Slaughter tapping is an obsolete method of extracting large quantities of natural latex from

rubber tree ''Hevea brasiliensis'', the Pará rubber tree, ''sharinga'' tree, seringueira, or most commonly, rubber tree or rubber plant, is a flowering plant belonging to the spurge family, Euphorbiaceae, originally native to the Amazon basin, but is now p ...

s in a forest environment. Before commercial exploitation of latex-bearing trees such as ''

Hevea brasiliensis ''Hevea brasiliensis'', the Pará rubber tree, ''sharinga'' tree, seringueira, or most commonly, rubber tree or rubber plant, is a flowering plant belonging to the spurge family, Euphorbiaceae, originally native to the Amazon basin, but is now p ...

'' in the Amazon Basin and '' Funtumia elastica'' in the Congo, native populations limited harvesting to non-lethal tapping of the latex. However, with the rising demand for rubber worldwide in the late nineteenth century, debt-slave "hunters" began tapping more intensively, using ladders to extract as much latex as possible from all areas of the tree, killing the tree as a result. This "slaughter tapping" resulted in the destruction of all latex-bearing trees across large swathes of sub-Saharan Africa and South America. Eventually, the establishment of rubber

plantation Plantations are farms specializing in cash crops, usually mainly planting a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. Plantations, centered on a plantation house, grow crops including cotton, cannabis, tob ...

s in the

Far East The Far East is the geographical region that encompasses the easternmost portion of the Asian continent, including North Asia, North, East Asia, East and Southeast Asia. South Asia is sometimes also included in the definition of the term. In mod ...

made "hunting" of naturally occurring rubber trees unprofitable, and the practice largely ceased in the early twentieth century.

References

* Hobhouse, Henry (2003, 2005). Seeds of Wealth: Five Plants That Made Men Rich. Shoemaker & Hoard. pp. 141–142. {{ISBN, 1-59376-089-2. Rubber Environmental issues with forests