Email

Print

Exotic dishes such as peccary, armadillo, crocodile tail, and deer leg are usually rare in Belize. But not recently. Just like those folks from Douglas Village who’ve all had to evacuate, the floods have pushed wildlife to the edge of their natural habitats – right into the sights of hunters. That’s caused a bounty of game for some vendors but two who didn’t have a permit to hunt or sell these animals have been strung up. I found out more today.

Jacqueline Godwin Reporting,
The hundreds of pounds of confiscated game meat are believed to have come from animals that were forced out of their natural habitat by flood waters in the Belize River Valley. The white tail deer, gibnut, peccary, armadillos, and even a crocodile were likely killed by hunters taking advantage of the plight of the wild animals.

George Hanson, Enforcement Officer – Forestry Department
“The main issue here though is not that we are targeting the little guy that is hunting to subsidize his table. We try to target those individuals that are killing large quantities of deer like 5 or 6 or up to 8 we hear and the majority of those people are not even from the villages. So they go into these areas right now because of the flooding and they are taking advantage because most of the animals are trying to congregate on these higher ground, they don’t have anywhere to go and in a sense you are fishing in a bucket so basically they go in there and they just massacre these animals. You can see very young and undersized. Even with a license we are not going to allow someone to hunt a specie that small.”

The find was the result of an early morning operation that led to the arrest of two Bermudian Landing businessmen: one Chinese the other American.

ASP Ralph Moody, Special Patrol Unit
“We set up an operation for this morning at 3 am. We set up a checkpoint between Bermudian Landing and Burrell Boom Village until about 7:30 to 8 this morning. From there we went into the village of Bermudian Landing where we conducted searches of two business establishments.”

The two business owners Yung Guang He and James E. Beachy are naturalized Belizeans who were taken to the police station after the meat was found at their business places.

George Hanson,
“By checking these establishments they didn’t have any dealer’s license to be dealing this game meat. They didn’t want to provide us with any information in terms of who they got it from so in this they don’t have a permit, by law it is illegal and therefore we confiscated the meat and also we’re going to charge those individuals.”

James Beachy who operates a gas station and store could not produce a dealer’s license.

George Hanson,
“And this individual had no dealer’s license for all this meat that he has and he cannot give us any information who he bought it from. He is either protecting someone or we are not sure what’s going on with him. In this case then he will be charged for illegal hunting and also for illegal selling without a provisional dealer’s license.”

Yung Guang He was first found at the road block with these four deer hooves.

George Hanson,
“After we went back to his establishment we found he had actually meat from a crocodile so that’s also a protected species and so he will be charged for those as well.

Over the past week we’ve been getting a lot of complaint generally from a lot of the community in the Belize River Valley because of a lot of illegal hunting.”

It is believed the animals were recently killed. The illegal hunting has also been creating problem for area residents.

George Hanson,
“Some of them are relatively fresh. As you can see some of them are still soft so we assumed they had it a day or two. Some of them are much older than that because they are solid frozen and you can see from the meat texture it is hard already because of the freezer burn. So you could determine that some of the meat are much more fresh than others. From the deer you can see there are different pieces, there is not a whole one. There is half there, a quarter there, and so this guy probably was selling the meat. What we are getting in complaints from the villagers is that they can’t even buy the meat from the shops because these guys who deal also take the price so high that the locals cannot afford to go and even buy from those shops.

What we want to do is to tell all hunters is that they need to come in and get a hunting license. If they are going to sell meat they need to get a dealer’s license which could be had at the Forestry Department or any Forest office. Presently what we are doing because of too much hunting, we are trying to reduce the amount of hunters so we’re not issuing any new hunting licenses this year but what we are doing, we are reissuing old licenses, or when they come up for renewal, we renew those. But those that we know consistently break the law, we’re going to cancel those individual licenses.”

The confiscated meat will be donated to needy organizations.

George Hanson,
“In cases like this, particularly with any game meat or fish that we catch, particularly from the marine reserve, we give them to the old people’s home or the children’s home. We don’t want to have anything to do with it because we don’t want the public to think we’re taking the meat and we’re using it for ourselves.”

According to the Forestry Department, they have also received reports that sometime last night a number of deer were also killed but they have yet to find the meat from those animals. Restaurant owners are also being cautioned about buying meat from anyone who does not have a valid dealer’s license. According to the Forestry Department and the police because of an increase in reports of illegal hunting, their combined operation will continue.