“Endangered animals are the new blood diamonds . . . .”

[Note: the tiger debate is still pending, as Dr. Nyhus up in Maine has been snowed under both literally and figuratively. It is imminent, however.]

If your image of the immediate threat to wildlife was an unprincipled but impoverished poacher feeding his family as best he could, it’s time for a frightening revision.

Newsweek’s Sharon Begley reports that warlords and militias, including Sudan’s Janjaweed—the butchers of Darfur—are using the illegal trade in rare animals and animal parts to fund their bloody terror campaigns.

The new poachers are “brutally effective,” organized, and heavily armed, Begley writes. The size, artful concealment, and genetic provenance of seized shipments of ivory, for instance, suggests that contractors receive a specific “purchase order,” then “organize teams of poachers to kill a set number of elephants in a specific area.”

“The consequences for wildlife have been devastating,” reports Begley. The northern white rhino population in Garamba National Park, on Congo’s border with Sudan, had recovered from thirteen in 1983 to thirty-two in 2003. Now there are two. Islamic and separatist terrorists based in Bangladesh are suspected of mounting raids across the border into India’s Kaziranga National Park—like Garamba, a World Heritage Site—to slaughter tigers, rhinos, and Asian elephants.

Of course, demand is the ultimate driver of a contraband business that the U.S. State Department now estimates at $10 billion a year, “and possibly twice that.” It’s easy to blame China, the biggest customer, with its seemingly bottomless appetite for traditional-medicine ingredients and exotic foods. But “a close second”? The United States.

HOW WE CAN HELP:

• World Wildlife Fund
• Wildlife Direct

(Annie Gottlieb)

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