From Animals Magazine, Jul/Aug 1994

The Primate Pipeline
The more endangered the ape, the more smugglers will risk in illegal trade

By Jessica Speart

The zoo director's request had the ring of a shopping list to it: 1.1 (one male, one female) orangutans, 1.1 gorillas, and a breeding group or family of chimpanzees. All three great apes appear on Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a list of rare animals and plants that treaty signatories generally agree to ban from commercial trade. But the zoo director knew there would be little problem obtaining the animals he'd requested, for what is rare is also highly valued. Illegal wildlife trade into the United States alone is a $5 billion a year business, according to one official in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And orangutans, chimpanzees, and gorillas are the endangered species most in demand by circuses, zoos, the pet market, entertainers, and private collectors around the world.

Even more frightening than the fact that rare primates are traded is the case with which orders for them can be filled. But how is any illegal trade in endangered species possible with all the rules, regulations, and enforcement agencies in place to combat this kind of activity? As plenty of animal dealers can attest, nothing could be simpler.

Orangutans are found only in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, where they number approximately 30,000 in the wild, tottering on the verge of extinction. Sporting a halo of red hair that stands on end and large, liquid-brown eyes that gaze in devotion, orangutan babies appear almost human. It's an appeal that has created a deadly demand. Taken by first killing their mothers, captured orangutan babies suffer a high mortality rate. "They die like flies," states primatologist Biruté Galdikas, founder and director of Camp Leakey in Kalimantan, Borneo. It is estimated that for every baby reaching the first leg of its journey, five to six babies meet their deaths. Equally horrendous is what lies ahead for the survivors.

The shadowy underground world of wildlife trafficking relies on countries and zoos that knowingly cooperate with the illegal trade. High rewards and relatively low risks make the partnership desirable. In the past, a number of eastern European zoos have been more than willing partners. Lacking hard currency (such as U.S. dollars or British sterling) with which to buy animals, these zoos have turned to "laundering" illegally caught wildlife. In return for supplying false certificates, which claim the animals were captive bred and therefore legal, participating zoos keep a few specimens for their own collections.

According to Shirley McGreal, chairwoman of the International Primate Protection League (IPPL), a number of zoo officials from Poland's Wroclaw and Poznan zoos became involved in just such a scam in the 1980s, providing temporary havens for endangered species to be "quarantined." Freshly laundered, the animals then continued on to zoos in Western nations in what appeared to be legal transactions.

Poland has not been the only pipeline for illegally traded orangutans. A ruse once used to smuggle orangutans out of Indonesia to Singapore might very well still be in use, says McGreal. The primates were whisked to Thailand and surreptitiously transported into Cambodia, where they were certified as having been captive-bred at "Koh Khong Zoo." Signed by the director on zoo stationery, the certificate could not have looked more official -- except that there are no zoos in Cambodia. Allegedly working with German dealer Marlies Slotta, owner of the animal-trading firm Slotta Interzoo, the "zoo" shipped two "big red birds" (the smugglers' code for orangutans) to an unsuspecting Czechoslovakian Film Board in 1988 for a movie about endangered species. Later it was discovered that another two orangutans with Koh Khong certification had been shipped to Russia's St. Petersburg zoo.

But such discoveries are rare and, as one connection in a country folds, there is always another ready to take its place. IPPL's McGreal closed the Polish connection with a massive letter-writing and publicity campaign after an anonymous source sent her dozens of documents revealing the trade. But she worries about countries yet to be discovered. "It's so frustrating," she says. "Besides contending with eastern Europe, each new country that's formed from the break-up of the Soviet Union provides dealers with a potentially new connection." What lies ahead is a nightmarish prospect for those desperately trying to fight illegal trade.

Additionally, CITES documents that verify a shipment as legal frequently are stolen or simply used over and over again if an official is amply paid to turn a blind eye. Other methods are equally blatant. In the case of the Bangkok Six, a half dozen baby orangutans were drugged, stuffed inside two tiny boxes, and mislabeled as birds. The boxes were then checked into the airport in Singapore as personal baggage -- a loophole widely exploited by wildlife smugglers to avoid the pesky problem of receiving an air waybill. With less of a paper trail, there is little evidence to follow, which allows smugglers to move illegal wildlife around the world with ease. Though the six orangutans were discovered and confiscated in Thailand, their final destination had been listed as the Belgrade zoo, where they were to be laundered before traveling to the Soviet Union.

Taiwan has been a frequent destination for the orangutan trade and one of the worst offenders, say conservationists monitoring the trade. The Orangutan Foundation estimates that close to 1,000 of the primates have been smuggled into Taiwan for sale as pets, causing the deaths of 5,000 to 7,000 orangutans in the process. Earning the nickname Mad Monkey City, Taipei is reputed to have more orangutans per square mile than the animals' native habitat. The money to be made is enormous. While a hunter gets $200 for a baby, the middleman can sell it for $1,000 in the capital. Though orangutans have sold for as much as $5,000 in Taiwan, the price can soar up to $30,000 for a foreign circus or zoo -- unless the final destination is the United States, where orangutans can fetch $50,000 each.

Orangutans face a multitude of problems within their own country as well. Though wild orangutans have been protected under Indonesian law since 1931, it has not stopped the trade, much of which is carried on at Pramuka Market in Jakarta, the capital. And the ape faces trouble even in its rainforest home. The opening of Kalimantan to an aggressive logging industry in 1979 brought a million Javanese to the island along with a Korean plywood factory that employs 2,000 people and has run 24 hours a day for the past 14 years. Its location is menacingly close to Tanjung Puting National Park -- one of the orangutan's last strongholds and the site of Camp Leakey, Gaidikas' research station. As more logging takes place, orangutans are being flushed out into the open, where they are easy prey for greedy poachers.

To make matters worse, gold mining, begun in earnest on Borneo in 1988, has turned the park's northern boundary into barren land and tainted the area's water supply with mercury used in the extraction process. Equally ominous is the discovery of oil inside the park. "Orangutans have never heard of the Dow Jones, but it's affecting their lives," Galdikas flatly states.

Indeed, little tolerance is found within Indonesia for those who dare oppose any policies or trade that produce such large sums of money.

Galdikas has learned this firsthand, having made a number of powerful enemies. She stands as a last bastion against those in the Indonesian Forestry Department who would gladly allow wholesale logging and capture of the remaining orangutans to feed the illegal trade. In response to her controversial stand, Galdikas says she was beaten and threatened in 1990 by a man who warned her to "go home." The director general of nature preservation within the Forestry Department screamed that he would see her destroyed, reports the researcher, and the Indonesian press denounced her rehabilitation program as a "kindergarten for primates."

Though Galdikas claims to have successfully rehabilitated more than 100 ex-captive orangutans back into the wild, the government shut down her program in 1990, forbidding any new primates into the camp. In 1993, the Forestry Department took over care of the babies, confiscated from the illegal trade, in the nursery area of Galdikas' camp. While she is allowed to continue her research on wild orangutans, the dismantling of Camp Leakey looms like a specter of the future.

As foreboding as the orangutan's situation is, the mountain gorilla has an even more tenuous grip on survival. Parc des Volcans, home to half of the world's 620 remaining mountain gorillas, lies in the northwest corner of Rwanda, where it is caught in the eye of a storm. All foreign researchers fled the country in April, when full-scale civil war broke out. Thousands of frightened refugees have been reported fleeing up into the mountains and gorilla habitat.

Civil unrest is not new to Rwanda. It has raged for the past three years between government forces and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) over ethnic issues. Both sides have assured conservation groups of their concern for the welfare of the gorilla and its habitat. But in February 1993, 5,000 rebels stormed the park from across the Ugandan border, driving out game wardens and ransacking Karisoke, the research center first established by the late Dian Fossey nearly two decades ago. Karisoke's staff escaped, but antipoaching patrols came to a halt for 10 days. By May, when the researchers returned, poaching snares had increased a hundredfold.

The year before, Mrithi, the silverback leader of Group 13, was accidentally shot by government forces on patrol. Mrithi's group has since broken up.

Even if present hostilities subside, their legacy bodes ill for the mountain gorilla. Land mines, placed by government troops in an effort to halt the invading RPF, dot the northern border of the park -- just one more hazard for the endangered mountain gorilla.

Even without the war, mountain gorillas face the threat of human encroachment. With a growing population and little arable land left, the native populations of Rwanda, Zaire, and Uganda are in fierce competition with gorillas for the scarce bit of land they inhabit. "Most of our efforts ought to concentrate on making sure we lessen pressure for the conversion of park lands. Because when that goes, the gorilla will go," asserts Dieter Stecklis, chief executive director of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

Though not as rare as their mountain cousins, lowland gorillas face a different threat. They've become unwitting stars in the illegal wildlife trade. With their numbers hovering at 30,000, lowland gorillas are spread over much larger territories where borders are porous. During the late 1980s, German animal dealer Walter Sensen regularly shipped gorillas out of Cameroon with the help of highly placed officials. In the notorious case of the Taiwan Three, Sensen shipped three gorillas labeled as "monkeys" from Cameroon to Zaire. Two arrived dead. The third was sent on to Taipei, where it sits alone in a cage today. Working under a five-year contract with Equatorial Guinea, Sensen managed to export three other gorillas out of that country in June 1989. Shipped as his personal luggage, two of the gorillas were purchased by Mexico's Guadalajara zoo for $130,000. No one knows what happened to the third.

But the biggest marketplace for primates is now the Middle East, where both lowland gorillas and chimpanzees are purchased for private menageries. A recent incident involved an infant gorilla smuggled from Zaire and confiscated at Kigali Airport in Rwanda. Implicated in the plot was an Egyptian animal dealer, along with an employee of the Egyptian embassy in Rwanda. Conservationists believe illegal primates are flown to Egypt, where they are given false papers and then pipelined to other Arab countries.

In a 1990 confidential report to Interpol, CITES placed the annual illegal trade at 40,000 protected primates. Chimpanzees form an increasing percentage of that growing number. With only an estimated 175,000 chimpanzees left in Africa, the threat to their existence in the wild is substantial. At least 10 chimps die for each animal captured. Spain and its Canary Islands have been major centers for "beach chimps," infant animals local photographers use during the day to lure tourists, whom they charge $10 a photo. At night, this same racket takes place outside of bars. The chimps are drugged to keep them docile. As they get older, their teeth are filed to the gums or pulled out with pliers to prevent them from severely biting their handlers.

The IPPL suspects that chimps are also being smuggled out of Liberia and Sierra Leone and flown out of Equatorial Guinea on military planes bound for Spain.

Uganda has also been a major thoroughfare for smuggling wild chimps out of Zaire. In late 1990, four chimpanzees were illegally exported from Uganda to the Soviet Union in a deal set up by a Swedish animal trader and sanctioned by the Ugandan deputy minister for tourism and wildlife. Worth $400,000 on the world market, the chimps were shipped to an ice circus owned by a U.S. citizen operating out of the USSR. The chimps traveled on tour through Italy, Austria, and Hungary before finally being confiscated.

These days, Tanzania is believed to be the largest source for illegal chimpanzees. In late 1993, nine wild chimps were shipped from Tanzania to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where they sold for $100,000 apiece. At the same time, infant chimps were available in that country's Jeddah zoo, while seven other young chimps popped up for sale in Faifa. All these chimpanzees were flown from Tanzania on private planes owned by people close to the king of Saudi Arabia -- without any official papers.

These are but a few examples of the illegal trade still going on at a steady rate. According to IPPL's McGreal, "The problem is the whole iceberg pops up to the surface for a moment and then drops back down." It allows a frustratingly rare glimpse into the international network of wildlife traffickers.

Only through strengthening current laws, enforcing harsher penalties, and educating countries on the senseless squandering of their precious natural resources can we entertain any hope for the three great apes' survival in the wild. Their fate lies in our hands as they wait to see if the trade can be controlled or if their destiny is to become more merchandise in the smuggling pipeline.

Copyright © 1994 by Animals Magazine. Used with permission.