Exotic Animal Smugglers: Part of Growing Problem

(CANVAS STAFF REPORTS) - Cases such as a woman's attempt to smuggle a drugged tiger cub with stuffed toys have authorities around the world attempting to address a growing problem of exotic animal smuggling.

Sky News reported that a woman heading from Bangkok to Iran recently tried to smuggle the tiger onto a flight by hiding him in a bag of stuffed toys.

Inspectors X-raying the bag saw what they believed was an image of a real animal and found a sedated tiger about two months old. ( See a photo of the tiger cub in the suitcase .)

Despite claiming that the bag wasn't hers, the woman was arrested and faces up to four years in prison. The news network said if she was successful the tiger could have fetched about 100,000 baht, equal to $3,200 in American dollars.

The Consumerist said there were other cases such as a man trying to smuggle 18 monkeys under his shirt at a Mexican airport. A wanted wildlife smuggler, who had served six years in prison for similar crimes in the United States, was caught in Malaysia with almost 100 endangered snakes in his luggage.

Airport employees saw the snakes slithering out of a busted suitcase headed down a conveyor belt. The Consumerist said inspectors found 95 boa constrictors, two venomous rhinoceros vipers and a mata mata turtle.

Mental Floss reported in January that a German citizen was caught in New Zealand with 44 endangered skinks and geckos stuffed into his underwear. The geckos may have netted $2,800 each to European collectors.

Mental Floss stated that the black market, when it comes to size, is second only to the illegal drug business. It is estimated to be more than $20 billion.

For example, a pair of Queen Alexandra's Birdwings, the world's largest butterflies, goes for about $10,000. A baby chimpanzee can go for about $50,000.

The blog said that, unlike the drug business, not as many law enforcement are tracking down animal smugglers. There are fewer than 400 law enforcement agents with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service compared to 11,000 employees in the Drug Enforcement Agency.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals quoted a wildlife inspector as saying the agency can only physically inspect about 25 percent of wildlife shipments with the number of agents it has.

PETA stated that the United States is the main destination for exotic and endangered wild animals. While national, state and local governments pass laws to prohibit people from capturing and selling certain species, the organization claims that most of the regulations are poorly enforced and are meant to protect humans from disease rather than protect the animals.

PETA said such animals do pose a disease threat to both humans and other animals. There are also other ’ some more obvious ’ dangers from what PETA estimates is thousands of tigers, lions and other big cats held captive in the United States.

The result has been dozens of big-cat attacks in the past decade including one in which a tiger mauled a woman's 3-year-old grandson and another in which a Bengal tiger tore a 4-year-old boy's arm off.

"A 600-pound tiger will do what it wants, when it wants to," Tippi Hendren, a former actor who runs a big-cat sanctuary in California, said to PETA. "You buy this cute creature at 8 weeks old. After six months, it's torn your house apart and taken a good chuck out of you."