We know that wildlife trafficking is bad, largely because it threatens species with extinction and helps fuel organized crime. But we humans are pretty self-centered creatures, so it’s easy to follow up knowledge that, say, rare fishes are dying out with “That’s sad, but how does that really affect me?” Well, here’s a story that’ll hit closer to home: A Chinese man was recently washing his dog in a river, hopefully having a good old time with his pet, when he was attacked by a piranha.
The man has been identified as 31-year old Zhang Kaibo, who was giving his pooch a bath in the Liujiang river, which is located in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region in Southern China. According to the AFP, Kaibo received cuts in his hands when he shook the fish loose, but was otherwise okay enough to take the piranha home (!), where a friend was also bitten while trying to play with handle the fish.
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But, wait, piranhas are only native to South America. What were they doing in China? Well, as Helga Brandt unfortunately discovered in You Only Live Twice, the razor-toothed fish have been transported all over the world.
Yet even with bans in place, piranhas are still being smuggled throughout Asia. And once animals are brought somewhere, to become pets or food or whatever, they have a real tendency to escape. And so poor Mr. Zhang ended up being assaulted by a scaly assassin. From the AFP’s report:
The importation of piranhas for exotic aquariums is banned in China and other Asian countries due to fears that the fish will enter local waterways and breed rapidly without predators.
Philippine police arrested five people for selling piranhas in December last year.
The problem is, species dragged around the world eventually escape, which wreaks havoc on native species like frogs. At the same time, collecting fishes for aquariums has decimated native populations. So yeah, piranhas are the fish equivalent of doing a flaming burnout, and that means people in need of upping their badass quotient want to own them. But it’s a terrible idea, and not just because they end up swimming around in rivers waiting for a tasty hand to appear. But perhaps a couple dudes getting gnawed on will get people thinking before their pet sea bass escapes.
Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.
