditch outside and moaning and showing serious signs of distress.
• I was allowed inside but without camera and found another 17 bears one again in a very bad state lying on his back and trembling.
• We again negotiated with the owner and he again presented a price of about $2000 per bear, saying that he wanted to close the farm down.

We made an appointment with the CEO/President of the Boten zone. He stated that he did not know he had a bear farm or was aware of any other captive wildlife (when he asked his 'foreign minister' he confirmed that this was indeed the case). He expressed interest in finding a solution and closing down the existing facilities.

• We pointed out to him that several bears seemed to be very sick.
• We offered to send in some Chinese speaking vets and find out what the problem was.

When I got to Singapore I had a Chinese speaking vet call the bear farm owner and the President of Boten. It turned out that they had a serious problem and were to some extent aware of it. Several bears had already died. A horse had died and the dogs which had eaten the horse meat had also died, This was clearly a virus which crossed species and has to be taken seriously. They say they cremated the dogs the bears and the horse giving a clear indication that they were aware that they might have a serious health problem on their hands.

The Singapore based vet agreed to send an Australian and a Chinese speaking NGO representative up there to do some field testing on what was now been classified as being a potentially explosive situation which might involve a virus which could also spread to humans.

The visit is going on as of yesterday 27/11/2009 and I just spoke to the NGO representative and was told that 9 bears have died and the two greasy ones outside the restaurant have disappeared and so have the two clouded leopards. They expect another bear to die today. The diagnosis so far excludes distemper but nothing else.

Supposedly meetings with the President/CEO have taken place and progress is being made to find a long term solution/set up a sanctuary.

We then did follow up on the tiger issue and found that the two tiger cubs had been picked up by the Vietnamese and had gone across the border and the final prize was some U$ 1800 per cub, I plan to do more follow up on this.

Karl Ammann
Nanyuki, Kenya
November 2009