Commerce City – A leopard head wrapped in a plastic bag gazes dully upon rows of metal shelves. In the next aisle, hundreds of elephant tusks are stacked. Other rows are filled with reptile-skin cowboy boots, caiman-skin wallets and bags of dried seahorses.
Seized by federal wildlife inspectors, these items and a million more are stored at the National Eagle and Wildlife Property Repository – evidence of the booming trade in illegal wildlife parts.
In the past, law enforcement focused on merchants and smugglers, but now federal wildlife officials say there is a new, emerging threat: the Internet.
“What the Internet has done is increase trading by bringing buyers and sellers together,” said Special Agent Ed Grace of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Worldwide, the illegal trade in endangered wildlife is a $4.2 billion-a-year smuggling enterprise, eclipsed only by illegal drugs, federal experts say. The United States, Europe and Asia are the biggest markets.
The contraband wildlife parts are increasingly traded through chat rooms and legitimate websites, such as eBay, law enforcement officials say.
EBay, the world’s largest Web auctioneer, prohibits selling live animals and illegal wildlife parts, but the site carries 50 million items, adding 5 million each day. As a result, some banned items slip through, eBay spokesman Hani Durzy said.
“We don’t want to do anything that encourages people to knowingly or unknowingly break the law,” Durzy said. “We will end listings; we will kick people off site; and we will provide agencies whatever information they need to prosecute traffickers.”
Still, on Monday, eBay had 387 listings for “African elephant ivory,” including some not labeled antique, which would be exempt from an international ban.
“Before, if you wanted a tiger- skin rug, you’d either have to travel abroad or rely on classified ads, which would limit buyers to a finite number of people,” Grace said. “Now, with the Internet, the market has been popped wide open.”
Grace said at least 70 percent of his cases involve computers in some way. For example, e-mail records from a suspect in the Midwest led to a raid on a house in Firestone last year, where almost 100 live snakes, many of them venomous, were seized, Grace said.
In 2003, the last year for which statistics are available, federal wildlife agents confiscated wildlife parts worth more than $5.8 million, obtained $9 million in civil penalties, and won convictions totaling 65 years in jail.
The Internet and computers are radically changing the game, wildlife field agents say.
“You can be sitting quietly at home, but as soon as you click the mouse to buy something covered under the treaty, you’re breaking the law,” said Pat Fisher, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “It’s a huge problem.”
This week, members of the 167 countries that signed the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, will meet in Geneva.
On the agenda is a plan to strengthen the ban on the ivory trade, which results in the slaughter of between 4,000 and 12,000 elephants a year.
Other agenda items include the trade in caviar from endangered sturgeon and the surging popularity of shawls woven from rare Tibetan antelopes.
For now, enforcement activities, such as on the Internet, are left to the individual nations where the sales occur, Fisher said.
The wildlife items at the Commerce City repository don’t stay there but end up in museums, universities and schools.
It is part of an effort to combat the illegal trade through education, said Bernadette Atencio, the repository’s administrator.
“We all need to understand how our purchasing habits affect wildlife resources,” Atencio said. “You may be one person buying one handbag, but multiply that by 10,000 and you can see how it can add up.”
Staff writer Theo Stein can be reached at 303- 820-1657 or tstein@denverpost.com.
