News: nature on the net
Many species are being illegally caught in the wild and sold via the internet, but can this online trade be stopped?
With illegal online trade of live animals and their body parts booming, how can consumers be savvier?
The trade in everything from live reptiles and birds to ivory and suspected ivory items was worth over £ 3 million.
L ike many people, I've always fancied owning a tortoise. So, I open up my laptop to search for a chelonian chum. On the website Preloved, I quickly find a pair of tortoises for sale for £175. ‘One marginated tortoise and one spur-thighed [common tortoise], both female,’ the advert says. And ‘four years of age, both living happily together and in a 1.2m vivarium, feeding well on weeds in the summer and mixed greens in the winter.’
Sounds perfect. The advert gives the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) Article 10 certificate number, required under EU regulations, but it doesn’t fit the format specified by Preloved. Is it genuine? I want to find out. Luckily, the website makes it simple to report any concerns about adverts you spot.
Preloved also provides a handy guide to Article 10 certificates and why you need one. There’s a list of the 50 most commonly traded protected species, which range from the common (tawny and little owls and otters) and the expected (African grey parrots and Hermann’s tortoises) to the exotic and potentially dangerous (reticulated pythons) and – you’d think – unethical (tigers and ocelots). But at least the information is there.
‘In the interest of conservation, Preloved bans the advertising of all ivory from its website – this includes ivory from elephant, hippo, walrus, whale, narwhal and warthog species,’ the website says. This is excellent practice. Even though it will still be legal to buy and sell some antique ivory in the UK once new legislation comes into force later this year, banning all forms makes it much harder for tusks from illegally poached animals to slip through the net.
Big business
But the fact is, the legal and illegal trade of live animals and products from dead ones is booming on the internet, hardly surprising as we buy virtually everything else online. New evidence comes from a survey last year by investigators from
the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and published in its report, Disrupt: Wildlife Cybercrime.
In 2017, researchers spent six weeks scanning advertisements and posts from 106 websites and social media platforms in the UK, France, Germany and Russia. The study showed that the trade in everything from live reptiles and birds to ivory and suspected ivory items was worth over £3 million.
In the UK, nearly two-thirds of the posts were found on eBay, Preloved, Bird Trader and Facebook. Just over half the sales were of reptiles – mainly live tortoises. This seems innocent enough, but many species are threatened by being taken from the wild for the pet trade, so their international export is banned or restricted by CITES. Therefore, any tortoises for sale should be captive-bred. But the chances are many of these were taken from the wild.
A 2008 study published in Chelonian Conservation and Biology catalogued more than two million tortoises from the Testudo genus (which includes most of those commonly kept as pets, such as Hermann’s, marginated and common tortoises) from CITES import figures for 1975 to 2005. Out of these, 70 per cent were from an unknown source, but of the remainder, more than two-thirds had been taken from the wild.
Trading trends
IFAW has been tracking the online trade in wildlife and its derivatives for more than a decade. In 2008, its report, Killing with Keystrokes, was able to identify more than 7,000 online adverts selling endangered wildlife or products across eight countries, while a 2014 survey found over 33,000 items for sale across 280 separate marketplaces and 16 countries.
Matthew Collis, IFAW’s international policy director, says the reports are not directly comparable, and it’s difficult to say whether trade is going up or down. “We only point out broad trends where we think they are comparable,” Collis adds. “For example, the absence of unworked tusks for sale in France, an increase in ivory for sale in Germany and the drop of ivory for sale in the UK.”
There are some encouraging trends. In partnership with WWF and TRAFFIC, IFAW has formed the Global Coalition to end Wildlife Trafficking Online, which aims to “secure industrywide support to reduce wildlife trafficking online by 80 per cent by 2020.” Tech companies that have signed up to the campaign include well-known brands such as eBay, Etsy, Facebook Google, Instagram, Microsoft and Pinterest, plus some that are unknown
here but used in Asia or Africa.
But it’s a massive task for these companies. eBay, for example, has 1.2 billion listings worldwide at any given time, and has had a long, ongoing battle with traders who want to sell both legal (antique) and illegal ivory products. So there was no room for doubt, in 2012 the online auction site decided to ban the sale of any ivory product.
Some traders try to circumvent its ban by using code words such as ‘oxbone’ (or, in Germany, where IFAW found ivory sales increasing online, ‘bein’), so these have to be blocked as well. The head of eBay’s global regulatory team, Wolfgang Weber, says that, while there is always a way round its ivory policy, this isn’t as bad as it sounds. “We looked at whether those listings [using code words] get sold, and what we’ve found is that by taking away the most popular ones, we made it nearly impossible for them to make a sale,” he says.
The dark side of the web
eBay has to remain alert to wildlife commerce trends – three years ago, Weber became aware of the massive global trade in pangolin products, so his team had to move quickly to make sure eBay was not being used to add to the trade in the most trafficked mammal in the world.
But while conservation groups and tech companies can do something about products that are openly traded on their sites, there’s a lot less they can do about those being sold within closed groups or
encrypted social media platforms, such as WhatsApp. Then there’s the so-called ‘dark web’ – that part of the internet that cannot be accessed by standard search engines or browsers. It enables its users to remain anonymous and untraceable, and is frequently used for selling illegal drugs and counterfeit money.
IFAW accepts that it has little idea of the scale of the trade here, though points out that research carried out by the University of Kent in 2016 found a small but growing quantity of wildlife products for sale on the dark net. Collis says that wildlife traders at that time had little need to move to the shadows because they were able to operate freely out in the open.
Consumer power
But the ‘whack a mole’ effect – where trade stopped on one site pops up on another – could see the dark web become the repository for wildlife trafficking, should the coalition achieve its aim of reducing trade on the visible web by 80 per cent.
For the moment, enforcement efforts are still mainly aimed at the visible side of the web, because that’s the big issue and because it helps to raise public awareness. “There is a risk that this may lead to some displacement to the dark net,” admits Collis, “but enforcement agencies are already developing ways to investigate and police that as a result of concerns about other products, such as drugs and arms.”
Returning to my search for a pet tortoise, Preloved has got back to me: “We removed the advert that was quoting [the incorrect] licence number, so you should be wary of anything you see on any site where the reference number does not match the standard format.” I’m impressed. I raised a technical matter relating to animals that may have been bred in captivity and did not therefore impact the conservation of either species, but there was a minor irregularity, and the website dealt with it. It shows that consumers have the power to help keep the internet clear of traffic that could impact on any threatened wildlife.
“Consumers can play a vital role,” Collis tells me, “by reporting potentially illegal advertisements and posts to the companies and not buying illegal wildlife products and live animals.” Or, as IFAW says in its latest report: ‘It takes a network to defeat a network.’
FIND OUT MORE
Read the full Disrupt: Wildlife Cybercrime report at ifaw.org