Trade in wild animal species and products derived from them is one of the most profitable illegal activities in the world. It brings in more than $16 billion per year for its perpetrators and ranks in the third position behind trafficking in arms and trafficking in drugs.1
Although deforestation, urbanization, and pollution are the primary causes of the disappearance of animal and plant species, traffic in animals also has a significant impact on endangered species. Traffic in wildlife specimens both alive and dead—in their organs, their skin, their fur, their feathers, or their bones—can bring about such a reduction in the population of a species that a critical threshold of survival versus extinction is reached.2 This kind of illicit trade brings on a vicious cycle: the rarer a species is, the more expensive it becomes; the more expensive it is, the more it is targeted by traffickers and runs the risk of being wiped out.
Endangered species are protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). This intergovernmental accord, also called the Washington Convention, was signed in 1973 by 170 countries.3 The organization that developed out of this treaty either surveils, regulates, or prohibits international traffic in specific animals whose survival situation is critical.
Bleeding the Ecology and Martyring Animals
According to a 2006 report of the WWF and estimates by CITES, annual illicit trade in wild animals numbers 50,000 monkeys, between 640,000 and 2 million reptiles, 1.5 million birds, 3 million tortoises, and 350 million aquarium fish. This can mean living animals: grey red-tailed parrots, a protected species, as well as boa constrictors, gorillas, tortoises, and leopards. Each year the illegal traffic also includes “derivative products”: 1.6 million lizard skins, 2 million snakeskins, 300,000 crocodile skins, 1.1 million furs, 1 million blocks of coral, and 21,000 hunting trophies.4 These products are used in Chinese medicine and in other traditional medicines. They are also used for decoration, in luxury products, and as good luck charms.
The eggs of the blue parrot of Brazil, also a protected species, sell for up to $4,500 apiece in Europe. But the Amazonian hunter who collects them in the forest gets only $3.50 per egg.5 The wool of the Tibetan antelope (Pantholops hodgsonii, or chiru in Tibetan), considered to be the finest in the world, is used to make the shawls known as “shatoosh” (“wool of wools”), which are sold on the black market for up to $3,300 apiece. Only the very fine hairs on the throat of the animal are taken. This antelope, which has become very rare, has become the object of intensive poaching by Chinese traffickers, who do not hesitate to hunt it by jeep using machine guns. This, despite the fact that the animal has been protected since 1979.
For its part, the organization TRAFFIC estimates that the trade in wild animals each year numbers 500 to 600 million tropical fish, 15 million fur-bearing animals, 5 million birds, 2 million reptiles, and 30,000 primates. This includes several tens of thousands of species. The growing demand for new kinds of pets, such as lizards, chameleons, and other geckos is a catastrophe for those species. According to CITES, in France the illegal trade in protected species of reptiles grew by 250 percent between 2004 and 2009.
In China, bear bile is used in traditional medicine, which attributes all kinds of therapeutic qualities to it. More than ten thousand Asian black bears (also known as moon bears or white-chested bears) are imprisoned for life in cages so that they can be tapped twice a day. Twenty-four hundred of them face the same lot in Vietnam, and an undetermined number in Mongolia. The bear is immobilized day and night in a lying position, and the cages are so small the animals cannot even turn over. The tapping of the bile can begin as early as one year of age: a catheter or a large probe is inserted at the level of the waist into an iron corset that helps to keep the catheter in place. The technicians also use more potent pumps, which are very painful: during the extraction, the animals moan and bang their heads against the bars. Some of them go so far as to chew their own paws.
For the most part injured and emaciated, the bears do not live very long. When they die, they are sent to the butcher, their meat being an expensive and sought-after dish. Some of them survive and endure this torture for ten to twenty years. The preparations using their bile sell for up to $450 for four ounces. After the death of the animal, its gall bladder can be sold for as much as $16,500 on markets in China, Honk Kong, Japan, Macao, South Korea, or Taiwan.6
Jill Robinson, an Englishwoman who has devoted her life to animal protection, visited a bear bile farm for the first time in China in 1993, posing as a tourist. She felt as though she were suddenly in the middle of a horror film. After seven years of research and negotiation, in 2000 she succeeded in obtaining from the China Wildlife Conservation Association and the Sichuan Forestry Department an agreement to free 500 bears.7 This was the first agreement signed by the Chinese government and a foreign organization for the protection of animals. Since then, Robinson has founded the Animals Asia Foundation and created a rescue center for moon bears in Chengdu, the capital of the province of Sichuan. This foundation has already saved 260 bears in China and has recently opened a reserve for them in Vietnam, where bile harvesting is still practiced, although it is illegal.8 According to official figures, 68 bear bile farms are still functioning in China. The Guizhentang Pharmaceutical Company, started in 2000, has in its possession 470 bears, and in view of its success, hopes to bring that number up to 1,200.9 So there still remains a lot for us to do.
Wild animals are not the only victims of illegal trade. In Europe, traffickers do not wait for cats and dogs to reach the legal age before exporting them from one country to another. Puppies and kittens sell much better than the adult animals. Many of them die during transport, which often occurs in very bad conditions. Belgium is the hub of this trade, because it is easy to obtain the European passports there that are now obligatory for the movement of pet animals.
The Twilight of the Tiger
In the course of ten years, the wild tiger population diminished by half due to loss of habitat and poaching. The worldwide population, estimated at 100,000 individuals at the beginning of the twentieth century, has been devastated. Today, there are only roughly 3,200 tigers left in the wild. Tigers have disappeared in 11 of the 24 countries where they once flourished. Three subspecies have already become extinct. Indonesia allowed the tigers of Bali to disappear in the 1930s, and those of Java went in the 1980s. The last of the most Western subspecies of tiger, the Caspian tiger, had died out by 1972.
Keshav Varma, director of the program of the World Bank to save the tiger (the Global Tiger Initiative), estimated that in 2008, when the program was started, there were ten years left in which to save the tiger in the wild. At that time, he lamented: “The means presently in place to prevent this tragedy are clearly insufficient when it comes to fighting the great international mafias that nowadays operate the illegal trade.”10 If the present trend is not reversed, the wild tiger is doomed to disappear.
To that concern we must add the cruelty that prevails in the numerous “tiger farms” that have been set up in China. These are described by Louis Bériot in his Ces Animaux qu’on Assassine (The Animals We Murder): “China holds in captivity in its parks, zoos, and farms—in more than 200 locations—two or three times more tigers than roam free in the world. The operators of the farms and many zoos raise them with the intention of killing them and re-selling them in pieces—the skin, the meat, and the bones—in order to supply the Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese, and American markets. Because tigers reproduce easily in captivity, they have become an animal that is raised ‘in bulk.’”11
One of the places Louis Bériot visited was the Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Mountain Village, where 1,400 tigers from Bengal, Siberia, the south of China, and surrounding countries are kept, as well as 400 black bears from China, 300 lions from Africa, and 500 monkeys. In addition, 200 to 300 frozen tiger cadavers are kept in their freezers.12
This is without a doubt the largest “wild” animal breeding operations in the world. In addition to carrying on this commercial breeding, this vast complex puts on circus performances that attract many visitors.
This enterprise was created in 1993 with the blessings of the government and the regional authorities and benefited from a public grant of more than 350 million yuans (about $39 million). However, the same year, China announced a prohibition of commercial products derived from tigers. Every part of the tiger is sold: its skin, its bones, its penis, its whiskers, its claws, its teeth . . . A tiger skin costs $16,400; its skeleton sells for $219,000. Its bones are used to fabricate a “tonic” wine that is supposed to heal all ills and stimulate all kinds of vital functions. The bones are also used to produce an ointment and other remedies. Once the tigers have attained their full adult size and their bones have ceased to grow, during the weeks preceding their being put to death, they are inadequately fed, even starved. At the Shenyang Forest Wild Animal Zoo, also in China, 40 Siberian tigers died of starvation between December 2009 and February 2010.
Regarding the totality of products derived from the bodies of tigers that are used in Chinese traditional medicine, Andy Fisher of the Wildlife Crime Unit in London says: “Thousands of tests have been carried out on these products and have demonstrated that they bring no more benefit than the ingredients found in cow’s milk.”13 This illegal traffic continues to thrive, in spite of laws that are supposed to prohibit it but which are hardly enforced by the Asian governments concerned.
The Craze for Elephant Tusks, Rhinoceros Horns, and Shark Fins
Twenty-five thousand elephants are killed every year for their ivory. As a result of the report put out by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) on the ruinous poaching that prevailed during the 1980s, an international prohibition of commerce in ivory was promulgated and entered into effect in 1989. For several years, a spectacular reduction in the level of poaching was observed in large parts of Africa. Unfortunately, the demand for ivory remains very strong, and elephant populations are again being decimated. Ivory is highly prized in Asia for jewelry, ornaments, and religious sculptures. The amount of ivory reaching East Asia (especially China) from Africa is estimated to be around 72 tons per year (corresponding to an annual kill of 7,000 elephants), having a value of $300 million.
According to Amanda Gent of the IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare), “At present, a hundred elephants disappear per day in the 36 African countries that still have them. The poachers are directed and paid by Chinese traffickers, who having established themselves in Africa around fifteen years ago, have significantly developed the trade in ivory, a luxury product that is quite sought after in China and in all of Southeast Asia.”14
The recent wave of rhinoceros massacres is in great part due to the widespread claims in the Far East, which are completely without foundation, that rhinoceros horn is a remedy for cancer, impotence, and other ailments. Use of rhinoceros horn powder and possession of sculptures made of rhinoceros horn are also regarded as symbols of wealth. Businessmen do not hesitate to pay $98,000 for a rhinoceros horn, which they go on to sell in powdered form for between $1,000 and $2,000 per dose, which is more expensive than cocaine. All that for a product that has no effect whatsoever.15 In the East, the Chinese Triads of Hong Kong have succeeded in cornering the major part of this traffic. The demand is such that rhinoceros poaching in South Africa (where there are more rhinos than anywhere else in the world) increased 5,000 percent between 2007 and 2012. In 2013 alone, 900 rhinos were killed. One of the animals is killed every ten hours. Today there remain no more than around 25,000 rhinos in the world, compared with 600,000 in the middle of the twentieth century.16
More than 200 million sharks are killed every year, of which 75 million are killed for their fins alone. The fishermen cut off the fins and throw the wounded sharks back into the sea, where they suffer from blood loss and are incapable of determining their direction in the water. Thus they are doomed to certain death. Shark fins are principally sold in de luxe restaurants in Hong Kong, Thailand, and China.
The Links between Corruption, Organized Crime, and Terrorist Groups
A study by Leo Douglas of the multidisciplinary Center for Biodiversity and Conservation and the American Museum of Natural History17 and Kelvin Alie of the IFAW18 have shown that poachers are often associated with the heads of local military groups or with rebel groups that regularly resort to wildlife trafficking to finance their activities.19 This is notably the case of the Janjawid of Chad and the Sudan, the Democratic Liberation Force of Rwanda, and the Somalian Islamic group Al Shabab, who cross the border with Kenya to poach elephants in the Arawale Preserve. The revenue from the poaching ends up financing the purchase of arms and ammunition and thus exacerbates regional conflicts.
According to Kelvin Alie, “The corruption spreads like wildfire and affects the military, border guards, the police, the judiciary system, the customs service, the personnel of the embassies, and even the diplomats of many countries. All of them profit from the illegal trade in wild species and actively support the traffickers.”20 In addition, criminologists have observed that valuable wild animals also serve as currency for criminal and terrorist organizations, because the wildlife trade has become an effective means of laundering money.
The fact is, it is easier, less burdensome, and less dangerous to carry on trade in animals than to risk trafficking rare minerals or other natural resources of value, such as oil, gas, minerals, rare arboreal extracts, and so on. The authorities have a harder time surveilling and wiping out the wildlife trade than trade in these other commodities. Forest rangers and anti-poaching squads are often inadequately equipped and paid. In their small numbers, they are not up to confronting poachers armed with AK–47s and grenade launchers, and they are unable to choke off the networks of traffickers who have considerable means at their disposal for corrupting local officials and crossing borders unmolested.
Tourists also play a role in these malpractices by buying hand-made objects made of ivory, tortoiseshell, and other by-products of the exploitation of protected species. Thus they are complicit in the ongoing poaching. The same goes for collectors of rare species. Taking a great number of animals out of their natural habitat can upset the balance of an ecosystem and break the chain of interdependence that links all the species that are part of it. The impact of this is felt by the local flora and fauna throughout the ecosystem.21
The Hot Spots
The hot spots and pivotal points in the wildlife trade include the Chinese borders and certain parts of Indonesia, Malaysia, New Guinea, the Caribbean, Mexico, the Salomon Islands, Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, as well as the eastern borders of the European Union.
The Chatuchak Weekend Market in Bangkok, for example, is a known center for illegal trade in animals; here they sell lizards, primates, and other species that are nearing extinction. Similarly, in the Amazon, in the markets of Iquitos and Manaus, a large variety of animals from the tropical forest—agoutis, peccaries, and tortoises—are sold for their meat. Numerous other protected species, notably parrots and monkeys, are marketed there as pets. In March 2009, 450 Brazilian policemen arrested seventy-eight persons belonging to a network that was trafficking 500,000 animals per year, including boas, capuchin monkeys, brockets, hyacinth macaws, Lear’s macaws, and other protected species.22
The poachers prefer to take young animals. To do this, they often kill the mother who is trying to protect her young. In the case of tamarins, marmosets, spider monkeys, saki monkeys, and many others, they fire on the mother as she is carrying her offspring into the higher branches of the trees. Many of the babies do not survive the fall.
Mass Losses during Capture and Transport
The stress and violence involved in capturing live animals, their conditions of life when incarcerated, and their clandestine transport result in a very high level of mortality. On average, for every ten animals captured in their natural environment, one survives. In the case of the chameleons of Madagascar, the rate of survival is thought to be only 1 percent.23 Therefore, foreseeing these losses, the traffickers capture a large number of individuals in the wild. The United States is a main destination for tropical-forest animals of the Amazon, which are transported across the borders in the same way as drugs: in the trunks of cars, in suitcases, and in shipping containers. A trafficker was arrested at the Los Angeles airport with fourteen rare birds concealed in his clothing. In 1999 at the Frankfurt airport, 1,300 tarantulas (with a value estimated at about $133,000 today) were discovered in the baggage of a Frenchman returning from Mexico.24 Examples of this sort abound.
Charitable organizations with limited funds take into their care a small proportion of the animals confiscated by the customs services. In the majority of cases, however, the authorities have no choice but to euthanize the confiscated animals by the thousands, since they are unable either to shelter and feed them or to send them back to their countries of origin.
An Attempt That Backfired
In 2005 the Dalai Lama unequivocally condemned the custom that had become fashionable among well-to-do Tibetans of strutting about on holidays wearing clothing trimmed with tiger skins, leopard skins, and otter skins. He declared that this custom did not at all reflect the ancestral traditions of Tibet and was in flagrant contradiction with the teachings of Buddhism. He added, “The fact that my countrymen are taking up such customs makes me not want to live very much longer.” This statement spread like wildfire in Tibet. Nearly all Tibetans tore the animal skins off their garments and made huge heaps of them, which they burned in public places.
In December 2007 in Kashmir, the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) publicly burned an accumulation of eight truckloads of skins and furs taken from protected species (tigers, leopards, snow leopards, white-chested bears, otters, wolves, etc.), without a doubt one of the biggest accumulations of wild animal skins ever destroyed in this manner.
Unfortunately, these interventions, which were attempts to set an example and create better intentions, had the unexpected and pernicious effect of considerably increasing the prices of these skins, and at the end of the day, they increased the trafficking. In Tibet, Debbie Banks, one of the main investigators of the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), and her colleagues encountered traffickers who had just made deals for some tens of large tiger skins, headed for China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia. They also easily found stashes of tiger bones ready to be sold to Chinese pharmaceutical companies.
The traffickers in Lhasa took pride in being able to continue their activities without fear because they had connections in high places in both Nepal and China that guaranteed their impunity. Several of them let it be known that they were selling up to 25 leopard skins per month in spite of the significant reduction in demand among Tibetans inspired by the wishes of the Dalai Lama. In the face of these wishes, in order to thwart the Dalai Lama, the Chinese officials were forcing the Tibetans to resume wearing tiger skins, even though this practice was against the laws of the country.
The main routes taken by these traffickers are, in India, the scarcely surveilled passes from Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, and Ladakh to Kashmir, as well as via the borders of Nepal and Bhutan.25
Inadequate or Barely Enforced Laws
Confiscations and spectacular destructions of ivory, skins of protected species, and other products derived from them can momentarily impede the wildlife trade, but they do not represent a long-term solution. It is essential to beef up the existing laws and especially to enforce them, which is far from the usual case. As the organization One Voice points out, “In spite of protective laws on a worldwide scale, we are forced to acknowledge that the poaching and capture of wild animals in their natural habitat, including protected species, is continuing.”26
White-chested bears and honey bears, for example, although they are protected by the Washington Convention because they are among the most endangered species on the planet, continue to be pursued in India or in China for their bile, their meat, or just for the entertainment of tourists enthusiastic about “dancing bears.” In Africa, lions are set loose for the pleasure of safari participants or to serve as targets for big-game hunters.
According to Leo Douglas, wildlife trafficking is particularly profitable “because it is not the object of any real social stigma, because the chances of being arrested are quite small, and because those few criminals who do face trial unfortunately often receive only the most ludicrous of penalties.” In 2014 in Ireland, two traffickers in rhino horns were arrested. The potential market value of their merchandise was $547,000; the fine they received: $547.27