EXOTIC CONSUMERISM: ILLEGAL TRADE IN LIVE ANIMALS
It is estimated that less than 10% of illegal wildlife is actually detected. Analysts suggest that as many as 13 million live animals were actually brought into the U.S. in that time period – and up to 9.7 million of them died before they reached the intended buyer.
The U.S. trade data found that some of the most popular wildlife in illegal trade included tropical fish, freshwater turtles, coral, and pythons. In fact, the U.S. data reported that 53,799 individual tropical fish were seized during the 2005-2014 period, along with 68,680 turtles and 18,000 pythons. Coral, which is sourced for jewelry and other artifacts, was almost entirely illegal and sourced from the wild (91 percent).
Photo Credit: Wildlife Conservation Society
The Middle East has long played a pivotal role in the illegal traffic of live animals. Beginning in the 1990s, it was a destination market to supply the private menageries of the wealthy elite, and many of the Gulf States established pipelines to exotic wildlife cartels in Egypt. A decade later, however, the Middle East had evolved into a transit market to feed the burgeoning live animal trade in China, Thailand and other Asian consumers.
Today, the Middle East serves as both a transit and destination market for illegally traded wildlife, an industry that now uses the internet and popular social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram to contract customers. But it’s not just great apes, and it’s not just the Middle East. Millions of live animals and plants – many of them endangered or critically endangered species – are being moved between major cities via airports and ports and rail routes every day, all going to serve lucrative markets.
According to data from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), 3,726 illegal shipments containing nearly 330,000 live animals attempted to enter the United States between 2005 and 2014. Yet much of the trade is still invisible.
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Rare and exotic birds also comprise a huge element of the live illegal trade in wildlife. BirdLife International estimates that several million birds are trafficked annually from 4,000 species involved in the domestic and international trade, many of them traded as infants and stuffed head-first into plastic water bottles to avoid detection. It is estimated that one- third of all living bird species have been recorded as traded internationally for the pet trade and other purposes. Given that 266 of these species are considered globally threatened, and over half of these (152) are faced with potentially unsustainable exploitation, it is now estimated that 1,375 species – or 13% of extant species, basically one in eight -- are globally threatened with extinction.
The most commonly affected families of birds involved in the pet trade include finches, weavers, parrots and raptors. Small birds comprise 70 percent of the trade, while large birds such as macaws, parrots, cockatoos, parakeets, and lorikeets account for 20 percent of the trade. Prior to the enactment of the Wild Bird Conservation Act in 1992, approximately 800,000 wild-harvested birds were imported annually to the U.S. to supply the pet trade.
Reptiles and amphibians are also big-ticket items among the exotic and illegal pet traders. In late 2014, a Chinese national named Kai Xu – also known as “Turtle Man” – was apprehended at the Canadian border with 51 live turtles
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