Concern about the use of threatened species in traditional Asian medicines grew in the late 1980s as numbers of rhinoceroses and tigers plummeted, largely because of poaching for the medicinal trade. Thousands of species of animals and plants are used in traditional Asian medicines and many of these species are controlled in international trade. In fact, in many cases such controls were partly as a result of demand for medicinal ingredients. Examples include: horn from rhinoceros, musk pods from musk deer, bile salts from bears, bones from tigers and leopards and stems from orchids
