A win for the elephants - but what about the birds?
The internet auction site eBay is getting some good press for its decision to ban most ivory sales on its sites around the world. The company announced its decision - a toughening of an earlier policy, which merely banned all cross-border ivory sales - on 20 October, just before the International Fund for Animal Welfare released a damning report on the booming Internet trade in endangered species.
That IFAW report pinpointed eBay as "the dominant online marketplace for endangered and protected wildlife products." It examined listings on 183 web sites around the world and found that during a six-week period, 7,122 listings advertised products whose sales were banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. 73 percent of the listings offered elephant parts, largely ivory tusks. The black market demand for elephant ivory is thought to fuel the killing of 20,000 elephants around the world each year, the report says.
The IFAW and other animal rights groups commended eBay's decision. Others noted it may take a while to have any impact, and that the United States, home to most of the illegal trade documented in the report, has cut the ranks of officers who enforce the laws governing such trade.
But the good PR for eBay has obscured some of the other disturbing findings uncovered by the IFAW report. After ads offering trade in elephant parts, ads offering endangered birds were second most common. A total of 1,416 listings offered rare parrots, cockatoos and macaws, sometimes clearly identified as illegal. Some of the birds were priced as high as $1500. But the bird trade will be harder to police because the animals are often traded through message boards and classified ads, rather than open marketplaces such as eBay, the IFAW report found.
The report also finds that even though China's Internet is more heavily policed than elsewhere in the world, that country saw the third-largest volume of traffic in endangered and protected species, after the United States and the United Kingdom.
