My pet topic so excuse me if I jump around but it is a big subject: I agree with earlier replies. If you are an animal you must kill to live. Even this is not the whole truth as plants compete and kill each other every day. Things we learn from gardening. We don't teach these truths in school.

A few more things we have to know: China exports a lot of cat and dog fur and some people were buying these trims on jackets and parkas without knowing. That market is now being blocked in the EU. The bear farms in China and Korea are horrific. The bears are kept chained and imobilized in steel cages so that a plastic tube can drain the gall bladder fluid from a hole in the belly. Naturally these holes get infected.

Importation of many of these medicines are blocked in western countries but they still come in in hand baggage and the market is mainly Asian, Malayasia, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, LA and San Francisco, Korea etc.

Vegetarianism is no answer to the ethical problems raised and I don't know why this isn't voiced more often. If we wear cotton and eat beans instead of using fur, leather, wool and eating meat we are still cutting down the forest to grow the cotton and soybeans. Get it? Human population growth and consumerism drives ecosystem convertion from natural animal-filled forests to farm vegetation with domestic animals.

A restaurant owner in Beijing was on TV yesterday telling about his 8 children. Eight children in the land of 1-child policy! This is often the norm in Mexico and all forests will be cut down in Indonesia in the next 15 years. Say goodbye to it all. They don't miss it till it's gone then they say "it disappeared". Take paradise, put up a parking lot.

I put my money where my mouth is. I bought 58 acres of swamp and mixed cedar forest in Canada. I protect all the animals and plants there but I do use some of it myself, being part of this ecosystem. There is more land for sale if anybody wants to know (60 acres, south Ontario, cheap). Tropical land is generally more diverse and holds many more species but protecting land in a foreign country is a different set of challenges.