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December 2009 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Black-footed ferret Feature: Wildlife management Feature: Blue whales The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte Mosaic Reviews

Stiff, withered, inert. Packed inside enormous glass jars, their small bodies shared shelf space with curls of lizard skin, shards of shark cartilage and a colossal overstock of ginseng. This was not what I had come to see. I was on an undercover tour of Vancouver’s Chinatown, hunting for products containing illicit bear bile, which is used in traditional Chinese medicine. My guide, Ernie Cooper, Canada’s top wildlife-trafficking investigator, was being increasingly thwarted in his search. The bear-bile trade had effectively gone underground. Instead, Cooper was turning his attention to the subtle nuances distinguishing the nearly 50 species of sea horse, many of which are threatened.

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