The price of gold? A note on the illegal trade in Asiatic golden cats and other small felids between Mizoram (India) and Myanmar

Wildlife represents an important natural resource for many rural communities, including northeastern India. Many species, in fact, have been an integral part of community lifestyles and culture, contributing to food, traditional medicine, supplemental income, and cultural rituals and practices. The link between a rural community’s socio-economic needs, its development, and its wellbeing, and that community’s dependence on wildlife resources, is complicated, making hunting challenging to disrupt. The commercial value of products coming from rarer species has increased due to growing demand among the middle class across Asia, which is having a negative impact on species populations (Pernetta 2009; Janssen and Krishnasamy 2018). In fact, wildlife trade is so profitable that it is now considered the second largest direct threat to the survival of many species, after habitat destruction (IFAW 2016). For many species, however, hunting and trafficking is the most serious threat to their existence today, and has pushed them to brink of extinction. In recent years, as tigers, leopards, and snow leopards have become rarer, and trade in their parts more challenging due to increased international regulatory policies (e.g. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, CITES), pressure on other, smaller felid species has increased. Clouded leopards (Neofelis nebulosa and N. diardi), Asiatic golden cats (Catopuma temminckii), and marbled cats (Pardofelis marmorata) are among those species being substituted for their larger kin, as trade in their parts has increased across Myanmar, India, China, Malaysia, and Thailand (Nijman and Shepherd 2015; Nijman et al. 2019; Morcatty et al. 2020) among other countries. Currently, the Asiatic golden cat and marbled cat are categorized as ‘Near Threatened’ on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List (McCarthy et al. 2015; Ross et al. 2016); they are also listed as Appendix I species under CITES, and are considered a Schedule I species under the Indian Wildlife Protection Act (1972). Although widely distributed across India’s northeastern states, the status and viability of these wild populations are still unclear, although all are believed to have been declining for years. Here we report on incidents that are consistent with a flourishing illegal trade in rare small cat species along the Indo–Myanmar border.