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Published in Fall 2005
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The e-legal wildlife trade
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By Ron Orol
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© IFAW International Fund for Animal Welfare/D. Willetts - www.ifaw.org
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After the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) reported in June on the increasing use of the Internet as a black-market conduit for protected animals, Kate Nattrass decide to press officials at the world’s largest online marketplace, eBay Inc., to help stop this growing electronic trade.
“While eBay exceeds the industry standard by having some sort of policy on the issue, we encouraged them to do better monitoring and respond quicker to reports of illegal trade on their sites,” says Nattrass, a wildlife program specialist at IFAW’s headquarters in Hyannis, Massachusetts.
But making Internet site operators more aware and responsible for such sales is only the tip of the iceberg. While there has been no comprehensive study on the trade of prohibited wildlife in North America, IFAW found that 9,000 wild animal products, specimen and live wild animals were for sale on English language sites during a one-week period in January. It concluded that Internet trafficking represents a growing stake in the $6 billion to $10 billion global illegal wildlife trafficking trade—with most animals and parts coming from Africa, South America and Asia.
Ed Grace, a US Fish and Wildlife Service (US FWS) enforcement agent, says the growth of illegal wildlife trafficking via the Internet has forced his agency to focus its energy on the big-time traders who knowingly sell live animals or derivatives as a commercial business. And what a business it is. Grace says he bought orangutan skulls for prices ranging from $1500 to $5000 apiece and a rug made from five snow leopard pelts for $25,000, as part of covert operations, over the Internet.
Illegal Trade in Wildlife: A North American Perspective
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 Published: 30 September 2005
27 pages
This new report from the CEC presents a North American perspective on the illegal international wildlife trade. It sets out domestic and international legal frameworks and summarizes the steps each of the three countries has taken to meet its national and international obligations, as well as its enforcement cooperation efforts. In addition, the report outlines some of the reasons why the North American countries should increase cooperative efforts to monitor and control legal wildlife trade and minimize illegal trade. |
The communications revolution has also transformed the way Grace, a nine-year-veteran at US FWS, goes about his daily efforts to defeat illegal sales of animals. A decade ago Grace may have relied solely on his contacts in the underworld of animal trafficking to identify criminal sales. Now he also spends time cruising chat rooms, electronic bulletin boards and of course, perusing online sites such as eBay. “It’s a new tool in our war chest,” he says. “A decade ago a tiger rug could be sold only by word of mouth or through a classified ad in the paper; now a trader can send an e-mail or post on the Internet and find hundreds of buyers much faster.”
Through the Internet, Grace says, enforcement agents acting covertly get introduced to a chain of bird or reptile dealers, for example, until something illegal crops up. In the course of one investigation, Grace discovered one trader, Denis “Dusty” Gruver, a tribal artifacts dealer from Honolulu, Hawaii, selling illegal items on eBay. Acting covertly, Grace purchased hornbill skulls and approached Gruver, who said he didn’t know such transactions were illegal. After a $500 civil penalty, Gruver allegedly began selling more items on his own web site, where Grace sent him additional emails, again, undercover. This time Gruver acknowledged the sales were illegal and that he was previously in trouble with the US FWS. After that, in 2003, Grace began criminal proceedings. “Dusty had items shipped from Malaysia to his brother in Oregon to avoid any connection to himself,” Grace says.
Thomas Bayes, National Wildlife Officer of the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS), says enforcement agents north of the border have also turned increasingly to the Internet to find traffickers. Bayes says that Canadian enforcement agents, like their United States counterparts, are focusing their energy on “big-time” traders rather than one-time sellers, and that many investigations take place because of tips from concerned people that identify suspicious behavior.
Both Bayes and Grace are also using another tactic to address the ever increasing group of one-time sellers, many of which are not aware the products they sell are illegal. Getting web sites, like eBay, to identify what animal auctions are illegal is a key part of this effort, so that individuals not engaged in large-scale animal trafficking become more informed about what they can and can’t sell. Another strategy is to put the information up on enforcement web sites, such as that of the US FWS <www.fws.gov>, to get the word out.
“Sometimes people inherit wildlife products and they don’t know they are illegal,” Grace says. “That’s why we’re trying to get out information about what is legal and what isn’t, so we can reduce this number.”
The problem in Mexico is different, yet still significant. Ignacio Gonzalez, program manager at the CEC, says that the limited availability of the Internet in Mexico has impeded the growth of online trafficking in the country. But, he adds, illegal wildlife trade is nevertheless on the rise in Mexico, where intermediaries often move exotic species through the country to eager buyers in Canada and the United States.
The global nature of Internet wildlife sales has shone a spotlight onto the enforcement responsibilities of Interpol, the Lyon, France-based policing agency designated to coordinate international efforts at defeating crime. Bill Clark, an Israeli law enforcement officer assigned to Interpol, says coordinating efforts to defeat Internet trafficking of wildlife has not yet become a central or even key responsibility at Interpol, but the international enforcement organization is likely to develop a strategy as Internet use increases. Clark, who serves as secretary of the Interpol Working Group on Wildlife Crime, notes that while there have been many groups raising concern about Internet trade in protected wildlife, he does not believe that the largest commercial traders are using it.
“It is unlikely that someone with two tons of raw ivory will try to sell it on one of these Internet sites,” Clark says. “These commercial dealers or criminals are very careful and want to know their business partners.”
But he adds that smaller dealers selling a consignment of items often use the web and the result adds up to something Interpol is likely to spend more time looking at. “A thousand small ivory items sold via the Internet will add up to a ton and result in the same number of dead elephants,” Clark says.
Nattrass and Clark both point to Interpol’s Ecomessage global data gathering system as a place where enforcement officers in North America and around the world could coordinate their Internet wildlife tracking efforts. Wildlife law enforcement agencies use the system to
submit data about illegal wildlife trafficking to Lyon where it can be used to track down a particular criminal by cross referencing addresses, telephone numbers, shipping lines and potentially, Internet correspondences.
The Ecomessage data is also analyzed to identify priorities for targeting, such as key countries where wildlife trafficking begins.
“Because one of the main problems in tracking Internet criminals from country to country is poor communications, reporting systems like Ecomessage will become more important,” says Nattrass.
Canada’s Bayes notes that discussions about the role of the Internet are underway with the CEC’s North American Wildlife Enforcement Group, a coalition of enforcement agents representing Canada, Mexico and the United States.
As part of its ongoing effort to increase the capacity and effectiveness of enforcement officials, including customs officers, the CEC is planning a training seminar on 7–9 February 2006, to educate wildlife enforcement officials in the three countries about the role of the Internet in illegally trafficking of exotic species. Gonzales says the seminar will look at technical issues, such as how to research such trades over the Internet, as well as legal issues, providing a general overview of applicable laws and protocols for the exchange of information and intelligence.
How enforcement agents work with auction web sites to deter illegal sales is another topic participants will consider. Efforts undertaken by US FWS agents and animal rights groups have already encouraged changes. After discussions with IFAW’s Nattrass and US FWS law enforcement officials, eBay’s Trust and Safety Department began developing a system of key words, which trigger an investigation by security officials at the online auctioneer. The company also added “Animals and Wildlife Products” to its dropdown list of options for clients to report a sale of banned items or other questionable conduct (in addition to its recently adopted policy page describing what is illegal to buy or sell).
“Now consumers can report such illegal sales more easily,” she says. “And eBay can shut down illegal auctions.”
Hani Durzy, a spokesperson for eBay, says the company has the resources to track and shut down such illegal sales, with its thousand-plus team of experts working around the world in its trust and security department. Though he admits eBay’s filtering system is not foolproof, he says “It’s in our best interest to make sure that people aren’t using the marketplace for illegal purposes, either knowingly or unknowingly.”
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