Facebook is a thriving marketplace for illegal wildlife trade, allowing “frightening” volumes of trafficking of endangered species, an investigation has found. The platform’s algorithms are actively boosting the spread of content by illegal poachers, so that they are seen by more people, researchers say. Posts of animals for sale included pygmy marmosets, the world’s smallest […]
Tag: wildlife trade
Tanzania’s elephants protected from slaughter by stronger wildlife legislation
Ivory poachers slaughtered more than 60% of Tanzania’s elephant population between 2009 and 2015. The vast biodiversity of the world-famous wildebeest migration’s home was under jeopardy. Since then, Tanzania has been able to stop the worst of the poaching within its borders thanks to years of dedicated conservation work by the government and NGOs. In […]
Uganda fails to enforce laws against wildlife crime by allowing bailed Ivory traffickers to disappear
Authorities in Uganda intercepted a shipment of roughly 4 tons of elephant ivory and pangolin scales from the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo on its way to the city, Kampala, in January 2019. What has happened in the three years since then reveals flaws in the country’s enforcement of wildlife-crime legislation. The Uganda Revenue Authority […]
Airborne DNA can now be used to detect rare and endangered species
The discovery of environmental DNA has altered the way environmentalists monitor biodiversity. Scientists can examine entire ecosystems or find unusual animals that are too elusive to trace using traditional methods by sequencing the genetic material contained in water and soil samples. Environmental DNA, or eDNA, has been utilized by teams to catalog everything from viruses […]
A video of an overweight tree frog has gone viral, highlighting the cruelty in the reptile pet trade
There are numerous reasons to adopt rather than buy an animal, and one of the most important is animal cruelty in the pet trade. Many consumers in the United States go into legitimate pet businesses to buy an animal, entirely unaware that the pet store may be supporting the illegal wildlife trafficking and other unethical […]
The Years of the Tiger: the demand for tigers and the price they pay
On the 1st of February 2022, the Year of the Tiger starts. The Chinese zodiac is an increasingly popular pseudoscientific classification scheme with followers in Asian countries, like China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nepal, Bhutan, and Thailand. Hundreds of millions of primarily Asian people observe the start of the Year of the Tiger, but […]
‘Huge blow’ for tiger conservation as two of the big cats killed in Thailand
Tiger conservationists in Thailand are reeling following the recent killing of two tigers in Thong Pha Phum National Park. Authorities confiscated the two carcasses and are investigating the incident and possible links to the illegal wildlife trade. The two Indochinese tigers (Panthera tigris corbetti) were killed on Jan. 8 by local farmers in the park […]
Wild cat trade: Why the cheetah is not safe just yet
A recent article on the Emirati newspaper The National reports that, according to conservationists, “The increased enforcement by Somaliland in the Gulf [of Aden] and along known smuggling routes, plus the increased community awareness for poaching as a crime has led to a major decline in cub trafficking.” While this is a positive outlook, and […]