It still boggles the mind as to man’s propensity to kill wantonly for the sake of profit, sport, self-esteem and personal glory.
I remember the old days when I would accompany groups of Chinese towkays owning semi-auto shotguns on weekend hunting trips.
In those days, the forests were teeming with wildlife such as green pigeon or flying fox (large fruit bats), and when using the gun against these unwary animals seemed embarrassingly unfair.
What my friends would do is to wait for information that the edible bats – with wingspans measuring some three to four feet – were leaving their roosting place to look for food.
While waiting at a designated spot – a crossroads where the flying targets were most vulnerable – the sky above us would be darkened and that’s when we let loose with the guns using No. 8 cartridges (each with 400 pellets) to ensure a substantial success.
Scores would fall from the sky, some into thick shrubs that made it difficult to retrieve, but never mind, there are many more.
If the shooter is not satisfied with the number of kills, he would try to coax the bats to fly lower to ensure a better success rate.
What the hunter would do was to capture an injured bat and then after pinning the animal down, get a stick and use a crude way of putting pressure on its wing bone so that it will shriek.
This would lure its friends to dive low in an attempt to save their injured friend, only to suffer the same fate as all the other fallen creatures.
I’ve not only seen but also heard the story about how a businessman on an evening drive spotted a Orang Belanda (proboscis monkey) feeding on the ground near a mangrove forest, shot the primate and drove off.
None of the hunters reported the matter, even though the monkey is a totally protected species, because I suppose they too were guilty of some cruel or indiscriminate act against God’s fauna.
The worst case I heard about also happened about 25 years ago at the Batang Ai National Park where an off-duty police sergeant killed a male orang utan in the presence of his group of hunters.
I only learnt about it a year later when a member of the hunting party – a senior government official who could not live with his guilty conscience – told me the story of how the ape was decapitated, skinned and eaten.
Never mind the culling and killing which is going on, this is what happened and is probably still happening today.
Only two weeks ago, a man used a hammer to club to death a young saltwater crocodile that was accidentally caught in a fishing trap.
Despite the video footage of the incident, it is most likely the man with the hammer has not been prosecuted!
Which brings me to the sad story of how Sarawak’s natives were responsible for the annihilation of Borneo’s iconic two-horned Sumatran rhinoceros.
Before World War II, there were probably several thousand Borneo rhinoceros (Didermocerus sumatrenis harrissoni) in Sarawak, but the pachyderm (thick skinned animals such as elephants, hippopotamus and rhinoceros) is now almost extinct!
In 1956, Sarawak Museum curator Tom Harrisson predicted the animal’s fate 70 years ago when he wrote in the museum journal that just after the war, he spotted the fresh tracks of the rhino at the Sarawak-Kalimantan border.
He said: “I am probably the last non-Bornean to have come across the fresh tracks of the two-horned rhino. Today (1956), there are almost certainly not more than two living in Sarawak.”
Harrisson, a British major who led a group of Allied Forces intelligence officers, raised an army of Kelabits to fight the Japanese at the tail end of World War II, said: “Although any Dayak was free to kill one (rhino) on sight, the Sarawak museum has no specimens…it is the bitterest, most shameful void in all our collection.”
Harrisson said that the Chinese were chiefly responsible for the use of rhino horns from the time of the Tang Dynasty and may have sought the product in Borneo more than 1,000 years ago.
Rhino hunting was and still is a lucrative business because in the 1950s, one animal carcass could fetch several thousand dollars, which was a large fortune in the old days.
Sarawak government records show that there were at least seven rhino “slaughterhouses” (abattoirs) in Marudi, Lawas, Limbang, Belaga, Sibu, Kapit, Kanowit and Bintulu between 1925 and 1931.
In Marudi alone, 70 rhinos were killed between 1925 and 1931.
Harrisson said: “Unbelievable though it may seem, the government took no realistic action to protect an obviously vulnerable, slow-moving…and nearly blind beast.”
In the process of using the various body parts of the animal for religious purposes as well as its ground horn shavings for aphrodisiacal reasons, the natives discovered a body part for a novel use.
It was the Orang Ulu upriver natives who discovered that the rhinoceros was endowed with a unique sex organ in the shape of a cross-piece, and decided to imitate and fashion one on humankind.
Called a palang or “penis pin”, the process of making one entailed driving a hole through the head of the organ before it was fitted with an implement shaped like a crossbar.
In ancient times a special Irau feast was held during the making of a palang where the young men underwent this painful ceremony to prove their manhood.
After the killing of a sacrificial pig in the early hours of the morning, the candidate would dip into the icy cold river where the shaman would start the hole-puncturing process.
A small bone or bamboo is then left in the hole until the flesh heals – after the bamboo is pulled out, it leaves an aperture into which the palang is fitted.
In some cases, the young men would make a small bone or bamboo palang – the width of the penis head – and place half inch long pig hair into two holes at each end of the palang.
The users say this is to satisfy their partner, but in reality, it’s to satisfy their egos.
We may pride ourselves with having “invented” a new sexual device, but the age-old art of making penis pins had long been practised in Europe, America and Asia.
Looking back, it was the Russian revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin who said: “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.”
So there you have it, this is the story of mankind.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the New Sarawak Tribune.
