Illegal Wildlife Trade Is Booming. What Does That Mean For The Confiscated Animals?

This episode explores the significant challenges and concerns surrounding the handling and care of animals confiscated in the illegal wildlife trade.

1. The illegal wildlife trade is a multi-billion dollar industry causing significant harm to global biodiversity.
2. Authorities face immediate challenges in providing care for confiscated animals, often resulting in difficult decisions about their future.
3. A pilot project in Southern California aims to streamline the process of finding housing for confiscated wildlife.
4. There's an urgent need for public awareness and involvement to combat the poaching and trade of live animals.
5. Regional networks are being developed to manage confiscated animals more effectively, with hopes for a national network in the future.

1: Introduction

Overview of the episode's focus on the illegal wildlife trade and its impact. Brief visit to the aquarium of the Pacific to see confiscated corals. Rachel Carlson: "These corals were confiscated...shipped here illegally."

2: The Scale of the Problem

Discussion on the vast scope of the illegal wildlife trade and its implications. Nate Rott: "A legal wildlife trade that's estimated to be more than $200 billion annually."

3: Challenges in Animal Care

Exploration of the logistical and ethical challenges in managing confiscated animals. Tamisha Woolard: "What to do with confiscated live animals has been a concern for as long as I've been a wildlife inspector."

4: Solutions and Strategies

Details on the pilot project for managing confiscated animals and insights into the network's operations. Sarah Walker: "Immediate care, immediate triage from a high quality facility."

5: Future Directions

Discussion on the potential expansion of the network and the broader implications for wildlife conservation. James Liu: "James says they are planning to release some box turtles back into the wild this summer for the first time ever."

1. Educate Yourself and Others: Learn about the wildlife trade and share your knowledge to spread awareness.
2. Support Conservation Efforts: Donate to or volunteer at wildlife conservation organizations.
3. Be a Responsible Consumer: Avoid products made from endangered species and question the origins of wildlife products.
4. Report Illegal Activity: Inform authorities if you suspect illegal wildlife trade activities.
5. Adopt Sustainable Practices: Reduce your ecological footprint to lessen the pressures on wildlife habitats.

Wildlife trafficking is one of the largest and most profitable crime sectors in the world. The illegal trade estimated to be a multi-billion dollar industry. On a high level, that illegal trade causes problems for everything from global biodiversity to local economies and the balance of entire ecosystems. And on the immediate level, authorities are tasked with caring for confiscated animals and placing them in long-term care facilities.

One network launched last year by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Association for Zoos and Aquariums hopes to help. And with wildlife trafficking surging globally, the organizations are now in talks to expand the program to other parts of the country.

People

Tamisha Woolard, Sarah Walker, James Liu

Content Warnings:

None

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Rachel Carlson
You're listening to short wave from NPR short wavers.

Nate Rott
What's up, Nate? Rott back in the host chair today? Or should I say co host chair?

Rachel Carlson
Yeah, definitely co host chair. How dare you? I'm sorry.

I am also here producer Rachel Carlson hosting and reporting this episode.

Nate Rott
Okay, so a few weeks ago, Rachel and I took a little field trip here in southern California to the aquarium of the Pacific.

Rachel Carlson
We were there in the middle of one of many school field trips that.

Nate Rott
Day, but our field trip took us behind the scenes to see one of the aquarium's newest arrivals. Don't mind just putting the bottom to your feet in a water bath there on the nose right here.

Nate Jaros
Okay.

Rachel Carlson
With another Nate.

Nate Rott
Nate Jaros better. Nate, the aquarium senior curator of fish and invertebrates.

Rachel Carlson
Very cool, Nate.

Nate Rott
So this is one of our areas that we hold corals.

This would be the first stop of any confiscated coral and a majority of what you see, and these two lower aquariums and a portion of what you see behind me are all confiscated corals.

Rachel Carlson
These corals were confiscated by federal or state authorities at a point of entry in the US because they were shipped here illegally.

Nate Rott
And we're not talking just a few. We've taken on nearly 500 pieces individual.

Rachel Carlson
Coral colonies this year, 500 in the last six months. And that's just here in southern California.

Nate Rott
Ebbs and flows. It's not always that race clams have been confiscated in pretty high numbers recently.

So there's a lot of different reasons that they can be confiscated. Every day at airports, post offices, and ports around the country and world, live animals are being moved legally.

Rachel Carlson
Reptiles, fish, birds, mammals, all part of.

Nate Rott
A legal wildlife trade that's estimated to be more than $200 billion annually.

Rachel Carlson
But the illegal wildlife trade is estimated to be a multibillion dollar industry, too. And on a high level, that illegal trade causes problems for everything from global biodiversity to local economies to the balance of entire ecosystems.

Nate Rott
But on the immediate level, for authorities like Tamisha Woolard, the US Fish and Wildlife Service's regional supervisory wildlife inspector for the southwest, there's an immediate question of caring for the animals that they seize.

Tamisha Woolard
What to do with confiscated live animals has been a concern for as long as I've been a wildlife inspector, because the quantity, the care, what happens after they're here.

Rachel Carlson
So today on the show, we look at a pilot project in Southern California aimed at getting confiscated animals immediate and.

Nate Rott
Long term care, and at a surprising new trend in the illegal wildlife trade centered here in the US. I'm Nate Rott.

Rachel Carlson
I'm Rachel Carlson, and you're listening to.

Nate Rott
Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

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Support for this podcast and the following message come from Doubleday, publishers of lessons in chemistry. Be inspired. Read lessons in chemistry, the number one global bestseller with more than 6 million copies sold. Meet Elizabeth Zott, a sixties era scientist who brings her smarts and unapologetic worldview to a tv cooking show that has the power to change lives. Lessons in chemistry is available wherever books are sold from Doubleday. This message comes from NPR sponsor Rosetta Stone, an expert in language learning for 30 years. Right now, NPR listeners can get Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership to 25, five different languages for 50% off. Learn more@rosettastone.com npr.

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Nate Rott
Okay, Rachel, should we start from the beginning?

Rachel Carlson
The airport?

Nate Rott
Oh, you know, let's do it. Okay. So a few weeks ago, Rachel and I went to this massive warehouse at Los Angeles International Airport.

Rachel Carlson
It's a place any cargo that was transported on a plane gets taken after the passengers and their luggage are taken off.

Nate Rott
And we were there with us fish and wildlife inspectors for what they call a live inspection.

Allie Ventura
Okay, so this is our coral shipment, you guys.

Rachel Carlson
This is wildlife inspector Allie Ventura.

Nate Rott
And yes, she's heard every variation of a joke about her abbreviated name entitled being a Ventura wildlife inspector.

Allie Ventura
And this is our fish shipment.

Nate Rott
Fish, okay.

Rachel Carlson
Tropical fish that were imported, like the coral from Indonesia for the pet trade by a federally licensed importer.

Nate Rott
So as Allie opens the box, she says, really, this should all be legal.

Allie Ventura
So box one has got a variety. It definitely has the euphilias in it, four different species of it.

Rachel Carlson
Allie's pulling out brightly colored stone corals. They're each suspended upside down in these, like, plastic bags full of water. And they're hugely important for biodiversity and super popular for home aquarium enthusiasts.

Nate Rott
Who knew? So Allie and the rest of the inspectors are shining flashlights on the coral to try to help identify them.

Allie Ventura
If what is inside the box does not match their packing list, we're gonna.

Rachel Carlson
Season the whole thing. No.

Allie Ventura
What is over. Mm hmm.

Nate Rott
The US Fish and Wildlife Service does inspections like this, and others with a dog trained to smell heavily trafficked wildlife, like reptiles and animal parts, like ivory. His name is Braxton.

Tamisha Woolard
Mister beautiful. That's true.

Rachel Carlson
Mister beautiful.

Yes, you are.

Nate Rott
I wish I could smell stuff like that.

Ivory.

Rachel Carlson
The other person in the background here is Ray Hernandez, Braxton's handler.

Nate Rott
Ray says they find stuff daily, and when they do, they often seize the animals or goods and then have to decide what to do with the people involved.

Rachel Carlson
Like, is it a species a person could import, but the paperwork is just wrong? Did the person buying it know it was illegal and do it anyway?

Nate Jaros
If it's inside of a shoebox, tucked away in a shoe, like, wrapped in tin foil, and all sorts of other stuff like that, you're like, okay, this is something that needs my attention. Right? And we get a lot of that at the male facilities.

Nate Rott
Tamisha wants to show us an example of that. A group of animals that were being illegally shipped back at the US Fish and Wildlife Service field office, a short drive from LaX.

Rachel Carlson
Walking into a small room in the back of their office building, were warned of a bit of an odor.

Unmistakably turtles.

Nate Rott
Oh, yeah, that's ripe.

Rachel Carlson
It was ripe. Think like rotting strawberries with wet, moldy dog food.

Nate Rott
Holy moly.

There's a lot of turtles.

Tamisha Woolard
A lot of turtles that are not going back to the wild.

Nate Rott
About 40 box turtles native to eastern North America, where they're a health indicator species for forests.

Rachel Carlson
And they're all just crawling around in these five shallow plastic tanks on the concrete floor of this fish and Wildlife Service office.

Nate Rott
Tamisha's colleague, a special agent who's investigating the case, says they were seized about a week earlier at an international male facility in a city series of boxes bound for Asia.

Tamisha Woolard
They're collected to be sold as pets.

Rachel Carlson
And we learned that a single box turtle can be sold for hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.

Nate Rott
Big money.

Tamisha Woolard
These were smuggled so not in the best condition because they were trying to keep them from being detected.

Nate Rott
Some of these turtles have mottled white splotches on their shells, a sign of sickness.

Rachel Carlson
Tamisha says smugglers will often tape animals legs to their bodies or sedate them to keep them from moving.

Nate Rott
The latest federal data from the US Fish and Wildlife Service shows that from 2015 to 2019, an average of 27 live plants and animals were seized in the US every day.

Rachel Carlson
And Tamisha says today that number is definitely higher.

Tamisha Woolard
To me, what was highlighted after Covid is that people will try to make money using a lot of different methods. And e commerce has exploded. And there are people that are making pets out of animals that were never pets before.

Nate Rott
They've seized venomous scorpions, spiders, snakes, monkey tail, skinks.

Tamisha Woolard
They are large lizards and they don't play well with each other.

So this room is very small, as you can see, and we had about 50 of them.

Rachel Carlson
A recent report by the United nations found that more than 4000 species are being targeted globally for wildlife trafficking, threatening, in some cases, entire populations of rare plants and animals.

Nate Rott
Which is why the most immediate challenge that Tamisha and other authorities face when they seize a trafficked animal is keeping.

Rachel Carlson
It alive and finding it at home.

Sarah Walker
Oftentimes, if placement isn't found, an animal will have to be euthanized.

Nate Rott
This is Sarah Walker, the senior advisor on wildlife trafficking at the association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Rachel Carlson
She says it's often hard to return an animal to where it came from because it's not always clear where it came from and it could carry disease.

Sarah Walker
So really, the best thing for this animal who comes in very sick, very injured, very stressed, as you can imagine, needs immediate care.

Immediate care, immediate triage from a high quality facility.

Nate Rott
That's why Sarah's organization in the US Fish and Wildlife Service partnered to launch a pilot project last year in southern California, creating a one stop shop network dedicated to finding housing for wildlife confiscated.

Rachel Carlson
In the regional at zoos, conservancies and aquariums like the one we visited with the corals and clams.

Nate Rott
Since August of last year, the network has helped place more than 1300 animals in southern California, including many of the.

Rachel Carlson
Turtles at the Turtle Conservancy in Ojai, California.

Nate Jaros
That's bumblebee that's chasing you. This is the dude.

Nate Rott
James Liu is the head veterinarian at the conservancy.

Nate Jaros
People also don't realize that they can feel through their shell. They have personalities.

Nate Rott
His little bud is wagon bad days.

Nate Jaros
Yeah. So they love getting the backs of their shells scratched.

Rachel Carlson
And since 2017, the turtle Conservancy has accepted about 500 confiscated turtles, including about 100 box turtles in just the last year.

Nate Rott
James says this is all part of a broader trend where people in Asia, who have always valued turtles as pets, traditional medicine, food, depleting their own turtle populations, now have the financial means to buy turtles from other places and other.

Rachel Carlson
Countries like North America, which has the greatest amount of turtle biodiversity on the planet.

Nate Jaros
All those things together have created this perfect storm where now Americans are the people who are poaching and sending them to China instead of, you know, traditionally you think of the reverse like you think of poachers in Africa or Asia for trophy hunters in the US and Europe. Right? It's totally backwards now the turtle Conservancy.

Nate Rott
Is taking in all of the turtles.

Rachel Carlson
It can, but the sheer number is challenging.

Nate Jaros
Box turtles can live over 100 years, and unless you can figure out a way to have other organizations step up, take them in, or in a perfect world, start releasing them back into the wild, it's not sustainable.

Nate Rott
James says they are planning to release some box turtles back into the wild this summer for the first time ever.

Rachel Carlson
And to help in the long term, federal officials and the association of Zoos and Aquariums are trying to make similar regional networks in other parts of the country with the hope of someday having a national one.

Nate Rott
But this is all just treating a symptom, James says. In order to actually solve the problem, the poaching of live animals, people need to stop participating in the trade.

Rachel Carlson
If you want to see photos of the turtles, the live inspections, and the rest by the excellent, excellent Ryan Kelman, please check out our story on npr.org dot.

Nate Rott
This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy, edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and fact checked by myself and Rachel. The audio engineer was Gilly Moon.

Rachel Carlson
Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is the senior vice president of podcast strategy.

Nate Rott
I'm Nate Rutt.

Rachel Carlson
And I'm Rachel Carlson.

Nate Rott
Thank you for listening to short wave from NPR.

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Rachel Carlson
Northwest icons in journalism. An evergreen story isn't tied to one news cycle. It goes deep and helps you understand the world. The Evergreen is also a podcast from OPB about the Northwest. I'm Jen Chavez. Listen to the Evergreen podcast from OPB every Monday, part of the NPR network.