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Mob Trafficking Is Killing Off Our Favorite Wildlife

With species of plants and animals going extinct at a rate of around one every "twenty minutes":http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/01/020109074801.htm, you'd think that at least the most famous animals – lions, tigers, rhinos and the like...

With species of plants and animals going extinct at a rate of around one every twenty minutes, you’d think that at least the most famous animals – lions, tigers, rhinos and the like – would receive some sort of protection. Yet that’s nowhere near the case. Sophisticated smuggling operations trading in illegal wildlife parts have been taken over by organized crime, building networks with capabilities far beyond those of enforcement agencies. To put it bluntly, the mob is killing off the world’s favorite animals.

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Elizabeth Bennett, a top conservationist with the World Conservation Society, recently wrote a paper describing the increasingly intelligent and connected trade in animal parts. According to the paper, there’s an massive appetite for animal parts in East Asia that is backed with the kind of ridiculous wealth that’s caught the eye of organized crime. Animal smuggling operations are as advanced as those in the drug world, with the same bag of tricks, while enforcement budgets for rangers and conservation groups lag far, far behind the massive coffers provided by the War on Drugs.

“We are failing to conserve some of the world’s most beloved and charismatic species,” Bennett said in a press release. “We are rapidly losing big, spectacular animals to an entirely new type of trade driven by criminalized syndicates. It is deeply alarming, and the world is not yet taking it seriously. When these criminal networks wipe out wildlife, conservation loses, and local people lose the wildlife on which their livelihoods often depend.”

African and Asian species are at the heart of the trade, and stats are astounding. More than 220 rhinoceroses were poached in South Africa between January and October last year. Fewer than 3,500 tigers exist in the wild, occupying less than seven percent of their historic range. There were 50,000 free-roaming lions a decade ago; now there are between 10,000 and 15,000. The African wild dog, the most endangered predator in Africa, counts between 4,000 and 5,000 members left in the wild.

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While habitat destruction is surely the most important cause of species’ declines from historic levels, for famous species there in nothing comparable to the targeted poaching of the animal parts trade. What’s really depressing is that poaching hits what have been always considered in conservation as flagship species.

Conservationists have long lamented that, for every whale and elephant saved through support campaigns driven by their popularity, a whole bunch of unknown salamanders, flowers or bees go extinct. On the flip side, that constant attention to the famous species has always come with the expectation that they’d be relatively alright, or that their plight would be enough to drive people to protect their lands, something that benefit all the species in the region. Now we’re seeing that’s not the case.

“We have taken our eye off the ball,” Bennett said. "Enforcement is critical: old fashioned in concept but needing increasingly advanced methods to challenge the ever-more sophisticated methods of smuggling. When enforcement is thorough, and with sufficient resources and personnel, it works.”

The simple problem is there’s a high demand for illegal leopard balls and rhino horns, and not nearly enough support for enforcement. All but the most trafficked and popular reserves in Africa have a near-complete lack of resources, and even in those that do poaching and animal parts smuggling is not treated nearly stiffly enough in prosecution, nor is it a priority politically worldwide.

“Unless we start taking wildlife crime seriously and allocating the commitment of resources appropriate to tackling sophisticated, well-funded, globally-linked criminal operations, population of some of the most beloved but economically prized, charismatic species will continue to wink out across their range, and, appallingly, altogether," Bennett said.

There are a few bright spots. The UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime in Asia has recently listed wildlife crime as a core focus, and it should at least have some semblance of resources available to put pressure on the demand side. Also, the International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime was formally put to work in April. The ICCWC combines five inter-governmental agencies, including Interpol and the Wold Bank, to combat parts smuggling on a global scale, which is a first. Of course, the jury’s still out on whether it’s too late.

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