"a zoo in my luggage" smuggling attempt

Chlidonias

Chlidonias

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Illegal 'zoo' in 3 suitcases gets man arrested - World news - World environment - msnbc.com
The attempt to smuggle more than 200 live animals — snakes, tortoises, squirrels, spiders, lizards and even a parrot — inside three suitcases was bold, but also dumb.

The suspect, an Indonesian man arrested Wednesday at the airport in Bangkok, Thailand, allegedly had gone on a wildlife shopping spree and expected to be able to get his haul out in three pieces of checked luggage.

He "was stopped after the regular luggage scanning process at the airport showed images of an array of animals stuffed inside his three black bags," the international wildlife monitoring group TRAFFIC said in a statement Thursday.

What surprised TRAFFIC was that the man expected to make it through security.

"It's not unprecedented to find numbers — sometimes even hundreds — of live animals inside luggage like this," TRAFFIC spokesman Richard Thomas told msnbc.com. "What makes this case unusual is the wide variety of wildlife in the cases. Animals like tortoises are usually taped up to keep them from moving, and being detected, but quite how the man in this instance expected not to be found out is quite extraordinary."

Here's the list of what was found:

* 88 Indian Star tortoises
* 34 ball pythons
* 33 elongated tortoises
* 22 common squirrels
* 19 bearded dragons
* 18 baboon spiders
* 7 radiated tortoises
* 6 Argentine horned frogs
* 6 mata mata turtles
* 4 spiny tailed lizards
* 4 striped narrow-headed turtles
* 3 aldabra tortoises
* 2 boa constrictors
* 2 Sudan plated lizards
* 2 corn snakes
* 2 king snakes
* 1 ploughshare tortoise (world's rarest turtle)
* 1 pig-nosed turtle
* 1 African gray parrot
* 1 milk snake
* 1 hog nosed snake

The suspect "admitted to authorities that he had purchased the animals from Chatuchak Market," TRAFFIC said, referring to an outdoor trading area in Bangkok where rare and endangered species are bought and sold.

"One really has to question how Chatuchak Market, which is located just down the street from both Wildlife Protection and Nature Crime Police Offices, can continue these illegal mass sales," TRAFFIC regional director William Schaedla said. "The situation is totally unacceptable in a country that claims to be effectively addressing illegal wildlife trade."

"Some retailers have openly acknowledged to TRAFFIC staff that many of the species they sell have been illegally obtained and even offer advice on how to smuggle them out of the country," TRAFFIC stated, "in contravention of national laws and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora."

The suspect remains in custody, TRAFFIC noted, and is expected to face a variety of smuggling charges.
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"Some retailers have openly acknowledged to TRAFFIC staff that many of the species they sell have been illegally obtained and even offer advice on how to smuggle them out of the country,"
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"One really has to question how Chatuchak Market, which is located just down the street from both Wildlife Protection and Nature Crime Police Offices, can continue these illegal mass sales,"
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must be a lot of bribery of officials going on
 
Am I the only one wondering where the animals went to afterwards?

As for the dubious title "World's rarest turtle": I always thought "Lonesome George" was the rarest chelonian...not to mention various other highly endangered chelonian species such as Aspideretes/Nilssonia nigricans, Rafetus swinhoei...
Nevertheless: Astrochelys yniphora is a really rare species; makes you wonder how it was obtained.
 
Don't know how he hoped to sell them even if he had managed to get them on the flight, seeing as you need paperwork to sell (or breed) some of the really rare stuff
 
AgileGibbon said:
Don't know how he hoped to sell them even if he had managed to get them on the flight, seeing as you need paperwork to sell (or breed) some of the really rare stuff
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Unfortunately, there are plenty of people willing to trade without the necessary paperwork.
 
@KCZooFan: ??? I'm not following your "technique".

So far, "Lonesome George" is the last known living specimen of the subspecies Geochelone nigra abingdoni (although Prague's "Tony" and some Volcano Wolf tortoises might proof us wrong; but even then, the number would be very limited).

If you're last of your subpopulation, you're very rare, no matter whether you're a tortoise, a Bali tiger or a Caucasian wisent. There might still be other specimens of the same species left, but none of this very subspecies.
And given the fun taxonomists seem to have at turning highly endangered subspecies into full species just before they are gone (see Northern White Rhino), who knows whether Georgy might not be updated to "last of his species" in the future?

Anyway, to get back on topic: ploughshare tortoises are rare, but (fortunately) not the rarest chelonians. That doubtful title might be given to several other (sub)species...
 
Wow, that must have been a very tight squeeze.

Pygathrix said:
Answer may be here:

Critically endangered ploughshare tortoises returned to Madagascar | Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust
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Unfortunately they seem pretty easy to get hold of if you've got the money:
BBC News - Rare tortoise sold openly at Indonesian expo

Black market animal traders also offer them regularly - Ploughshares seem to be a bit of a status symbol among 'the kingpins'; Anson Wong and others have repeatedly offered some to undercover reporters over the phone. This article may be of interest:
Asia's Wildlife Trade — National Geographic Magazine
 
AgileGibbon said:
Don't know how he hoped to sell them even if he had managed to get them on the flight, seeing as you need paperwork to sell (or breed) some of the really rare stuff
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you only need paperwork to sell or keep them if you are selling or keeping them legally. In Indonesia the legality of things often means little.

felix said:
must be a lot of bribery of officials going on
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the Chatuchak Weekend Market sells a truckload of smuggled animals. Its all "under the counter" so to speak. The only animals on actual view there are legal pets like puppies, birds, squirrels, etc; all the illegal stuff is well-hidden unless you are a buyer, in which case you can get anything you want, whether its birds of paradise or baby tapirs or Komodo dragons. The market gets raided quite often, but it doesn't do much to stop the trade. And being Thailand, yes, there is a lot of bribery to look the other way.
 
Would have been interesting to know where he was headed with that haul.

:p

Hix
 
zoogiraffe said:
Yes and its very surprising as to who some of those people are and the positions they hold!!
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San Diego Zoo springs to mind ;)
 
With animal trade in general, wild-caught is offered cheaper than captive-bred, this doesn't exactly do much to stop this sort of trade going on, it just perpetuates it.

I'm not claiming that a pricing review would stop it, it might just give it less encouragement with the species which are common in captivity but in trouble in the wild (such as horsfields tortoises)
 
@AgileGibbon: Low prices of exotics will encourage more of the wrong kind of owners to purchase one-and treat it as a throwaway, disposable article. Best examples: pet Bearded dragons in Europe...
 
peacockpheasant said:
Do you care to elaborate what you think you know? Or are you just going to disseminate nonsense?
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so now you are just going to start following me around the site harrassing me? Grow up.

The San Diego and Bronx Zoos are well known to have had very shady dealings with reptile smugglers, and there are a number of other American zoos that displayed (for example) Australian reptiles that had never been legally exported from Australia. For starters you could just do some google searches. A good recent book on the subject is "Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skulduggery" by Jennie Erin Smith.
 
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