Why the gall bladders of bears are smuggled?
(i) Because they fetch lot of money
(ii) Because they are apparently useless
(iii) Because they are used for making drugs
Directions: Study the situation given below and answer these questions.
On November 26, 1993, the airport police caught a youth Sravan Kumar trying to smuggle 98 dried bear gall bladders out the country. They looked like shriveled black mangoes and no one but an expert could say that the weird looking things came from an animal. Even experts could falter in identifying the species of the animal the gall bladders came from. This if the gall bladders came from the Himalayan brown bear as the airport police suspected, then Sravan Kumar should have been prosecuted under the law. Actually, drugs made from bear gall bladder are used in Tibetan medicine as cures for various ailments including joint aches, rheumatism, cataracts, gall stones, cancer and even as aphrodisiacs. Since these drugs are highly reputed (despite their being actually useless), the intact gall bladders of bear sell in the international markets at phenomenal rates. This has caused poaching of bears and the consequent fall in bear population.
Sravan Kumar understood that he had been caught red-handed. The best way to circumvent the law was to deny that these were bear gall bladders. Consequently, he asserted that the gall bladders had been taken out from pigs and not from bears. Since pig is not protected species in the Act, Sravan Kumar could go scot free. He banked upon the fact that the gall bladders of large mammals look quite alike and extremely difficult to distinguish one from the other. In effect, the question belonged to pigs or to bears. It was at this state that the airport police asked for my help.
Despite common belief, forensic science doesn’t enter to solving murders, killings or assassinations. Forensic science is the application of scientific knowledge to solve any legal dispute. Since here the police did face a legal dilemma, forensic science could come to their rescue.
During recent years, the law enforcement agencies involved in protecting wildlife are increasingly turning to forensic sciences to bring the culprits to book. Protected animals are killed either because of false beliefs in the curative powers of medicines made form their body part or because of their valuable furs or hides or sometimes just for plain fun. Poaching of elephants for ivory is a common problem. But ivory comes from a number of sources (as many as fifteen), and often the criminals find it convenient to assert the ivory is illegal, trading in the ivory of now extinct mammoths and mastodons is totally legal (where there would hardly a point in making it illegal, since mammoths and mastodons are already extinct). These is synthetic ivory too, which is plastic like material. Whenever smugglers are caught with ivory, their standard answer is that the ivory is from a mammoth which is completely legal.
Forensic science once again comes to the rescue of wildlife officers. It helps in differentiating Ivory coming various sources. Mammoth ivory is usually darker than elephant ivory, since it contains traces of iron which has oxidized over time, but that is not always the case. The best way ivory from various sources can be distinguished is by observing what are known as Schreyer lines. Ivory is criss-crossed by dentinal tubules, which can be seen under a scanning electron micro-scope (SEM) as straight lines. These tubules were first described by a German researcher Schreger, after whom these lines are named. These Schreger lines form a unique pattern in each species. For instance, while in elephants, these lines always meet at an angle greater than 110 degrees, in mammoths, the form is a very conveniently basis for differentiating between the ivories of mammoth and elephant.