For the past few years, much of my work as a journalist has focused on wildlife and environmental crime. I’ve covered poaching busts and seizures of everything from pangolin scales and big-cat skins to rhino horn, live turtles and songbirds. I’ve reported on the Asian, African and South American markets that sell animals live, dead and in parts, and about the consumers that drive this black-market trade. I’ve written about China, the largest consumer, where many endangered species products are luxury items bought by the wealthiest and most influential as a way to flaunt power and gain prestige. I’ve also explored the trade here in the United States — the world’s second largest consumer. I covered the ubiquitous bird trade in Latin America, where ownership of pet parrots and other birds is so rampant that few realize these animals are endangered, or that it’s against the law to buy or keep them.
One thread links all of these stories: illicit wildlife trade has become big business. It’s a $19 to $23 billion dollar a year industry, run by international organized crime syndicates — often the same people responsible for trafficking guns, drugs and people.
Yet from where I sit, there’s never been enough mainstream coverage on this massive loss of life on Earth. And despite the scope of the crisis, lately it’s become even harder for journalists to sell these stories.
Here’s the harsh reality of media today: When it comes to possible nuclear war with North Korea, millions of U.S. citizens potentially losing health coverage, massive climate-change-charged hurricanes or mass shootings in a nightclub, rock concert or Sunday church service, wildlife stories become a hard sell. A story on coral bleaching, pangolin poaching or tiger trafficking is just not going to grab an editor’s attention.
Another challenge is the time scale of the demise. Although scientists say this is becoming a full-blown crisis that will ultimately affect all life on Earth, it’s a slow-motion train wreck in terms of the news cycle. This doesn’t necessarily work well for media outlets focused on maximum page views, Tweets and shares.
And it’s always difficult to sell these stories unless there are dramatic or bloody headlines.
But wildlife trade is a dramatic and bloody business, although it’s rarely seen as such. And we’re witnessing an unprecedented surge in poaching and illegal trade of wild plants and animals, which is now occurring at an industrial scale.
Growing demand is driving what has become a large-scale massacre of African elephants for ivory, rhinos for their horn (which is now worth more than gold or cocaine on the black market), tigers for their skins. A census published in 2016 found that 144,000 elephants disappeared from 15 African countries in less than a decade. The Species Survival Commission’s African Rhino Specialist Group reported in 2016 that the number of African rhinos poached in Africa had increased for the sixth year in a row.
Perhaps 3,800 tigers still roam the wild, split among the five remaining wild subspecies, meaning that only a few hundred wild Siberian, Sumatran, Indochinese and Malayan tigers survive.
These are the iconic creatures that make headlines, but this massive illegal industry in wildlife has put innumerable animals on the fast track to extinction. We’re losing species at more than 100 times the normal rate. From a scientific perspective, this loss is so rapid and extreme that it’s often called “the Sixth Extinction.” In July, Paul Ehrlich and colleagues categorized the situation in even more catastrophic terms, calling it “biological annihilation.” If this level of widespread slaughter were killing human beings, we’d label it genocide. Many of the world’s most iconic, beloved species — as well as animals we’ve never heard of — could vanish from the wild or disappear from the planet within our lifetimes.