L.Introduction It All Started When I Mentioned the Parrot Sausages
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l.Introduction It all started when I mentioned the parrot sausages. ‘What are parrot sausages!’ asked someone, and I had to explain. Years ago when I had been collecting animals for zoos, 1 had become involved in the odd, sometimes confusing, and frequently shady world of animal dealing. Over the years I got to know just about everyone in the business from the trappers and hunters, through the middlemen to the exporters, in countries as far apart as India, Senegal and Colombia. And in Europe and Britain, and to a lesser extent North America, I became friends with importers and collectors of exotic animals. The world was different then and animals of all sorts were being traded in huge numbers. It was not uncommon for consignments of 30,000 birds to leave Senegal, and one dealer in India used to offer considerable discounts for quantities offinches over 100,000. In thoseedays there were very few restrictions on the trade and the existing ones affected only a few species that were considered a health hazard to domestic animals, so, for instance, one could not import gallinaceous birds-poultry and the like-into the United Kingdom for fear of fowl pest. Twenty-five years ago there was no talk of conservation, natural habitats weren’t being exploited and not a murmur was heard about the depletion of natural resources. Then the whole situation began to alter. The first time it really struck me that this traffic was having an effect on wild stocks was when I visited India nearly 20 years ago, and asked a friend where all the monkeys were that could previously have been commonly seen. ‘Oh,’ he said with a shrug, ‘they’re in your country.’ It seems incredible nowadays that no one had given a thought to the effects the business might have, but then the numbers seemed limitless. Several things started to happen about the same time that were to change the whole trade completely. World populations began to increase steeply after a setback during the Second World War, so that more land was cleared for cultivation, and a period of prosperity meant that people had money to buy a lot more--not just exotic pets, but new furniture, wood panelling in the home and, for the first time, new cars. All this purchasing power meant a sudden demand on the wild, for animals, timber and rubber. For the first time television sets appeared in the home, and before long natural history programmes were being shown which stimulated people to want to travel to ever more distant locations actually to see the animals that they had watched on the box. But when they arrived in their chosen resort they disco- vered that the Garden of Eden was having to compete with logging industries, large industrial estates and factories. On returning home, these now rather concerned tourists created the first of a whole legion of societies dedicated to conserving some aspect of the natural world. Over the next two decades the whole situation deteriorated so that by the end of the 1970s numbers of both plants and animals were disappearing faster and faster. By then, many countries had brought in legislation to stop, or at least control, this depredation, and then in the mid-1970s a number of nations signed an agreement in Washington to standardise the international trade in endangered animals and plants so that everywhere might follow the same system. However, CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) was as full of holes as a fishing net, and although over the years more and more countries have ratified CITES, and indeed it has done a lot of good in many cases, it is a Convention that is largely abused or ignored by signatories that are either uncaring or are making so much money from the trade that at least one blind eye is turned to its restrictions. Wherever there is a demand, a way will be found to supply it and if the demand cannot be supplied legally, there will always be plenty of people to meet it in other ways. 1 dare say that people have always smuggled animals or animal products since first a peasant killed a deer on the King’s estates and carried off the meat to sell in a distant market, but with the advent of CITES the whole proposition suddenly became much more attractive. Animals that had previously been cheap sud- denly became expensive., and animals that had been expensive became unob- tainable, so a new generation of animal smugglers started to bring a variety of species to Europe and America from their countries of origin. To start with it was easy-customs controls were not too strict andofficials in any case were not trained to be able to differentiate between one animal and another. But as law enforcement improved, the smugglers had to adopt ever more ingenious techni- ques to evade discovery, and today the illegal trading in animals is a sophisti- cated business. The public face of officialdom in every country either maintains that the problem is non-existent or that it is very minor, and whenever someone is caught much is made of it. The reality is that only small-fry are ever caught and the big men in the business continue to trade as they have for years, quietly and without any fuss. Most people are totally unaware of the trade. John Tonge, a courier who was caught in 1985 when he attempted to smuggle some parrots through Felixstow, is quoted as saying that when he was asked to smuggle birds ‘. I just laughed, “Who’d want to smuggle bloody parrots?” 1 thought!’ Unfortunately, whenever a case is reported in the press it is written by a journalist, which means that it is generally full of sensational inaccuracies and that doesn’t help the situation at all. The exaggerations are included to cover holes in the reporter’s knowledge. The real animal smuggling scene needs no embellishments to make it fascinating and exciting. The smuggling of live animals and animal products is a business that involves many people, because despite public protestations to the contrary, there are very few dealers or collectors who would not become involved in an illegal deal if circumstances were right. The one thing that can be said about the trade is that it is world-wide. One thing that cannot be said is that the story is simple. It is incredibly multifaceted, covering as it does the subjects of health and customs legislation, cruelty and destruction of habitat, changing lifestyles at both ends of the trade and conservationists on each side of the legal fence. Sometimes the story is sad and the wastage of life is terrible, sometimes it is about the boring shuffling around of paper to ‘legitimise’ consignments, and sometimes it is comically unbelievable, which brings me back to where 1 began, at the parrot sausages. Though birds are now frequently smuggled like this, the first time I saw it was in Germany. I was staying with a friend in Duisburg who was an animal dealer, well known among collectors as someone who could obtain the more difficult species. I asked him how he managed to get hold of animals that elsewhere in Germany were difficult to find. ‘Come, I’ll show you,’ he said, and led me upstairs. The building where he kept his stock was an old tall house and as we climbed ever more rickety stairs past floors full of Squirrel Monkeys and pythons and pigeons, he explained that all his illegal stock was kept on the top floor which we had to reach by squeezing past sacks of seed and old airline crates. Once we had negotiated this obstacle course 1 discovered that the room beyond was packed with cages. At first I thought that they were all empty, but then I saw that in one block in the uxner there were about a dozen Amazon parrots of different species and a pair of Leadbeater’s Cockatoos. ‘Aren’t all parrots prohibited for sale in Germany!’ I asked. ‘Oh yes,’ he replied with a laugh, ‘but that makes them far more valuable. As you can see, 1 do not have many just now but 1 will be getting a new consignment in the next few days. I will show you.’ He was as good as his word. Some days later just as the sun was setting he picked me up from my hotel in his opulent grey Mercedes and, as it got steadily darker, we set off through the streets of Duisburg. Leaving the town behind we headed towards the Dutch border. About an @I after midnight we turned off the road into a small wood and switched off the engine. My friend locked the car, and taking a cloth bag from the boot, he led the way through the wood and across flat country for over a mile before we waded a ditch, struggled through a wire fence and continued for another quarter of an hour across fields until we came to a narnxv road. There, parked in an overgrown layby, was a car, containing - it soon became obvious - a courting couple. Their enthusiasm didn’t inhibit Hans-Georg, however, from knocking on the window. Instantly the couple separated, and with no sign of embarrassment climbed out of the car to greet us, for the man was OUT contact. The woman, who was his girl friend, provided a pleasurable excuse for being parked in a deserted layby while they waited for us. They were both Dutch, as during our walk we had strayed into Holland, and while they drove us to their house they discussed the business of trading in animals.