Animal Smuggling Exposes Illegal Wildlife Trade

An Indonesian man was stopped at Suvarnabhumi International Airport last week with dozens of rare wildlife stuffed into three suitcases. This would-be smuggler was caught at Thailand Airport with animals including snakes, squirrels, and tortoises. He had purchased the wildlife at Bangkok's Chatuchak Market and was attempting to smuggle them out of the country. According to Traffic - the organization that fights wildlife trafficking - the man was found with "88 Indian star tortoises, 33 elongated tortoises, seven radiated tortoises, six mata mata turtles and four Southeast Asian narrow-headed softshell turtles. He also had three Aldabra tortoises, one pig-nosed turtle, and one ploughshare tortoise, which Traffic described as the world's rarest tortoise". However, the list doesn't stop there. Authorities also found "34 ball pythons, two boa constrictors, several milk snakes, corn snakes and king snakes and one hog-nosed snake, 19 bearded dragon lizards, four spiny-tailed lizards, two Sudan plated lizards and six Argentine horned frogs", and to top it all off, "there were 18 baboon spiders, 22 common squirrels and one African grey parrot inside the suitcases, Traffic says". 

"Suspected smuggler stuffed squirrels, tortoises into suitcases"

Reported by CNN Wire Staff on CNN.com - February 11, 2011

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/02/10/thailand.wildlife.smuggling/index.html?hpt=T2





These Indian Star Tortoises were one breed of many found and seized in the smugglers suitcases.


Sadly, this seems to be one of many cases like this, as Chatuchak Market (located right down the street from wildlife protection and nature crime police offices) is widely known for its illegal mass sales of rare animals.


What this man was planning to do with these animals? We may never really know - but my guess is his plans were to smuggle them out and sell them on the black market; a case that can be directly related to man's anthropocentrism. This man, like most others, holds the belief that because he is human he has the right to treat animals as subhuman beings - capturing them, detaining them, and selling them as if their existence is worthless. Beliefs such as this are so widely held, that CNN doesn't even recognize that what he is doing - holding animals in captivity and treating them as subhuman - is wrong. The only issue addressed by CNN is how this man tried to do what he did, buying the animals illegally and stuffing them all in a suitcase. Society has selfishly interpreted Darwin's "survival of the fittest" and used it to justify doing just about anything to any being deemed subhuman, and in doing so has exploited nature for economic purposes. The man trying to smuggle these animals probably thought that once sold, the money from his acts would bring him great happiness - a type of metaphor that is held as truth in today's society. These types of metaphors are addressed in Nieztzsche's On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense - "Truths are illusions, we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have been worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coin" (pg 5). In closing, the "truth" that money brings happiness quickly followed Nieztzsche's priciple and revealed itself as an illusion... this man is now in prison and faces wildlife smuggling charges. 


Meredith Whittier