At Russia-China Border, Bear Paws Sell Best

BLAGOVESCHENSK, Russia — It was a routine arrest, warranting only a brief mention in the local newspaper, Amur Pravda. Customs agents, suspicious of a woman’s bulky clothing, discovered she had tape wrapped around her torso.

The New York Times

An illicit trade in animal parts has begun in Blagoveschensk.

Removing it, they found the contraband: several large, furry bear paws.

Closed for decades, the border between Russia and China has been creaking open in recent years, allowing more trade and travel but also clearing the way for a peculiar cross-border criminal enterprise in animal parts for Chinese medicine and cooking.

“It is very widespread just now,” Aleksei L. Vaisman, a senior coordinator for Traffic Europe-Russia, a group sponsored by WWF that monitors trade in wild animals, said of the illicit trade in animal parts in the Far East.

Not only bear paws but also bear gallbladders — highly valued for their medicinal and aphrodisiac qualities — frogs, tiger bones, deer musk and the genitals of spotted deer are smuggled daily into China.

But it is bear paws, a ritual dish for the Chinese, that are the most common commodities in this underground market, Mr. Vaisman said. He estimated that thousands were smuggled each year.

While illegal and, to most people perhaps, offensive, the traffic apparently poses no threat to the robust Siberian population of Russian brown bears, a relative of grizzlies, which is rising despite the paw trade.

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