Tiger Poachers Use Fishing Boats to Smuggle Body Parts Out of Malaysia, Study Shows 

A Malayan tiger walks in its enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden in Cincinnati, July 7, 2023. (AP)
A Malayan tiger walks in its enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden in Cincinnati, July 7, 2023. (AP)
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Tiger Poachers Use Fishing Boats to Smuggle Body Parts Out of Malaysia, Study Shows 

A Malayan tiger walks in its enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden in Cincinnati, July 7, 2023. (AP)
A Malayan tiger walks in its enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden in Cincinnati, July 7, 2023. (AP)

Commercial fishing fleets have been playing a key role in trafficking parts of tigers poached in Malaysia, according to research released Wednesday that could help enforcement efforts to save the critically endangered cat.

The fishing boats are part of a network of routes used by sophisticated teams of poachers to move parts of illegally killed Malayan Tigers and other poached animals to Vietnam, according to the study by conservation organizations Panthera and ZSL in conjunction with Malaysia's Sunway University.

Through interviews with more than four dozen people involved in the operations, including poachers and those who brokered sales of the illicit goods, researchers found that fishing boats were able to carry larger consignments, cheaper, and less likely to be checked by customs than land or air routes.

“To really crack a problem and insert the right intervention that's going to have any impact you have to understand the thing inside out,” said Panthara's Rob Pickles, the lead author of the study, in a phone interview from Kuala Lumpur. “That's what we hope that this study does — contribute to that depth of understanding of the problem to allow us to tailor the interventions.”

From a population estimated at some 3,000 tigers in the middle of the 20th century, the latest estimates are that there are only about 150 of the cats left in Malaysia and they have already gone extinct in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam over the last 25 years.

In addition to poaching, tigers have lost much of their habitat to deforestation, and they have been falling victim in recent years to the canine distemper virus while a major source of food, the wild boar, has been decimated by the African swine fever virus.

“It's their last gasp,” Pickles said. “This is the last chance to turn things around.”

The tigers live in the forests of peninsular Malaysia, which is connected by land to Thailand to the north. They have also been targeted by poachers from Malaysia, Cambodia and Thailand, but researchers said the Vietnamese teams operate on a “different order of magnitude.”

Almost all from the poor, rural and rugged province of Quang Binh, where many took to the jungles to escape relentless American bombing during the Vietnam War, the poachers use well-honed bushcraft skills to live as small teams in the forests for three to five months at a time on poaching excursions.

They capture wild tigers with heavy steel snares made of wires as thick as a person's index finger, as well as other animals.

Once caught, the tigers are killed and processed largely for their bones, which are boiled for days until they become a gelatinous glue-like substance that is pressed into small blocks and sold for perceived medicinal benefits. Claws and teeth are used to make amulets.

As Malaysia went on lockdown during the COVID pandemic, poaching operations came to a near standstill. The researchers were able to use the time to find and interview more than 50 individuals involved in the operations for the study, which was done in two phases concluding in 2024.

Researchers learned that fishing boats were also used to carry bear paws and bile, live civets, wild boar tusks and meat, pangolins, monitor lizards and turtles.

One person told researchers the fishing boats were ideal to send larger items like tiger skins.

“Nobody checks,” the interviewee was quoted as saying. “In addition, people can go back by boat so many things also can be brought back by this route.”

Malaysia and Vietnam have both been increasing maritime controls recently, making trafficking by fishing boats riskier.

Malaysian authorities have also had success in catching poachers and have substantially increased punishments for wildlife crime in recent years, though the study also found that the managers who send the teams into the forests are rarely caught and can easily recruit replacements.

Researchers also learned that many Vietnamese poachers take on significant debt to travel to Malaysia.

They recommend that in addition to focusing more on fishing boats, authorities should target potential poachers in their home villages in Quang Binh with information about the increasing risks and diminishing returns to try and dissuade them from coming to Malaysia in the first place.

Officials in Malaysia and Vietnam, both of which were celebrating public holidays this week, did not respond to requests for comment on the survey and its recommendations.

“We can’t arrest our way out of a problem or over-rely on the criminal justice system,” said ZSL's Gopalasamy Reuben Clements, a co-author of the report.

“We need to explore other approaches, such as highly targeted behavioral change interventions, that can run in parallel to arrests and prosecutions.”



How Did a Jet Flip Upside Down on a Toronto Runway and Everyone Survive?

A Delta Air Lines plane that crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport is seen on February 18, 2025 in Toronto, Canada. (Getty Images/AFP)
A Delta Air Lines plane that crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport is seen on February 18, 2025 in Toronto, Canada. (Getty Images/AFP)
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How Did a Jet Flip Upside Down on a Toronto Runway and Everyone Survive?

A Delta Air Lines plane that crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport is seen on February 18, 2025 in Toronto, Canada. (Getty Images/AFP)
A Delta Air Lines plane that crashed at Toronto Pearson International Airport is seen on February 18, 2025 in Toronto, Canada. (Getty Images/AFP)

Investigators are probing the causes of an unusual plane crash at Canada's largest airport on Monday, when a regional jet flipped upside down upon landing during windy weather, sending 21 of the 80 people on board to hospital.

Video shows the Delta Air Lines plane belly up and missing its right wing at Toronto's Pearson Airport, and of the crash that involved no fatalities, circulated widely on social media. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada said on Tuesday that parts of the plane -- a Bombardier-made CRJ900 -- separated after impact and the fuselage came to rest slightly off the right side of the runway, upside down, facing the other direction.

The TSB said it is too early to know what happened and why. Here is what we know about this accident and similar crashes.

HOW DOES A PLANE LAND UPSIDE DOWN?

US aviation safety expert Anthony Brickhouse said aircraft are normally designed to land first on the two main landing gear, and then the nose gear. While the cause of the accident is unclear, the type of impact on the runway likely damaged the landing gear, leaving the plane imbalanced.

Brickhouse said that the plane ending up pointing in the opposite direction speaks to the amount of force and speed that led it to change direction.

"With all the forces and everything going on, if that wing is not there to support the aircraft it's going to go over," Brickhouse said. "It's not something that we see regularly, but when structures start failing, they can't do their job and the aircraft is going to react to the different forces on it."

HOW DID EVERYONE SURVIVE?

Passengers say they were hanging upside down in their seats after the crash.

"All of the passengers were wearing the safety belts. This prevented more serious injuries from occurring," said Mitchell Fox, director of the Asia Pacific Center for Aviation Safety.

Airplane seats are designed to withstand the force of 16 times the normal pull of gravity, or 16Gs, in a crash, whereas wings and fuselage are designed to handle 3-5Gs.

"In an impact-survivable crash, it's more important for the seats to hold up, giving passengers the best chance of survival," said Raj Ladani, a program manager for aerospace engineering at Australia's RMIT University. Good evacuation is key to air accident survivability, as witnessed last year when all 379 people escaped a burning Japan Airlines plane after a runway collision.

"The crew did a remarkable job of evacuating all of the passengers expeditiously," Fox said of the Delta crash.

HAS THIS HAPPENED BEFORE?

While rare, there have been cases of large jets flipping over on landing, including three accidents involving McDonnell Douglas' MD-11 model.

In 2009, a FedEx freighter turned over on landing in windy conditions on the runway at Tokyo's Narita airport, killing both pilots. The left wing was broken and separated from the fuselage attaching point and the airplane caught fire.

In 1999, a China Airlines flight inverted at Hong Kong while landing during a typhoon. The plane touched down hard, flipped over and caught fire, killing three of 315 occupants.

In 1997, another FedEx freighter flipped over at Newark in the United States, with no fatalities.

Brickhouse said it is too early to draw any conclusions from these earlier cases, especially as the MD-11 is a three-engine aircraft and the CRJ900 has two engines mounted toward the back of the aircraft, producing different flight dynamics.

HOW WILL THE INVESTIGATION PROCEED?

Unlike other investigations in which parts of the plane have gone missing, and there are mass fatalities, investigators will be able to interview all 76 passengers and four crew.

Investigators have access to the fuselage and wing, which are on the runway, and the black boxes -- the flight data and cockpit voice recorders -- have been sent for analysis.

"This is going to be a textbook investigation," Brickhouse said. "Some accidents, a lot of the pieces of the puzzle are missing. But right now looking at this accident, all the puzzle pieces are there. It's just you piecing them back together at this point."