So what's worse than buying powdered black rhino horn from a back alley Shenzen apothecary to cure your impotence? Paying too much for black rhino horn at aforementioned back alley apothecary! Luckily, I came upon an interesting table at Havocscope, which provides indexes of black market industries, including animal trafficking. While these metrics are certainly depressing, this sort of information helps conservationists understand the economic challenges they are up against, and plan their strategies accordingly.
The sources for these numbers are listed at Havocscope. As any longterm Zooillogix reader knows, animal trafficking is the #1 threat to many species worldwide. Although most prevalent, in Southeast Asia, Africa, and parts of the Amazon, animal trafficking has been documented on every continent (including Antarctica if you count whaling). While many of these animals are destined to become luxury goods (ivory), dinner (delicious whale and bush meat), or pets (slow lorises), the explosive growth of the Chinese demand for exotic animals to be used in traditional medicines has been particularly devastating.
Things you should buy at back-alley Chinese apothecaries instead of tiger penis:
Environment
Comments
Hey! They forgot to list ebola-laiden monkey meat and pox-infected pocket rats!
Posted by: julia goolia | October 27, 2008 4:00 PM
Sometimes humans are the dumbest things on earth.
Posted by: ym | October 27, 2008 4:01 PM
Reason.com--a Libertarian website--tried to address this issue a few years ago, but most participants couldn't see past their own textbook assumptions. When I commented on how the black-market trade really was wiping out species, several board regulars retorted that it was nonsense, that a stable and logical market would be set up in order to maximize profits. Apparently they believe that pagan witch-doctors eating bird eyeballs in hopes of improving their own vision suddenly become logical 21st-century people just because they use currency.
Posted by: TTT | October 28, 2008 11:05 AM
Good point: money is one of the "Big Three" that drive human nature. And if those markets are known, you can attack it at the "money source" of the problem, instead of doomed attempts to protect animals solely at the battle front in the wild.
Posted by: Robert V Sobczak | October 28, 2008 11:54 AM
I'm not so interested in dragon scales for my remedies, but I could be convinced to buy gizmo at a discount....seeing as most of its offspring are about as evil as poachers. Can't we just convince these "pagan witch-doctors eating bird eyeballs" that poachers are the next big "it" market?
Posted by: bugaboo | October 28, 2008 12:52 PM