supply cheetahs to the United Arab Emirates, bonobos to Armenia, macaws to the Czech Republic, and chimpanzees to China. Although data on the scale and scope of the live illegal wildlife trade is limited, it is clearly big business that attracts drug cartels, arms suppliers, counterfeit organizations, and a host of other illegal networks.
It is estimated that millions of live animals and plants are shuttled illegally around the world each day, sometimes as openly as the infant bonobo that was hand-carried in a bassinet like a baby through the Paris airport in 2006, or the gibbon stuffed inside a suitcase that was discovered at the Jakarta airport in 2014. Exact numbers are difficult to come by, but it is estimated that 40,000 live primates, 4 million live birds, 640,000 live reptiles, and 350 million live tropical fish are traded globally each year. In a single market in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, up to 90,000 mammals were sold in a single year, and a survey at a market in Thailand that spanned 25 weekends found 70,000 birds, representing of 276 species, were sold. A similar survey of four markets in Bangkok found that of the 36,537 birds observed, only 37per cent were native to Thailand, while 63% were nonnative species. There is a growing number of documentaries and news briefings on this issue.
The illegal trade in live animals is markedly different than the more commonly discussed traffic in elephant ivory, rhino horn, shark fins or pangolin scales. To begin with, all of those commodities are dead, and carry little of the urgency – or risk – associated with the live trade. Animals transported alive nearly always require a courier, a human being to accompany them along the supply line, thereby raising the stakes for law enforcement and seizure if an arrest is made. The live trade is also time-sensitive – most animals cannot survive for long in the cramped, contrived manner in which they are shipped – so the fastest route is usually the favored route.
Disease transmission
The live trade often requires a degree of corruption in order to pass through customs and security check-points, but the greatest risk is posed by the illicit traffic of animals and plants is the threat of disease transmission. None of the fauna or flora that comprises the illegal live trade goes through quarantine or any veterinary screens. As a result, animals – many of whom have been kept in unsanitary conditions for days and weeks – pass through transit countries and arrive at their destinations carrying all of the bacteria and parasites capable of spreading diseases.
In fact, experts point to pandemics such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Avian flu, Monkeypox and even Ebola as some of the diseases most likely to make the jump to global human populations in the future as a result of the live trade in illegal wildlife. Since 1980, a new infectious disease has emerged in humans at an average of one every four months. The origin of HIV is likely linked to human consumption of nonhuman primates, for instance, and recent Ebola hemorrhagic fever outbreaks in humans have been traced to contact with infected great apes that are hunted for food. Meanwhile, the SARS-associated coronavirus has been associated with the international trade in small carnivores.
Photo Credit: Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme
Many diseases are transmitted through the same species of parasites carried by imported animals. From November 1994
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UNEP FRONTIERS 2016 REPORT
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