Frozen Bear Legs Discovered on Bus
In this week’s crime blotter: sun bear legs on a bus in Vietnam, a drugged-out pet orangutan, and a ranger charged with poaching a rhino he was supposed to be protecting.
Aboard a bus in central Vietnam, police discovered 18 frozen bear legs on Tuesday. The bus driver and bus owner told police that a man had paid them to drive the macabre booty from Laos to Vietnam, Thanh Nien News reports.
Police confiscated the legs, which weighed nearly 84 pounds (38 kilograms), and the bus for further investigation. The final destination was unclear, but the shipment originated in Laos, a major source of illegal wildlife products for the Asian market.
The legs were from sun bears, according to the report, which are native to the tropical forests of Southeast Asia and parts of China. They’re endangered in Vietnam. While data on their numbers are scarce, their populations are
