Monkey Brains on the Menu
Reece
February 25, 2003
COLUMN ONE
Monkey Brains on the Menu
In Indonesia, unusual animals, including endangered species, are
consumed as health remedies, impotency cures or gourmet treats.
By Richard C. Paddock
Times Staff Writer
MEDAN, Indonesia -- The eight fruit bats are trying to sleep, but it's
not easy. At midday, they dangle from a stick alongside one of the
busiest streets of this teeming city.
The bats hang head down, their feet and mouths bound tightly with
rubber bands. Passing cars, buses and motorcycles belch so much smoke
that the pollution at street level exceeds any smog alert standard.
The bats' little ears twitch amid the cacophony of honking horns and
revving engines.
But these bats are not destined to suffer long. Captured in the
rainforest about an hour outside the city, they will be sold to
passing motorists as a cure for asthma.
The recommended treatment is to cook the bat's heart and eat it.
Westerners might think that improving Medan's air quality would do
more to help asthma sufferers. But here in Indonesia's fourth-largest
city, there are many who believe that bat hearts are the answer.
"There is always a buyer," said roadside bat vendor Mat Unan, who
estimates that he and his partners have sold as many as 500 bats at
about $3 apiece in the last three years.
For best results, it is customary to remove the heart from the animal
while it is alive.
"It's very brutal," said Hardi Baktiantoro, Jakarta coordinator of the
animal protection group ProFauna Indonesia. "Even though legally we
cannot do anything about it, we ask people to stop on ethical grounds.
We ask them, is it ethical to torture the animals just for pleasure or
medicine?"
Bats are not the only unusual animals on the menu in Indonesia. In
various parts of the country, cobra blood, bear paws, sea turtle eggs,
orangutan meat, crocodile and tiger penises, geckos, dried seahorses,
monitor lizards, goat testicles, shark cartilage, pythons, sperm
whales, rhinoceros horns and monkey brains are consumed as health
remedies, impotency cures or gourmet treats.
The demand for some endangered species -- including the Sumatran
tiger, the one-horned Javan rhinoceros, the Malayan sun bear and the
green sea turtle -- has contributed to a dangerous decline in their
numbers even though they are protected under Indonesian and
international law.
In a nation with 300 ethnic groups scattered across 17,000 tropical
islands, it is not surprising that Indonesians have a wide variety of
eating habits. KFC, McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts are popular in urban
areas. But on remote islands, local tribal traditions remain strong.
In a few places, there are still instances of headhunting and
cannibalism.
Much of the desire for peculiar foods is rooted in ideas of
traditional medicine brought to the islands over the centuries by
Chinese immigrants. Today, ethnic Chinese are among the main consumers
of animal remedies.
This is a country where health care is woefully inadequate and
established medical treatment can be prohibitively expensive. Some
people suffering from long-term illness or impotency are desperate
enough to try anything.
"These animals are endangered not because they cure ailments but
because people believe they can," said Meutia Swasono, professor of
medical anthropology at the University of Indonesia.
Indonesian medical experts say most legitimate traditional medicines
are derived from plants, not animals. However, the belief in animal
cures remains strong. Although about 85% of the population is Muslim,
many Indonesians retain ancient animistic beliefs.
With little education, many are superstitious, and belief in black
magic is widespread.
One animal product that might have some benefit is shark cartilage,
which some studies -- though controversial -- suggest can be effective
in preventing the spread of cancer, said Dr. Boyke Dian Nugraha, a
noted Indonesian physician.
However, the greatest benefit from traditional animal medicine appears
to be psychological, he said, noting that when people believe a cure
is effective, their faith has a healing power. This is especially true
when treating impotence, he said.
"When one believes in a treatment, it has already healed 50% of the
illness," Nugraha said. "Since they believe, 'I will be strong. I will
be powerful,' then they will be. It is not because of the traditional
medicine, but because of the suggestive factor."
People everywhere have eating habits that can be hard for others to
stomach. The French enjoy frog legs and snails. Australians eat
kangaroos. Americans boil lobsters alive. Dogs are popular in much of
Asia. Thais eat crickets, Japanese eat sea urchin eggs, and Chinese
eat everything from raw scorpions to pickled ants. But in Indonesia,
the variety and brutality are noteworthy.
Small restaurants and shops cater to popular demand for monitor lizard
meat, bat hearts, raw monkey brains and cocktails made with cobra bile
and blood. Some restaurants have been in business for decades.
There is no law in Indonesia against brutality toward animals.
ProFauna has mounted education campaigns to improve the treatment of
animals and worked with local police to curb the worst abuses, but the
group and its supporters remain a small minority.
In Bali, sea turtles are butchered alive to keep the meat from
sticking to the shell. In Sumatra, monkeys are burned to death before
butchering in the belief that they will taste better if the blood is
not drained from the body.
Perhaps most brutal of all is the treatment of the long-tail macaques.
Some believe that eating the monkeys' brains can cure impotence. The
practice has led to over-hunting, says ProFauna, which has campaigned
against the slaughter.
Some establishments serve macaque at a special table with a hole in
the center. The monkey is tied up and the top of its skull cut open
with one slice of a sharp knife. The animal, still alive, is placed
under the table so its head protrudes like a bowl. Arrack, a powerful
native alcohol, is sometimes poured into the skull and mixed with the
brain.
In the central Jakarta neighborhood of Kota, a shopkeeper who calls
himself Cobra Man specializes in selling snakes, bats and dried lizard
meat. He said he gets 10 to 20 orders a year for monkey brains.
"I feel pity, but I have to do it," he said. "It's my work."
Cobra Man said each week he sells about 100 cobras, all caught in the
wild. Little of the snake goes to waste. Typically, he cuts off the
head and drains the blood into a glass of arrack. He adds the bile and
serves the drink as a treatment for respiratory ailments, skin
problems, aches or indigestion. It is also said to improve a man's
stamina and sex life.
As a cure for impotence, the cobra's penis can be soaked in arrack for
a month much like a worm in a bottle of mescal. A bag of 50 snake
penises sells for $11.50.
The concoctions are as varied as the imagination. One customer asked
Cobra Man to boil a cobra live. When it was cooked, the man filtered
the liquid and drank it.
The quest for cures is contributing to the near-extinction of some
animals, particularly the rhinoceros, valued for its horn, and the sun
bear, prized for its gall bladder and bile. Some bears are smuggled to
China, where their parts are even more valuable. Though the Sumatran
tiger is highly endangered, tiger penis can be found for sale in
Jakarta, the capital, as a cure for impotence. The price: $40.
The arrival of Viagra might someday help reduce the slaughter of
species that are believed to cure impotence. But for most Indonesians,
Viagra is too expensive to replace traditional medicine. The smallest
size of Viagra tablet, 25 milligrams, sells for the equivalent of $8,
while a concoction made from cobra penis is only $3.50. The minimum
wage here is about $50 a month.
One who swears by traditional remedies is Hajjah Nurdiani, 60. Five
years of treatment with cobra bile and powdered shark cartilage cured
her intestinal cancer, she claims. Nurdiani ate cobra bile every day
for three years after learning of its benefits from a friend, she
said. Worried that the bile would eventually shrink her bones, she
switched to shark cartilage, a treatment she had read about in a
magazine. Every day for two years, she drank an ounce of the powder
mixed with water.
"The snake's bile tasted like nothing," she said. "But the shark's
cartilage was loathsome."
Nurdiani, a devout Muslim who has taken the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca,
said the medicine worked because she had faith.
"I had a health checkup in 2001 and, thank God, the doctor did not
find any cancer left in my body," she said. "I believed God would help
me heal my illness. Shark's cartilage powder was just a tool."
In Medan, a city of 2.2 million people, Unan and a man who gave his
name only as Dibah sell their bats under a large mahogany tree on busy
Walikota Street, a block from the North Sumatra governor's mansion.
A major port city across the heavily traveled Malacca Strait from
Malaysia, Medan has long been an entry point for Chinese immigrants.
The two men, along with a woman who declined to give her name, also
sell turtle eggs for the equivalent of about 17 cents each. It is
illegal because the turtles are endangered, but no one enforces the
law.
The bats, with black wings and reddish-brown fur, are caught in the
jungle by stringing a net between two trees. They are kept tied up day
and night until they are sold. Two or three times a day, their keepers
unbind their mouths for a few minutes and give them a few squirts of
sugar water. Every once in a while, they are fed banana.
"You fry the heart and make the meat into a soup," Dibah said. "I feel
nothing because I sell them as medicine to help other people."
*
Sari Sudarsono of The Times' Jakarta Bureau contributed to this
report.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Saunby
"Reece" <n...@spam.com> wrote in message news:3e5c4bd2...@news.io.com...
> Los Angeles Times
> February 25, 2003
>
> COLUMN ONE
> Monkey Brains on the Menu
> In Indonesia, unusual animals, including endangered species, are
> consumed as health remedies, impotency cures or gourmet treats.
Is this really what AR types are honestly proposing as an alternative to
conventional medicine? I can see that it eliminates the need for
vivisection, etc. but surely it's just as cruel?
Michael Saunby
Gorgeous George
No Saunby that would be wishful thinking on your part given your
history of animal abuse and self confessed perversions.
saunby+pervert
saunby+goatshagger
.
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- Sir Winston Churchill
The Eagle Has Landed, he's coming to get you.
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Rodney Myrvaagnes
>
>People everywhere have eating habits that can be hard for others to
>stomach. The French enjoy frog legs and snails. Australians eat
>kangaroos. Americans boil lobsters alive. Dogs are popular in much of
>Asia. Thais eat crickets, Japanese eat sea urchin eggs, and Chinese
>eat everything from raw scorpions to pickled ants. But in Indonesia,
>the variety and brutality are noteworthy.
New Yorkers and Parisians have eaten sea urchin eggs (right out of the
sea urchin), long before the spread of Japanese restaurants. Indeed,
the Japanese usually take the roe/gonad mix out and serve it in a much
more visually-refined manner.
I still remember the first time I saw a sea urchin, over 40 years ago.
I was at the bar in the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Terminal when the
lady to my left ordered one.
It was unnerving to a young man, and I didn't get up the nerve to try
it for a week Much later in Paris it was a bistro standard served the
same way.
Frogs legs and snails also are not so narrowly appreciated.
Rodney Myrvaagnes NYC J36 Gjo/a
The sound of a Great Blue Heron's wingbeats going by your head
Tony Lew
The Italians in New York State aren't too far behind:
Dear friends...
the following literally makes me sick to my stomach... it's graphically
cruel and very sad, so beware...
If this outrages you as much as it does me, please take a moment to sign
this petition:
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/hare1213/
melody
To: Thomas J. Spota, District Attorney
During a weekend family gathering at the Loverso home in Bay Shore,
Matteo Loverso and Rosario Loverso, (father and son) shot a video
entitled “our vacation”. This horrible, heartbreaking tape consisted of
large, brown rabbits being punched and slapped repeatedly with full
force by two adult males, Matteo and Loverso. It shows the rabbits being
set upon by the family dog at the command of the son while family
members cheered him on. It shows the rabbit, in shock and pain with a
broken back, slowly and futilely trying to get away. The film shows
living rabbits being used for karate practice while being held upside
down by members of the family. It shows the rabbits being kicked, held
by their hind legs, swung around and hurled into the air. Throughout
this entire video, one of the most disturbing features is the background
noise of laughter and banter exhibited by the family toward the animal's
plight. Mixed with that are the awful and heart wrenching sounds of
distress, the screaming that rabbits will do when in moral danger. The
sound is similar to that of a small child. Finally, at the end, a rabbit
that had been punched into unconsciousness wakes up while it is being
skinned. They never stopped. The rabbit screamed in unimaginable pain,
but they never stopped skinning him. The brutal and tremendous violence
in full view of children who are observed in the video, is particularly
disturbing.
We the undersigned protest the extreme cruelties committed by the
Loverso family in Bay Shore under the thin veil of “tradition”. We ask
that maximum felony charges are filed against Matteo Loverso and Rosario
Loverso as well as any other individual involved in this horrific case
Jake
disease jump the species line.
Jake
Aliona
Very interesting information, but I agree with Hardi Baktiantoro - it
is very brutal. And it is very sad that people believe that these
animals can cure. living in the world that is ruled by money I can
understand the Cobra Man, but there should be done something. We have
wildlife and nature to admire it not to eliminate it.
digimon
Gorgeous George <geor...@iname.com> wrote in message news:<t6tp5vg7aqkrsh6oo...@4ax.com>...
