The wildlife poacher has a new ally: the Internet, say activists who plan to tame this illegal trade in live animals and the remains of their slaughter, such as ivory, skins and tusks.
"Illegal trade has increased exponentially because of the ease of selling by Internet," said Lynne Levine, a spokeswoman for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
Her group began a letter-writing campaign to eBay in European countries asking the Internet auction sites to reject sales of animals taken in the wild or any of their parts, whether made into footstools, chess sets, pens or other ornaments, especially rhinoceros horns and ivory.
"A huge portion of the illegal items traded over the Internet is ivory products," said Michael Wamithi, a Kenyan elephant program manager.
"The impact of Internet sales is most definitely felt on the ground in elephant country," he testified before the US Congress.
Wamithi came from Nairobi to lobby Washington in favor of stanching Internet trade in ivory and all illegal takings, which gets an international hearing next month.
The Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) is an international treaty of 171 countries that will meet in June.
Then, Germany, representing the EU, will promote the idea of policing the Internet, where the remains of endangered species such as tigers and sharks are sold as poultices of no medical value.
Twenty-six tonnes of ivory was seized around the world in the past 18 months, Levine said. "We believe that is 10 percent of trade."
Some of it winds up on the US eBay auction site, which as Levine spoke showed 385 items made of ivory, from trinkets to a "Magnificent 5-foot long elephant ivory party boat!" with a starting bid of US$30,000. The seller's New York address was listed.
Few items on the US eBay professed to be "pre-ban ivory," but such claims mean little, said Levine, who compares the ivory trade to the sale of diamonds, but without a Kimberly process to certify it.
Even a certificate of authenticity prior to the 1947 international ban does not raise the value of the piece, because enforcement is so lax, she said.
"People are selling stuff because they think they can get away with it, and so far they have," Levine said.
In the countries where activists have approached eBay and other auction sites, "The ivory offerings have been reduced by 98 percent," she said.
Not surprisingly, wildlife defenders had good results with eBay in Germany, which will spearhead Internet enforcement proposals at the 14th CITES meeting of all member nations in The Hague from June 3 to June 15.
US offices of eBay did not return repeated telephone calls from reporters.
While the member nations are required to conform to CITES rules, Levine said, enforcement will be more difficult than putting the right rules in place.
"France has some of the most excellent policies of all of the international eBays but they have a problem enforcing," she said.
Not a problem for Craig's List, a San Francisco-based community bulletin board in hundreds of cities allowing classified advertisements, jobs, second-hand items, even "erotic services," that anyone may post -- or police.
With a staff of 23 supervising 5 billion pages a month, founder Craig Newmark said he would let the consumer beware.
"I encourage anyone who sees anything like that to flag it and let us know if there is a problem so we can see if there's a problem," he said.
Levine would be happy if a "landing page" popped up on a Web site anytime a person tried to post an illegal item, warning them of the legal and moral ramifications of selling wildlife.
A failure by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to respond to Israel’s brilliant 12-day (June 12-23) bombing and special operations war against Iran, topped by US President Donald Trump’s ordering the June 21 bombing of Iranian deep underground nuclear weapons fuel processing sites, has been noted by some as demonstrating a profound lack of resolve, even “impotence,” by China. However, this would be a dangerous underestimation of CCP ambitions and its broader and more profound military response to the Trump Administration — a challenge that includes an acceleration of its strategies to assist nuclear proxy states, and developing a wide array
Twenty-four Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers are facing recall votes on Saturday, prompting nearly all KMT officials and lawmakers to rally their supporters over the past weekend, urging them to vote “no” in a bid to retain their seats and preserve the KMT’s majority in the Legislative Yuan. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which had largely kept its distance from the civic recall campaigns, earlier this month instructed its officials and staff to support the recall groups in a final push to protect the nation. The justification for the recalls has increasingly been framed as a “resistance” movement against China and
Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), former chairman of Broadcasting Corp of China and leader of the “blue fighters,” recently announced that he had canned his trip to east Africa, and he would stay in Taiwan for the recall vote on Saturday. He added that he hoped “his friends in the blue camp would follow his lead.” His statement is quite interesting for a few reasons. Jaw had been criticized following media reports that he would be traveling in east Africa during the recall vote. While he decided to stay in Taiwan after drawing a lot of flak, his hesitation says it all: If
Saturday is the day of the first batch of recall votes primarily targeting lawmakers of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). The scale of the recall drive far outstrips the expectations from when the idea was mooted in January by Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘). The mass recall effort is reminiscent of the Sunflower movement protests against the then-KMT government’s non-transparent attempts to push through a controversial cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014. That movement, initiated by students, civic groups and non-governmental organizations, included student-led protesters occupying the main legislative chamber for three weeks. The two movements are linked