A young Vietnamese woman’s husband fell ill. Desperate for a cure, she later recounted, she visited the local Buddhist temple. A monk there instructed her to “release 40 birds, one for every year of your husband’s life.” So she did, purchasing and releasing 40 birds at the temple grounds. The woman soon rejoiced; her husband made a full recovery.

This is a common story in Asia, where “merit releases” of captive wild animals are performed in Buddhist rituals. But the practice raises concern amongst the conservation community for its potential to impact threatened species. Before a bird can be freed, it has to be captured—often just after having been released by someone else. The result is the denuding of wild populations and a vast recycling of mistreated animals, most of which are likely die on one of their ersatz flights to freedom. As if that were not bad enough, the dead, disease-ridden animals are then sold in food markets.

» View Photos of Merit Releases in Asia

“We were staggered by the number of birds moving through this trade,” says Martin Gilbert, a veterinarian at the Wildlife Conservation Society who recently co-authored a study in Biological Conservation on merit releases. “It’s a very good rational and understandable thing to do, to let captive animals go free,” he says. “But in certain situations, it creates a trade purely for demand for animals in cages.”

Gilbert and his colleagues monitored daily sales of merit release birds in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, over a period of 13 months. From their findings, they estimated nearly 700,000 animals pass through the local trade annually. They recorded a total of 57 bird species in the cages, including globally near-threatened Asian golden weavers and vulnerable yellow-breasted buntings. 

“This paper highlights the potentially huge impact merit releases have on a few birds that are easily caught and are already of conservation concern,” says John Pilgrim, a conservation consultant who specializes in Southeast Asia and Melanesia and who was not involved in the study.

Gilbert says he knows of only one other study, conducted in Hong Kong, which attempted to estimate merit release figures. The numbers were comparable, reporting that Hong Kong Buddhist temples released up to 580,000 birds per year.

“It’s pretty scary that this [new] paper estimates just a dozen families in two small markets sold more than 630,000 birds per year,” Pilgrim says.

Conservationists do not know how the merit release market figures into Asia’s overall wildlife trade, which also exploits wild birds for pets, food, passerine fights and song contests. Globally, trade in wild birds impacts about 400 species that are listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, or one third of all threatened bird species. No one know how many birds succumb each year to the wildlife trade since much of the trafficking is illegal, but within Southeast Asia alone, it is likely “in the order of tens of millions,” says Kelly Edmunds, a researcher at the University of East Anglia in England who investigates the emerging infectious diseases amongst bird sellers in Asia and was not involved in the study.

Buddhists free captive animals in order to accumulate health and longevity merits for themselves and loved ones. The exact origins of the practice are unclear, though it was mentioned in fifth-century Chinese Buddhist texts that instructed followers to “practice the act of releasing animals due to the mind of compassion.”

4 Comments

1. 1. Jazzism 09:32 AM 8/1/12

   'may' and 'could'? Junk science. I call shenanigans and come back when there's actual concrete evidence. Too much emphasis on issues on the basis of 'maybe's' and enough is enough.

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2. 2. clacroix 03:01 PM 8/1/12

   Not just Asia.Atlantic lobsters now breeding in Pacific Ocean near Vancouver are thought to have been introduced by this 'merit' chasing.

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3. 3. denverjims 04:13 PM 8/3/12

   This just in: Homo Sapiens living on Earth MAY add to 'non-natural' polution of planet. All humans urged to commit suicide on the possibility this MIGHT be true.

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4. 4. jonathanseer 01:28 AM 8/7/12

   Somebody needs to talk to the people ineffectively trying to save the gharials with the wisdom in these words.....
   
   "Gilbert imagines programs forged between researchers and Buddhist communities in which declining native species are captive-bred and then released by practitioners. The Society for Conservation Biology and Buddhist communities are already exploring initial ways of doing this."
   
   While I don't imagine releasing gharials per se, I can imagine turning to local people and training them to nurture the species, and in return being allowed to harvest some of what they raise to sell to make money to survive instead of the current system where all contact is illegal.

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