Organized Crime Whacks Lots of Cute Animals

A slow loris caged at a Southeast Asian wildlife market.Elizabeth Bennett/Wildlife Conservation Society

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Here’s something that will make you loathe organized crime even more than The Godfather, Part III: Mobsters murder many adorable, beautiful animals to make huge profits.

Elizabeth Bennett of the Wildlife Conservation Society writes in a recent paper that underground wildlife smuggling operated by crime syndicates is “decimating the world’s most beloved species including rhinos, tigers, and elephants on a scale never before seen.”

The illegal sales of animal parts—slow loris appendages, elephant tusks, bear paws, freshwater turtle shells, tiger skulls—has exploded over the years, particularly in Africa and in countries like Vietnam and Thailand, posing an existential threat to various species. And if that weren’t enough, the trade also helps ruin ecosystems and drain resources in poor countries.

The complexities of shifting smuggling routes, not to mention “e-commerce” and government corruption, have presented a daunting challenge to national efforts and international cooperation apparatuses like the ASEAN Wildlife Enforcement Network, even as certain crackdowns on illegal activities like poaching show some signs of intensifying.

Other obstacles, such as the cultural acceptance of owning high-priced body parts of endangered animals as spiritual commodities, also hinder stopping these “sophisticated, well-funded, globally-linked criminal operations,” Bennett writes in the scientific journal Oryx:

Tackling the issue by focusing on demand reduction is a challenge, given deeply ingrained cultural beliefs in the efficacy of certain wildlife medicines, leading to tacit support for the trade across many sectors of Asian society. Any change is likely to be on a generational time scale but we do not have that luxury of time for many of the species currently targeted by trade. In the short-term the only practical way to reduce demand is through enforcement…

And the solution to this problem is, naturally, the most obvious but elusive one: more money, more manpower. Bennett’s recommendations include increasing technical support to developing countries, building clearer bureaucracy, and issuing smart phone apps to law enforcement for better species identification. Corruption is also an important issue, as many wildlife enforcement agencies in poor countries can be bribed out of effectiveness. However, Bennett also notes the appalling shortcomings of many current international enforcement measures, even when agencies aren’t corrupted (emphasis my own):

The ASEAN Wildlife Enforcement Network is often held up as a good example of an international initiative to combat wildlife crime…but its home base of Thailand remains one of the three countries most heavily implicated globally in the illicit trade in ivory…CITES [Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species] and Interpol each only have a single person in charge of enforcement of wildlife crimes.

With vast criminal organizations running an illicit animal trade worth an annual $10 billion (making it one of the top-5 most lucrative black markets in existence), it’ll take more than one CITES rep per country to stem the trade, and help animals stay where they belong: in nature.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate