Speaking up for the African Grey
TWO-YEAR-OLD Briana is perched on a long wooden beam, oblivious to her fate. If you want her, she’s on sale for 50 percent of her price – that’s between $250 and $1 000 (R3 452 to R13 809). Shipping is free, anywhere in the world.
The global demand for highly intelligent pet African Grey parrots like Briana, widely available online, shows no sign of ending, but tomorrow a crucial decision at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites) CoP17, could determine the species’s future.
The EU and the US, and a flurry of conservation NGOs, want African Greys to be listed on Appendix 1 of Cites, stopping commercial trade and affording them the highest level of protection.
Now, African Greys are listed on Appendix II of Cites, allowing restricted international trade, which is where South Africa – as the biggest exporter of captive bred African Greys – wants them to stay. Range states, too, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where African Greys are snatched from their fast-vanishing forests and sent to South Africa, are similarly opposed.
“Thousands of these longlived, intelligent parrots are ripped out of the wild every year, packed into cramped travel crates, fed on mouldy peanuts, and then sold into the lucrative wildlife trade,” explains Dr Steve Boyes, the scientific director of the Wild Bird Trust.
Boyes and his colleagues at the World Parrot Trust have long called for the suspension of all trade in grey parrots from countries such as Cameroon and the DRC.
“Many die from exhaustion or fatal injury in nets and snares or from dehydration, disease and stress in rudimentary wooden crates when being stored, transported and sold by local trappers.
“Even more die in crammed travel crates in transit to rural markets where thousands of grey parrots are collected by exporters and quarantined until they are sold, euthanised or die.
“Veterinary experts are contracted by importers to visit source countries and select, sex and test all potential breeding parrots held in these substandard quarantines.
“The exporters make a profit and eventually give away, release or dispose of the grey parrots that are deemed unsuitable for breeding purposes. Housing and feeding them is simply too expensive, and there are more healthy parrots coming in from the forests next week.”
Boyes is adamant that all trade in wild-caught grey parrots must be terminated to save the species from extinction in the wild. “This Cites move is going to be incredibly important in shutting down the criminal syndicates and misinfor med breeders involved in the trade in wild-caught African Grey Parrots in South Africa.”
As far back as 2011, it was a business opportunity where investors could fork out $60 000, which would get them as many as 350 African Grey Parrot breeding pairs for their breeding facilities, he explains.
“Organised syndicates would then export thousands of young and pre-weaned chicks to emerging markets in Singapore, Bahrain, Pakistan and elsewhere in the Middle and Far East.
“Quarantine and breeding facilities have been established in these trade hubs, but lucrative business opportunities will always be the use of wild-caught breeding stock, sexed and in peak breeding-condition.
“In South Africa, support for the avicultural industry is well-established in government, resulting in the issuance of far too many import permits for African Grey parrots from the DRC.”
Boyes explains, how, in 2007, an importer that was smuggling scarlet macaws to South Africa via the Philippines lost the whole shipment, resulting in a large debt to the client. To pay back the debt, this importer went to the DRC to help set up quarantine facilities and teach local hunters to catch parrots at salt licks and forest clearings.
“The business opportunity was so good that the ‘African Grey Mafia’ gained control of much of the trade, which turned what had a chance of being a sustainable industry into an activity that now threatens the species.
“There is no doubt that South African breeders and importers supplied the majority of wild-caught grey parrots to the global market in the boom in demand over the past 20 years.
“The fact that grey parrots were one of the top two most internationally-traded wild bird species in the world for decades, alternating sometimes with the Senegal parrot as most traded, says a lot about Cites.”
The outcome of tomorrow’s Cites decision is “borderline”, says Ben Minnaar, a state attorney, who heads the Parrot Breeders Association of South Africa. “There are some countries that say they will support us if it’s a secret ballot … They know in their hearts a ban is not the right thing.”
SA has a “stable gene pool” and doesn’t need more birds to be captured from wild forests from other parts of the continent. “The ones we have in Africa we can breed for the next 1000 years … to supply the total demand for the birds,” he said.