From using it for medical purpose to showing one’s status, humans have hunted various animals for a number of reasons and purposes. In this video, we are going to talk about the 10 Animals that are Hunted Due to Their High Price.
10. Totoaba Swim Bladder
Each year, typically between late November and May, huge gillnets—some stretching more than 600 meters or 2,000 feet— are dropped into the waters to catch Totoaba macdonaldi.
This critically endangered species is illegally fished for its prized swim bladders, which can fetch prices between $20,000, and $80,000 per kilo in China.
The Chinese believe that the Totoaba Swim Bladder is rich in collagen, and it is used in skin treatments all over the world. It is also used to help joint pains, as well as several bone applications, and treatments.
Oddly enough, in Mexico, they use these fish bladders to transport large amounts of cocaine. They stuff these fish with vials, filled with pure cocaine, and send thousands of fish overseas, stockpiled with their drugs.
9. Bear Gallbladder
Bear bile has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years, with the first reference appearing in an eighth century medical text prescribing bear bile for maladies like epilepsy, hemorrhoids, and heart pain.
The estimated price of a raw bear bile can cost as much as $24,000 per kilogram. In Japan, the price of retail bile powder is the highest in the world at $33,000 per kilogram.
8. Snake Venom
Milking a cobra may sound insane, but commercial venom extraction can be rewarding for its potential medicinal uses. The poison is used as an antidote if someone is bitten, and its purported pharmaceutical uses are relieving pain, reducing blood pressure, and breaking up blood clots.
These venoms are multipurpose poisons, which is why they fetch such exorbitant prices. As an example, the King Cobra’s venom sells for around $40 per gram, while the Australian brown snake’s venom fetches for about $4,000 per gram.
7. Rhino Horns
In 2012, in South Africa alone, 668 rhinos were killed, or one rhino every 13 hours! In Vietnam, rhino horns are used as symbols of status, and wealth.
Vietnamese also believe that rhino horns have medicinal qualities to cure everything, including cancer, and hangover. Rhino horns can fetch up to $60,000 per kilo.
In South Korea, most over the counter medicine comes from rhino-based production, typically proposed by doctors in the medical field, and applied directly to the patient.
6. Polar Bear Skins
Of the world’s estimated 25,000 Polar Bears, around 16,000 or 65% are thought to live in the arctic regions of Canada. Around 600 or 3% of the Canadian Polar Bear population are killed in Canada annually, under a limited hunt, mostly by native Inuit hunters.
Quotas are established for each management unit, designed to keep harvests at levels the bear population can sustain. Hunting is prohibited in units threatened with population declines.
At roughly $10,000 per coat, the demand for polar bear trade on the black market hasn’t diminished, and the costs are said to be going up, with the devastating statistics to the species’ whispers of extinction moving forward.
It seems global warming, and the melting of the ice caps at the poles, might prove to be less of a worry than that of human interruption.
5. Pangolin Scales
Often described as “scaly anteaters,” pangolins are the world’s only mammal with true scales, armored plates made of keratin. While these scales can protect pangolins even from the bite of a lion, they’re of no use against humans, the animal’s biggest threat.
More than a million pangolins were trafficked between 2000 and 2014. Pangolin scales, which are used for medicinal purposes, can sell for about $3,000 per kilogram.
The Pangolin, which typically weighs anywhere from 80-85 pounds or 31-38 kilograms, can be harvested completely to roughly $10,000 per animal! Add the scales, and you could be looking at a substantial payday.
4. Elephant Tusks
One of the most tragic yet profitable items on this list falls at the feet of our beloved African mammal, the Elephant. Around 100 elephants are illegally poached and killed every day in Africa; a staggering statistic, even more so when you take into account that the elephant is often left without tusks, and robbed of its life at a much too early age.
An estimated number ballparks the Elephant population at almost half of what it was decades ago. At $3,000 per kilogram, the demand seems to only be increasing.
Ivory is used for a variety of things, including dentures, musical instruments, billiard balls, and even the whites in the eyes of statues. No matter what the use, a devastating reality is the slaughtering and illegal poaching of these beautiful creatures, for superficial purposes.
3. Snow Leopard Fur
In Afghanistan, the cunning, stealthy Snow Leopard has more to be worried about than being on the verge of extinction. Their coat, a frosty white crossed, with a vibrant orange, primed with anvil black, is worth $1,000.
This is more money than the average wage an Afghani citizen makes in over a year! Not only the fur, but the skull, the meat, the claws, almost everything is harvested and sold, making the graceful yet fierce animal even more at risk to be killed for money. It is estimated that around 4,000 Snow Leopard are left in the wild.
2. Turtles
Don’t imagine that poachers only ransack the land; they also find plenty to kill in the sea. One of their most popular targets is the hawksbill, the tropical turtle whose beautiful yellow-and-brown shell provides the commodity known as tortoiseshell.
The use of tortoiseshell dates back centuries when it was used in such things as jewelry, hair accessories or maquetry. Although the Hawksbill turtle is officially listed as “critically endangered” and selling it was banned in 1973, products made from the majestic creatures’ carapace continues in many parts of the world.
For all sea turtles, including the leatherbacks and green turtles, poaching is potentially catastrophic. The animals take so long to reach breeding age, more than 30 years in some cases, that many are killed before they ever have the chance to reproduce.
1. Tigers
Tigers are hunted, not only for their skins, which are laid out as a status symbol in some wealthy Chinese circles, but for their bones, which is made into wine, and promoted as a treatment for rheumatism and impotence.
According to the Hindustan Times, one tiger rug cost $124,000, while a stuffed tiger cost $700,000. A tiger paw is worth $1000, while the bones may be sold in powdered form for $64-$168 per pound. And these are the 10 Animals that are Hunted Due to Their High Price.