A Vietnamese zoologist has warned that wildlife in Vietnam is being eaten to extinction by an increasing number of locals.

About 200 species of wildlife are sold by poachers to restaurants and resorts that serve a growing number of diners seeking exotic food, professor Dang Huy Huynh, chairman of Vietnam Zoology Association, told participants to a government-sponsored wild animal protection and preservation seminar in Ninh Binh province on Wednesday.

Among the heavily traded and eaten species in Vietnam are snakes, monitor lizards, pangolins, turtles, wild cats, tigers, leopards, bears, elephants, wild boars, deers, monkeys, binturongs, chamoises and porcupines, Huynh said. Also on the Vietnamese menu are meat from the endangered rhinoceros, white-handed gibbon, civet and tapir, he said.

Meat from the rare animals used to serve the demand of people in mountainous areas before 1990, according to Huynh. The market for such meat has since widened to include urban dwellers, mostly government workers and businessmen.

An average 3,400 tons of wild meat, or one million individual creatures, are eaten annually, said Nguyen Dang Vang, deputy chairman of the National Assembly's Science, Technology and Environment Committee.

A 2004 law protecting natural resources has failed to curb the trading of exotic animals. The seminar recommended the issuance of a government decree on wildlife protection enforcement and a public information campaign against eating wildlife meat.