the world is not perfect

7/27/2019 The World is not perfect

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The World is not perfectIn every corner of the world, people are poaching, stealing, selling and buying protected

species. Wildlife trafficking and forest crime is worth at least $17 billion a year worldwide,

which makes it such a big industry that it's impossible to encapsulate its breadth in one or a

dozen posts. Rhino poaching in South Africa has increased 50-fold in the last five years. 30

percent of the world's timber comes from illegal sources. More than 5,400 endangered Asian

big cats have been poached since 2000. And in many of those cases, the millions and billions

made are being funneled into the pockets of criminals, corrupt officials, and militants.

Humans beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a

meaning; aldo they have a great understanding of their own capabilities to destroy

themselves when necessary.

Supporting the above organizations is a start, but more than that, the trade won't go away

until more people are made aware of how destructive it is. Spread the word, folks.

Long admired for his work on language and cognition, the latest book by the

Harvard professor Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, was a

panoramic sweep through history. Marshalling a huge range of evidence, Pinker

argued that humanity has become less violent over time. As with Pinkers

previous books, it sparked fierce debate. Whether writing about evolutionary

psychology, linguistics or history, what unites Pinkers work is a fascination with

human nature and an enthusiasm for sharing new discoveries in accessible,elegant prose.

The Rhino Horn Crisis and the Darknet

Sometime last fall, I logged into an underground message board in the anonymized recessesof the Internet they call the darknet in search of rhinoceros horn.

Once thought to posess magical abilities, and now used primarily for supposed medicinalpurposes across Asia, rhino horn is now an incredibly rare commodity that's worth more thancocaine, gold, or platinum. In Southeast Asia, a single horn--ripped from the head of a deadrhinoceros by a poacher working for a crime syndicate--can sell for half a million dollars ormore.

After I posted my request, plenty of people wrote back, though it wasn't clear who was tryingto sell and who was trying to scam. But one respondent sounded more serious. His emailhandle was "Keros," the Greek word for horn, and he dismissed my request as amateurish,explaining that the horn trade isn't something to take lightly. "Anyway," he wrote, "mymaterial is black rhino horn pure keratin hunted in Namibia. I have three in the US rightnow."
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As strange as it sounds, the international rhino horn trade has, like everything else, gonedigital. Last year, a nationwide law enforcement sting called Operation Crash netted sevenindividuals, including a Texas rodeo starwho'd been making horn deals via Facebook. That

bust marked a rising trend for the sale of an item that can fetch $90,000 or more per kilogram.Enforcement has cracked down on overt sales in the U.S., but vendors have taken a cue from

the drug trade and moved deeper into the Internet. Alongside heroin and MDMA, rhino hornis now being advertised through the impossible-to-trace connections of the darknet.

The illegal wildlife trade, including the sale of exotic animals and the parts of endangeredspecies, has exploded in recent years to become a massive black market worth some $20

billion a year. Fueled by booming Asian economies and organized crime, Africanparamilitary groups, and appetites for exotica in the US, the trade is threatening some of theworld's rarest and most charismatic species.

That includes tigers and elephants, as well as lesser-known species likepangolins, all ofwhich have seen their numbers decline due in part to poaching. But the growth of the trade is

best exemplified by the demand for rhino horn, which is falsely believed to have medicinaland psychoactive properties.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, the past twelve months have seen the worst spate ofrhino poaching in recent memory. Poachers have become notably more militarized, whilerangers, despite the growing use of drones and other surveillance tech, have struggled tocatch up. South Africa, which is home to the vast majority of Africa's white rhinoceroses and

just under half of black rhinos, saw the bulk of rhino poaching activity.

The increase in poaching, fueled by skyrocketing prices for rhino horn, reflects a precedingincrease in demand. Whether they use it for traditional medicine or, more recently, as a partydrug, buyers are paying more for horn than ever, and theyre being supplied by organizedcrime, speculators, and corrupt officials, who have connected through crime rings and theWeb to develop a global wildlife trade network.

A total of668 rhinos were killed in South Africa in 2012, up nearly 50 percent from 2011. In2008, only83 animals were illegally killed. (Rhino hunting is still legal in South Africa, andtrophy horns are legal for personal possession, which has complicated enforcementimmensely.) Since 2007, poaching in South Africa is up by a staggering3000 percent.

For both white and black rhinos, the huge increase in poaching threatens to derail what hasbeen an otherwise hopeful narrative about conservation. The IUCN Red List, the leadingglobal assessment of species vulnerability, lists the black rhinoas critically endangered, afterthe wild population declined by an estimated 97.6% since 1960 to a low of 2,410 in1995. Since then, the population has trended upwards, with an estimated 4,880 individuals inthe wild at the end of 2010. Thats still a stunningly low number.

The southern white rhino, one of two white rhinoceros subspecies, was hunted down to apopulation of only 20-50 individuals by the end of the 19 th century, all isolated in SouthAfrica. But aggressive conservation and reintroduction of individuals to former ranges helped

boost the wild population to 20,160 in 2010. After South Africa, the rest of the wild

population is concentrated mostly in Kenya, Namibia and Zimbabwe.
http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/02/23/3759080/texas-rodeo-cowboy-accused-of.htmlhttp://www.star-telegram.com/2012/02/23/3759080/texas-rodeo-cowboy-accused-of.htmlhttp://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-22/london-capital-of-the-rhino-horn-businesshttp://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-22/london-capital-of-the-rhino-horn-businesshttp://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/1212/breaking18.htmlhttp://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/1212/breaking18.htmlhttp://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/1212/breaking18.htmlhttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44503455/ns/world_news-world_environment/t/ugly-anteater-being-wiped-out-smugglers/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44503455/ns/world_news-world_environment/t/ugly-anteater-being-wiped-out-smugglers/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44503455/ns/world_news-world_environment/t/ugly-anteater-being-wiped-out-smugglers/http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/in-vietnam-rhino-horn-is-a-party-drughttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/in-vietnam-rhino-horn-is-a-party-drughttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20971182http://www.wildernessfoundation.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=98:latest-rhino-poaching-statistics&catid=2:news&Itemid=18http://www.wildernessfoundation.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=98:latest-rhino-poaching-statistics&catid=2:news&Itemid=18http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2013/01/08/poachers-prevail-in-horn-warhttp://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2013/01/08/poachers-prevail-in-horn-warhttp://www.iucnredlist.org/details/6557/0http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/6557/0http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/02/23/3759080/texas-rodeo-cowboy-accused-of.htmlhttp://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-22/london-capital-of-the-rhino-horn-businesshttp://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/1212/breaking18.htmlhttp://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/1212/breaking18.htmlhttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44503455/ns/world_news-world_environment/t/ugly-anteater-being-wiped-out-smugglers/http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/in-vietnam-rhino-horn-is-a-party-drughttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/in-vietnam-rhino-horn-is-a-party-drughttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20971182http://www.wildernessfoundation.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=98:latest-rhino-poaching-statistics&catid=2:news&Itemid=18http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2013/01/08/poachers-prevail-in-horn-warhttp://www.iucnredlist.org/details/6557/0


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As for the northern subspecies, in 2003 the only confirmed wild population stood at a paltry30 individuals in the Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A 2006survey only confirmed four individuals remained, and by now its presumed that thesubspecies is extinct. To blame are poachers, who in many cases, especially in the DRC, aremilitant groups looking to cash in on the lucrative trade.

In both major wildlife trades in Africa, for rhino horn and elephant ivory, militants havebegun to take over. Its a matter of economics; horn and ivory prices are higher than ever,which has lured paramilitary groupsinto the lucrative slaughter.

On the other side are wildlife rangers, who in Kenya, South Africa, and elsewhere are oftenunderfunded, understaffed, and left facing poachers who have evolved from roving packs ofhunter bandits into groups who are skilled at navigating the bush and who are also extremelyefficient killers.

TheNew York Times has called ivory the newest conflict resource in Africa, and notedthat some of Africas most notorious armed groups, including the Lords Resistance Army,the Shabab and Darfurs janjaweed, are hunting down elephants and using the tusks to buyweapons and sustain their mayhem.

While northern white rhinos have disappeared, Garamba National Park is still home to anumber of elephants, and because poachers are now often hard-core combatants, rangers have

become more heavily armed. While in the US we may envision wildlife rangers as lookingsomething like Ranger Smith, those in Africa are equipped withmachine guns and RPGs, andregularly find themselves in deadly confrontations. In Kenya, even civilians have armedthemselves to protect elephants.

For South Africas rhinos, its a similar situation. In November, following a rash of rhinokillings in the South African province of North West, ananti-corruption investigative forceknown as the Hawks arrested a trio of men, including a park ranger, for their involvement inthe rhino trade. That incident prompted Thandi Modise, the regions premier, to request thatthe South African military step in for technical and staff support in the provinces reserves.

The South African armys technical support was part of a shift towards the use ofsurveillance tech in conservation. Drones, which are cheaper than ever thanks to the U.S.militarys decade-plus of development along with a newprivate drone economy, have

become popular in ecology and conservation efforts. Ecologists working withorangutans were notable early adopters, with drones offering the ability to fly over forests forsurveys far cheaper than manned flights could ever be.

Drones are making their way into the wildlife trade as well. Google recentlygave the WWF$5 million for drones to protect wildlife in Africa and Asia, while a number of otherconservation groups have been getting into the drone game. Clive Vivier, a 65 year old rhinofarmer and co-founder of the Zululand rhino reserve in South Africa, recently received

permission from the U.S. State Department to buy Arcturus T-20 drones, which feature 17-foot wingspans, 16 hour flight times, and which are used by the Navy.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/14/us-rhinos-author-idUSBRE85D0JX20120614http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Letters/Latest-cases-of-poaching-have-all-the-hallmarks-of-an-inside-job/-/440806/1662502/-/aiswslz/-/index.htmlhttp://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Letters/Latest-cases-of-poaching-have-all-the-hallmarks-of-an-inside-job/-/440806/1662502/-/aiswslz/-/index.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/world/africa/africas-elephants-are-being-slaughtered-in-poaching-frenzy.html?pagewanted=allhttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/world/africa/africas-elephants-are-being-slaughtered-in-poaching-frenzy.html?pagewanted=allhttp://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/africa/130103/congo-virunga-national-park-security-mountain-gorillashttp://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/africa/130103/congo-virunga-national-park-security-mountain-gorillashttp://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/africa/130103/congo-virunga-national-park-security-mountain-gorillashttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/world/africa/central-africas-wildlife-rangers-face-deadly-risks.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/world/africa/to-save-wildlife-and-tourism-kenyans-take-up-arms.html?smid=re-share&_r=1&http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/world/africa/to-save-wildlife-and-tourism-kenyans-take-up-arms.html?smid=re-share&_r=1&http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/world/africa/to-save-wildlife-and-tourism-kenyans-take-up-arms.html?smid=re-share&_r=1&http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpions_(South_Africahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpions_(South_Africahttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-rhino-poaching-crisis-is-so-bad-the-south-african-army-has-stepped-in--2http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/motherboard-tv-drone-onhttp://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/2012/09/27/drones-help-conserve-sumatran-orangutans-wildlife/http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/2012/09/27/drones-help-conserve-sumatran-orangutans-wildlife/http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/google-bought-drones-to-track-wildlifehttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/google-bought-drones-to-track-wildlifehttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/google-bought-drones-to-track-wildlifehttp://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/01/2013117135422298209.htmlhttp://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/01/2013117135422298209.htmlhttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-south-african-rhino-farmer-is-buying-US-drones-to-fight-poachershttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-south-african-rhino-farmer-is-buying-US-drones-to-fight-poachershttp://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/14/us-rhinos-author-idUSBRE85D0JX20120614http://www.nation.co.ke/oped/Letters/Latest-cases-of-poaching-have-all-the-hallmarks-of-an-inside-job/-/440806/1662502/-/aiswslz/-/index.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/world/africa/africas-elephants-are-being-slaughtered-in-poaching-frenzy.html?pagewanted=allhttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/world/africa/africas-elephants-are-being-slaughtered-in-poaching-frenzy.html?pagewanted=allhttp://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/africa/130103/congo-virunga-national-park-security-mountain-gorillashttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/world/africa/central-africas-wildlife-rangers-face-deadly-risks.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/world/africa/to-save-wildlife-and-tourism-kenyans-take-up-arms.html?smid=re-share&_r=1&http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/world/africa/to-save-wildlife-and-tourism-kenyans-take-up-arms.html?smid=re-share&_r=1&http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpions_(South_Africahttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-rhino-poaching-crisis-is-so-bad-the-south-african-army-has-stepped-in--2http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/motherboard-tv-drone-onhttp://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/2012/09/27/drones-help-conserve-sumatran-orangutans-wildlife/http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/2012/09/27/drones-help-conserve-sumatran-orangutans-wildlife/http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/google-bought-drones-to-track-wildlifehttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/google-bought-drones-to-track-wildlifehttp://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/01/2013117135422298209.htmlhttp://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/01/2013117135422298209.htmlhttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-south-african-rhino-farmer-is-buying-US-drones-to-fight-poachershttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-south-african-rhino-farmer-is-buying-US-drones-to-fight-poachers


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"It can tell whether a man is carrying a shovel or firearm and whether he has his finger on thetrigger or not," Viviertold the Guardian. "We can see the poacher but he can't see us. We'regood at arresting them when we know where they are. Otherwise it's a needle in a haystack."

Vivier is still looking for funding. He estimates that two years of flying will cost $300,000per drone, and wants to slate 10 of the drones for South Africas Kruger park, where at least400 animals were killed last year, with another 20 aircraft spread out amongst the rest ofSouth Africas parks.

That would put the bill at around $4.5 million a year, which isnt anything to sneeze at. Butconsidering how much ground they can cover, theyre magnitudes cheaper than mannedsurveillance flights or rangers in Land Rovers searching for traces of poachers. As drones getcheaper, nature reserve surveillance is only going to get more high tech.

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While the situation in Africa has taken a turn for the worse, the money fueling the trade isntcoming from locals. Demand for ivory and horn has been fueled largely by Asia, where

buyers looking for traditional medicines, hangover cures, and what basically amounts toexotic animal bling are pumping cash into the industry.

While China is still the worlds largest market for wildlife parts, which include the big trio ofivory, horn, and tiger parts, the country has made efforts in recent years to crack down illegaltrade and fall into line with international regulations. According to the WWFs 2012 WildlifeCrime Report Card (PDF), China has made general progress in key aspects of complianceand enforcement when it comes to tigers and rhinos, but it failing in some aspects of theivory trade.

The worlds worst culprit, according to the WWF, is Vietnam. The country is failing orlacking in meeting almost all CITES wildlife conventions and regulations, which means it ismore or less a lawless space for wildlife trafficking. Because of that, and efforts by China tocrack down on the trade, Vietnam has turned into a global hub for parts coming out of Africaand, in the case of tigers and Asian elephants, the rest of Asia to later be sold region- andworldwide. That huge hole in the enforcement net, matched to a lesser extent by Thailand, isa major reason that the trade can still exist, as the WWF notes in the report:

Major gaps in enforcement at the retail market level are primarily responsible for the failingscores in destination countries, while Egypt, Thailand and Viet Nam fail for key areas ofcompliance as well. It is critical that demand countries, including China, Thailand and Viet

Nam, urgently and dramatically improve enforcement effort to crack down on illegal wildlifetrade in their countries... International wildlife crime is demand-driven, and it isrecommended that China and Viet Nam, in particular, prioritize the development andimplementation of well-researched demand reduction campaigns. Targeted strategies should

be developed to influence consumer behaviour around tiger parts, rhino horn, and ivory ofillegal origin.

In October, just as poaching levels in South Africa had reached a record high, with 455 rhinos

killed since the beginning of the year, eclipsing last year's figure of 448, Vietnamrejectedalaw-enforcement and biodiversity agreement with South Africa aimed at curbing poaching.
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Rather than cracking down on the trade, officials in Vietnam are known to be activelypartaking. Its gotten to the point that Vietnamese officials and politiciansprefer tiger bonepaste and rhino hornto cash bribes.

Nowadays, bribes for officials are disguised in the forms of not only gifts, luxury vacations

and cars, but also rhino horns, bear bile, or tiger bone paste, Le Nhu Tien, vice chairman ofthe Vietnamese National Assemblys Committee on Culture, Education, Youth, and Children,told Vietweek in October.

Horn use has recently become popular among

Vietnams nouveau riche and political elite as a party

drug, to be mixed with wine.

Rhino horn was once sold as a snake oil cancer cure, with customers basically fed false hopeand swindled. But horn use has recently become popular among Vietnams nouveau richeand political elite as a party drug mixed with wine, or ground up and mixed into a tincture asa hangover cure.

People actually have rhino horn tonic parties. They will use it to give them a boost,Crawford Allan, the North American director of WWF's Traffic wildlife trade monitoringnetwork, told me in a phone interview. I met last fall with the Vietnamese officialsresponsible for this in their country, and they told me that rhino horn, in the wealthy elite, is

being used as a hangover cure. They go out and get drunk every night, and they have to go towork in the morning, so theyll take a shot of $400 rhino hangover cure, and that helps themthrough the day.

Rhino horn is made of keratin, the same as your fingernails, and has absolutely zeromedicinal or psychoactive properties. That means people are getting about as high off horn asthey would if they snorted ground up $100 bills. The difference is, you can always print morecash.

In short, the trade has ballooned thanks to growing economies in Southeast Asia and China,where the newly wealthy, corrupt officials, and a booming middle class now can afford

strange highs and expensive traditional therapies. And just as rising prices have attractedmore sophisticated, militant groups to poaching, its also attracted organized crime.

If youve envisioned the wildlife trade as being similar to the drug trade, you wouldnt be faroff. Organized crime syndicates worldwidenow control much of the wildlife trade, and inmany cases have parlayed the very trade networks and smuggling techniques developed fordrug smuggling into moving animal parts around the globe.

The phenomenon was described ina paperby Elizabeth Bennett of the World ConservationSociety, which showed that budgets for enforcement efforts and conservation groups lag far

behind the resources available to crime groups. That, combined with the ability of mob
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groups to bribe and intimidate officials, has left enforcement struggling to keep up with thetrade on the sell side.

We are failing to conserve some of the worlds most beloved and charismatic species,Bennett said in a statementaccompanying the paper. We are rapidly losing big, spectacular

animals to an entirely new type of trade driven by criminalized syndicates. It is deeplyalarming, and the world is not yet taking it seriously. When these criminal networks wipe outwildlife, conservation loses, and local people lose the wildlife on which their livelihoodsoften depend.

Mob influence extends beyond just the wildlife trade, and is also fueling a huge market inillegal logging that may make up to30 percent of the global trade in hardwoods. In Laos,cronyism and smuggling by Vietnamese officials is responsible for ahuge illegal loggingindustry, which is robbing Laos of its valuable hardwood resources with little payoff.

But its the wildlife trade thats inflated most rapidly in the last decade. To gain a sense of the

size, note that enforcement officials are now recording record bustswhile simultaneouslywatching the trade grow beyond what is currently enforceable. And as if the sheer volume ofthe trade wasnt enough, the criminals running the trade continue to buy themselves

protection.

In fact, enforcement actions and seizures in Southeast Asia have increased 10-fold in sixyears. On January 5, more than 27 kilos of Rhino horn worth an estimated US$1.4 millionwere seizedby airport officials in Thailand and Vietnam: a 56-year-old Vietnamese man wasarrested at Bangkoks main airport after six pieces of horn, weighing about 10.6 kilos, werefound in luggage he left on the baggage carousel after arriving from Ethiopia. The same dayin Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam, customs officers confiscated six pieces of rhinohorn weighing some 16.5 kilos from a 33-year-old Vietnamese man who had smuggled thehorn from Mozambique via Doha and Bangkok.

But, as is the case with drugs, the Mr. Bigs of the trade continue to evade capture, and inmany cases are openly able to take advantage of corruption, as the AP noted last August:

Recently, Lt. Col. Adtaphon Sudsai, a highly regarded, outspoken [Vietnamese police]officer, was instructed to lay off what had seemed an open-and-shut case he cracked fouryears ago when he penetrated a gang along the Mekong River smuggling pangolin.

This led him to Mrs. Daoreung Chaimas, alleged by conservation groups to be one ofSoutheast Asia's biggest tiger dealers. Despite being arrested twice, having her own assistantstestify against her and DNA testing that showed two cubs were not offsprings from zoo-bred

parents as she claimed, Daoreung remains free and the case may never go to the prosecutor'soffice.

Although theyre home to the highest-profile consumers, itd be erroneous to think that thetrade is limited to Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. In 2011, a gang in Ireland

became notorious in 2011for robbing museums of horns from stuffed rhinos. Known as theRathkeale Rovers, theysourced horns by targeting auction houses, private dealers andcollectors, museums, and even zoos. (In response, a number of museums throughout Europe

replaced their stuffed rhinos horns with fiberglass replicas, along with signs that saidsomething to the effect of Dont steal me, Im fake.)
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-07/wcs-oci072711.phphttp://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-07/wcs-oci072711.phphttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/organized-crime-is-fueling-a-boom-in-illegal-logging-worldwidehttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/organized-crime-is-fueling-a-boom-in-illegal-logging-worldwidehttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/in-laos-cronyism-is-fueling-illegal-logging-with-little-payoffhttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/in-laos-cronyism-is-fueling-illegal-logging-with-little-payoffhttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/in-laos-cronyism-is-fueling-illegal-logging-with-little-payoffhttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/despite-huge-busts-elephant-poaching-has-reached-record-levels--2http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/despite-huge-busts-elephant-poaching-has-reached-record-levels--2http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-mr-bigs-of-wildlife-smuggling-can-t-be-stopped--2http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-mr-bigs-of-wildlife-smuggling-can-t-be-stopped--2http://bigstory.ap.org/article/untouchables-asian-wildlife-traffickershttp://bigstory.ap.org/article/untouchables-asian-wildlife-traffickershttp://bigstory.ap.org/article/untouchables-asian-wildlife-traffickershttp://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1122164/us14m-rhino-horn-seized-thailandvietnamhttp://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1122164/us14m-rhino-horn-seized-thailandvietnamhttp://bigstory.ap.org/article/untouchables-asian-wildlife-traffickershttp://bigstory.ap.org/article/untouchables-asian-wildlife-traffickershttp://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-12/rhino-horn-gang-strikes-again-in-belgium/2835958http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-12/rhino-horn-gang-strikes-again-in-belgium/2835958http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/traveller-gang-targeted-over-stolen-rhino-horns-193541.htmlhttp://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/traveller-gang-targeted-over-stolen-rhino-horns-193541.htmlhttp://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-07/wcs-oci072711.phphttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/organized-crime-is-fueling-a-boom-in-illegal-logging-worldwidehttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/in-laos-cronyism-is-fueling-illegal-logging-with-little-payoffhttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/in-laos-cronyism-is-fueling-illegal-logging-with-little-payoffhttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/despite-huge-busts-elephant-poaching-has-reached-record-levels--2http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-mr-bigs-of-wildlife-smuggling-can-t-be-stopped--2http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-mr-bigs-of-wildlife-smuggling-can-t-be-stopped--2http://bigstory.ap.org/article/untouchables-asian-wildlife-traffickershttp://bigstory.ap.org/article/untouchables-asian-wildlife-traffickershttp://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1122164/us14m-rhino-horn-seized-thailandvietnamhttp://bigstory.ap.org/article/untouchables-asian-wildlife-traffickershttp://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-08-12/rhino-horn-gang-strikes-again-in-belgium/2835958http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/traveller-gang-targeted-over-stolen-rhino-horns-193541.html


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By robbing auction houses and private dealers, the gang has been able to exploit loopholes ininternational bans on horn trading that, in some circumstances, allow for the sale of antiquesand trophy mounts.

At lot of the time the trade in rhino horn is taking place through auction houses, where

theyre selling old trophy mounts, for example, Allan said. People who arent buying for atrophy, but who are then buying it to smuggle it out of the country to countries like Vietnam,where the demand is so high and the price is so high.

Keeping the global trade connected iswhat else?the Internet. In Asia, it should come as nosurprise that as the trade has been legitimized by rampant corruption, its also headed online,where sellers can more easily reach buyers. Because demand still outpaces supply, the onlinemarketplace has also helped push prices higher.

We know certainly in Asia, or in Vietnam for example, the web is rife with advertising

offering to sell rhino horn, Allan said. Theres very little fear of being prosecuted ordetected.

"[The web] makes it easy, and those transactions often

happen fairly quickly. The reality of it is that no agency

has a large enough enforcement force to track everything

that goes on in the internet."

The U.S. also boasts a massive online trade, which has made enforcement difficult. TheEndangered Species Act, which regulates most of the wildlife trade, only prohibits interstateand international commerce. That means that not all possession, or even sales, of banneditems is illegal in the US. Pre-internet, selling something as rare as a rhino horn would bedone either through auction houses, or through private trade, but putting out an ad in the local

paper wasn't exactly going to reach a lot of buyers. Now a huge market is open to sellers,some of whom don't even know what they're doing is illegal, and tracking all of thosemarkets is pretty much impossible.

"You have the issue of the individual seller, who tries to take advantage of Craigslist or eBay,possibly without really being aware that theyre violating laws, depending on what theyreselling," Sandra Cleva of the Fish and Wildlife Service told me. "It makes it easy, and thosetransactions often happen fairly quickly. The reality of it is that no agency has a large enoughenforcement force to track everything that goes on in the internet."

That point was underscored last year by a pair of high-profile busts. First cameOperationCyberwild, a Fish and Wildlife operation in Southern California that netted a dozen arrestsfor people selling various illegal wildlife productsfrom turtle boots to live fishoverCraigslist.
http://www.fws.gov/cno/press/release.cfm?rid=334http://www.fws.gov/cno/press/release.cfm?rid=334http://www.fws.gov/cno/press/release.cfm?rid=334http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/illegal-tiger-pelts-and-turtle-boots-are-now-all-over-craigslisthttp://www.fws.gov/cno/press/release.cfm?rid=334http://www.fws.gov/cno/press/release.cfm?rid=334http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/illegal-tiger-pelts-and-turtle-boots-are-now-all-over-craigslist


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The sale of endangered animals on the Internet has reached an alarming level, with as muchas two-thirds of such sales taking place in the United States, U.S. Attorney Andr Birotte, Jr.said at the time. These Internet sales of wildlife fuel poaching and make the killing of

protected animals more profitable.

Around the same time, federal agents from Fish and Wildlife, the Department of HomelandSecurity, and the IRS were putting the final touches on Operation Crash, named after the termfor a group of rhinos. Seven people, including the aforementioned Texas cowboy, werearrested in the first wave, which netted 37 horns (worth $10 million or more) and millions ofdollars worth of assets.

"What were seeing here in the States with respect to rhino horns are people cashing in onthem once theyre already here, because people now have an opportunity to sell them forconsiderable amounts of money," Cleva said. "And there are those who tend to export theirhorns overseas to really magnify their profit, which is what the two gentlemen in Los Angeleswere doing."

The operation is ongoing, and at last count a total of 12 people have been arrested,includinga pairof the Rathkeale Rovers.

Rhino horn is worth more than gold, but its still being traded online, so I had to ask: Howhard is it really to get? Theres little chance of finding it on Craigslist, and itd take a realstroke of strange luck for me to end up finding someone who dabbles in horn throughFacebook. But it's a numbers game. Cleva told me that Fish and Wildlife has threeintelligence analysts who do Internet research, and even with 300, there's simply no way tomonitor the entire web for such a rare product.

After trying to scour websites for examples of rhino horn sales, it became rather obvious thatI faced the same problem. But there is another option to the regular old Internet: the Tornetwork, an anonymity service used to access an isolated portion of the Internet thats moresecure and more lawless than the net youre currently connected to.

Tor stands for The Onion Router, and connects solely to thepseudo-top-level domain.onion,which differs from .com, .net, and all the other regular domain suffixes by not being anofficial part of the Domain Naming System. So while .onion sites are part of the globalnetwork that makes up the Internet, theyre not accessible through Google or any of the rest

of the regular web as we know it.

Onion routing works by bouncing your requests all over the world, similar to how thatRussian dude in Goldeneyehides his own browsing. While .onion has been around since2004, the creation of the anonymous currency Bitcoin in 2009 helped give the .onion web areputation as a marketplace for all kinds of illicit goods. At the forefront is the Silk Road, anonline bazaar where you can buyjust about any street drug you can think offrom anonymousvendors and have it shipped anywhere in the world, along with porn, regular old classifieds,and for a short time, even firearms through the Silk Roads sister site The Armory.

As enticing as that may sound, navigating the Tor network is a major pain in the ass. Load

times are extremely slow, as data get routed all over the world, and .onion addresses forgo
http://www.justice.gov/usao/cac/Pressroom/2012/030.htmlhttp://www.justice.gov/usao/cac/Pressroom/2012/030.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/world/africa/ruthless-smuggling-rings-put-rhinos-in-the-cross-hairs.html?pagewanted=allhttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/world/africa/ruthless-smuggling-rings-put-rhinos-in-the-cross-hairs.html?pagewanted=allhttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/world/africa/ruthless-smuggling-rings-put-rhinos-in-the-cross-hairs.html?pagewanted=allhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-top-level_domainhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-top-level_domainhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-top-level_domainhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIq9jFdEfZohttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/traveling-down-the-silkroad-to-buy-drugs-with-bitcoinshttp://bitcoinmagazine.com/not-ready-silk-roads-the-armory-terminated/http://www.justice.gov/usao/cac/Pressroom/2012/030.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/world/africa/ruthless-smuggling-rings-put-rhinos-in-the-cross-hairs.html?pagewanted=allhttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/world/africa/ruthless-smuggling-rings-put-rhinos-in-the-cross-hairs.html?pagewanted=allhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-top-level_domainhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIq9jFdEfZohttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/traveling-down-the-silkroad-to-buy-drugs-with-bitcoinshttp://bitcoinmagazine.com/not-ready-silk-roads-the-armory-terminated/


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names, such as http://silkroad.onion, for complicated and impossible to remember bits ofgibberish, like http://kpvz7ki2v5agwt35.onion .

The vast majority of data in the Tor network and deep web is basically just that: data thatsmore or less inaccessible because theres no road map to get to it. The sites and data that are

useful, or at least interesting, arent easy to stumble upon.

What search engines exist, they dont have the finesse of Google, and mostly producegobbledegook for results. The addresses of popular sites like the Silk Road are no secret, andcan be easily found on the regular web. But for someone rooting around for something orother, the incredible lag time and purely DIY aesthetic make browsing a brain-numbingchore. And even if you have the right address, it wont always work.

For a first-timer, there is one go-to source for help, known as the Hidden Wiki. Its basicallyjust a huge list of links (an old screenshot is availablehere) to various sites of interest: Blogsand chat rooms for the types of folks youd expect to be chilling in such a place

revolutionaries, anarchists, anyone that doesnt dig The Manalong with lists of musicrepositories, drug outlets, and a number of links to various types of hardcore, and sometimesillegal, porn.

I think that sums up the Tor network best; the Web today, while still filled with porn and goresites, is relatively clean. Nowhere during your average surf session nowadays, especially aswe spend more time clicking on links from social media than randomly browsing, are yougoing to be a single click away from sites hosting bestiality and jailbait porn. But sites linkedto by the Hidden Wiki claim to offer exactly that, although I'm not going to try and confirm.

I wanted to find a source who had at some point dealt in the online horn trade, as I wanted toget a little more insight into how it worked. The Silk Road had, amongst all its other wares,weed and heroin, but no horn and thus no one to talk to.

Outside of the marketplaces, there are two other prominent options: Contact one of variouslistings for procurement servicespeople who claim they can get almost anythingas well asmessage boards that work as free-form classifieds, and which include buy-sell offers formyriad illicit goods.

Its tough to have much confidence in the procurement services, especially when theyrelisted alongside people claiming to be hitmen, but I found one with good reviews whose site

loudly proclaimed it was based in Israel and could get anything. I sent them an email via aTor email account saying that I was looking for information about the horn market, and

posted something similar on one of the classifieds boards.

The alleged Israeli service got back to me within a few days, and said that horn wassomething they could easily get. They said their going rate for a horn picked up in China was$18,000 a kilo, which was (and still is) below market price. I tried to get some more info onwhy the horn was relatively cheap and how they'd acquire it, but probably because it wasclear I wasn't actually interested in buying said horn, they stopped responding.

Soon after I put up the message board post, and in the months since, Ive occasionally gotten

random emails from people saying they've got their hands on horn. Most sound like this firstone, which happens to be my favorite:
http://kpvz7ki2v5agwt35.onion/http://i.imgur.com/Xq7ih.pnghttp://i.imgur.com/Xq7ih.pnghttp://kpvz7ki2v5agwt35.onion/http://i.imgur.com/Xq7ih.png


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A thief who deals in exquisite items! Now that sounds like some intrigue. After emailslike that, I figured the search was fruitless. I wasn't a buyer, and it's no surprise that peoplewouldn't want to talk to someone bumbling about so bluntly. But one guy whod written tome early on pulled a surprising move: After telling him the procurement service said they

could somehow score discount horn, this guy basically said I was being an idiot for thinkingthat was how the market worked.

Not only that, but he wrote back to tell me how he does business:

Man, this is why i ask this question. You only have to read the news to know, Im sellingright now at almost 62K per kilo intact horns and sections at 72K per kilo (average section isabout .52 to .66 kg) I dont sell powder.

If anyone is trying to sell at this ridiculous price is probably trying to scam you, and i repeatyou can search for news in google and youll see my prices are the right.

Anyway my material is black rhino horn pure keratin hunted in Namibia. I have three in theUS right now:

---82cm (32 inch) and 5.435 kg at 330K US dollars

---52cm (20.3 inch) and 2.918 kg at 180K US dollars

---37.3 cm (14.5 inch) and 2.188 kg at 135K US dollars

I will do sections for the smaller one, and the extra cost is because for me is more difficult tosell it in this way.

I only accept bitcoins, and of course accept full escrow.

I also can work outside full escrow, in 50% upfront and two bitcoins payments, or 20%bitcoins in first, and silver or gold in second.

The horn or section can be shipped to an address or to a drop point. If you are in NY, isuppose youll have it in three days tops once the payment is done.

I wrote him back asking how exactly he makes such massive transactions with strangersonline, and found that bitcoin escrow services are a real thing, which does open up the

possibility for trading ridiculous amounts of bitcoin with at least some sort of guarantee. Henever responded to that query, but followed up by saying he had an offer for two of the horns.I lost contact after that.

Was it the real deal? I of course cant be sure, and my admittedly clumsy way of searchingfor horn had already filled my inbox with scammers. But the details were right, and talking toAllan, the prices were about what one would expect. "The guy asking $180,000 for a singlehorn, that may be the real deal," Allan said. "Maybe he does have something real to sell."

Real or not, there are two takeaways: First, the rhino horn trade is indeed popular andlucrative enough that people didn't bat an eye at discussing its sale, regardless of whether
http://btcrow.com/http://btcrow.com/


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they were scammers or not. (For example, I doubt I would have received similarlyenthusiastic responses to queries about exotic, illegal fish.) Second is the sheer simplicity ofit. Rhino horn is an incredibly rare and exotic material, one that would be pretty muchimpossible for the average Joe to pick up through offline means. Assuming I had a mountainof bitcoins, an escrow service I could trust, and a desire for horn, attempting a buy through

the dark web would be the next easiest thing to going to South Africa and hunting a rhino inperson.

There's another facet to the case that's complicating the trade worldwide: While the act ofselling the horn through the web is illegal, the guy's possession of it may not be. "Now, thequestion must be that it may be a legally acquired horn," Allan said. "It might be an antiquethats been held for a hundred years in the U.S. sitting on someones wall as a trophy. It may

be a legal horn. But once that person starts to sell it and trade it, and goes across state lines,thats where offenses start to come in if its not done through the proper means."

So diving into Tor isn't even necessary. Unlike a guy with a brick of cocaine, someone who's

had a horn in the family for years could ostensibly throw it up for sale online withoutrealizing it's illegal, which is an issue authorities regularly have to deal in the wildlife trade,although horn is a much rarer case. But the opposite of that scenario is also realistic:Someone starts reaching out to trophy hunters and the like looking for horn, which had beenlegally acquired, and buys it up for cheap to sell in Asia. This is what the cowboy onFacebook did.

*****

Forays into the dark web aside, one giant final question remains: How does one stop thetrade? Unsurprisingly, shutting down the wildlife trade has been fraught with difficulties, alack of resources, and various theories about legalization, just like the drug trade it mirrors.

The most basic step to combat the trade is to increase support for awareness and enforcementefforts. That combination truly works, as evidenced online. A few years ago, you might have

been able to find elephant ivory on eBay labeled as an antique or as oxbone, but effortsfrom advocacy groups helped push the auction site to crack down on wildlife products.(Oxbone products still aren't banned by eBay, although most of them are fake ivory anyway.But if you search for the highest-priced oxbone listings, you can occasionally find whatappears to be ivory, which often is listed as antique even if it's from recently-killedelephants.)

Even Craigslist, which has much more of a hands-off policy on listings, has seen a decline inovert posts for wildlife products thanks to enforcement efforts like Fish and Wildlife'sCyberwild operation.

Of course, the Internet is still a major tool of the trade, and not simply for communication.While not necessarily the case with horn, many people who buy banned wildlife productsdont realize (or are misled by vendors) that theyre buying something illegal. Eliminating

products from the surface Web helps cut down on that sector of the trade. In the U.S. andEurope, online enforcement has helped prevent illegal items from being easily found and

purchased.
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_sacat=0&_nkw=oxbone&_sop=16http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_sacat=0&_nkw=oxbone&_sop=16


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In Southeast Asia, online markets are much more lax about vendor restrictions, especiallywhen it comes to wildlife products. Tightening enforcement in that space is key to limitingaccess to the trade. In the case of rhino horns newfound status as a luxury item, pushing thetrade further underground can help prevent people from buying into the latest fad.

"Theres the mentality of people that consider consuming endangered wildlife goes againstthe grain, goes against societys norms and is something cool and radical to do," Allan said."Thats obviously just wrong. We know that its certainly happening in a few countries inAsia. If it spreads, its a much bleaker picture than you would even imagine. We hope thatsnot the case."

As the online trade gets pushed deeper into the Web, catching and prosecuting buyers andsellers gets increasingly difficult. And, as weve seen with the drug trade, completely

preventing people from selling illicit products is impossible. But stepping up enforcementefforts and forcing trade networks as far away from the mainstream as possible can help suck

some of the demand out of the wildlife trade bubble thats encouraging criminal enterprises toget into the business in the first place.

On the supply side, equipping rangers and wildlife managers with better surveillance andmonitoring technology goes a long way to solve the age-old problem of poaching: In thevastness of wildlife parks, poachers are tiny, and finding them with limited manpower beforethey strike is a Herculean task. While 20,000 rhinos living in the wild isnt a large populationfrom an ecological standpointespecially if 700 to 1,000 of them are being killed a yearit isa huge number when youre trying to keep track of them.

The rise of drones in wildlife management is fascinating, as its a rather perfect application ofthe technology. Ranger budgets are chronically underfunded, and time spent trying to trackdown poachers is costly. Drones are relatively cheap to fly, can cover much more ground, andwith military-grade surveillance tools, can search for poachers more effectively than rangerson the ground or on manned flights.

The quasi-legality of horn has caused incredible trouble

for enforcement officials worldwide.

For rhinos specifically, theres a huge benefit to be found in bringing coherence to theconvoluted regulations protecting them. In South Africa, foreigners are still legally able tohunt rhino, as long as their horns are mounted and shipped home as personal trophies.

Proponents argue that the white rhino population in South Africa is large enough tosustainably allow hunts, but the legality of some rhino hunting has opened huge loopholes for

poachers.

For example, in November a Thai man was handed a 40-year jail sentence by a South African

court for setting up fake hunts to gather horns. According to court documents, the man paidThai prostitutes around $800 apiece to pose next to dead rhinos with small-caliber (read: not
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/09/us-safrica-rhinos-idUSBRE8A80WD20121109http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/09/us-safrica-rhinos-idUSBRE8A80WD20121109


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able to kill a rhino) rifles that had been shot by other people at game farms. A total of 26rhinos were killed, whose horns the man shipped back to Asia, not as personal trophies, butfor profit.

The quasi-legality of horn has caused incredible trouble for enforcement officials worldwide.Busting someone with a kilo of cocaine is a simple arrest, but someone may be traveling withrhino horn thats been legally acquired, whether as a personal trophy or an antique mount,that may or may not then be sold.

A standardized licensing system could go a long way to clearing up that confusion, whetherserial numbers are etched into horns or ID tags are embedded in legal horns. Moreimportantly, South Africa needs to figure out what, if any, rationale it has for continuingrhino hunts to continue. Its rather difficult to get tough on poaching as a whole when thehunting and permitting system as its set up now is so easily taken advantage of. It wouldn't

be the first to ban trophy hunts; Kenya has banned hunting since 1977, and Botswana and

Zambia recently announced plans to limit or eliminate trophy huntingof a variety ofthreatened species.

That lack of horn identification has been a driving force behind tech developments like thoseof the Rhino Rescue Project, which has designed a comprehensive identification system forhorns. First, an x-ray visible dye is injected into the horn of a living rhino, and a trio of IDmicrochips are inserted into the horn as well as the living animal, and keyed to a DNAsample in a database. The dye is designed to make scanning for horns easier for customsofficials, while the ID chips can help pinpoint exactly where a horn came from and whatindividual animal was poached. Rhino Rescue Project is testing their system now, andexpects that one deployed in the field could remain operational for three to four years.

Theres another option, often trumpeted by owners of private rhino reserves in South Africa:Legalize and regulate the trade. One particularly vocal proponent is rhino breeder JohnHume, who has nearly 800 individualson his ranches. Unlike elephant ivory, rhino horngrows back, and thus can be harvested without killing the animal. (While a rhino might getgrumpy at losing its fancy horn, they dont have blood vessels or nerves.)

Hume has millions of dollars worth of horn harvested from his animals already stockpiled inbanks around South Africa, and as such obviously stands to profit from legalization. But theconcept does have merit, at least at first glance: Why kill rhinos for horn when you can just

clip it off? There's another potential bonus: Opening up a flow of legal goods could helpdeflate the price bubble, which would discourage criminals from getting involved in thetrade.

"With legalized trade will come increased incentives for rhino breeding operations," Humesaid in a lengthy discussion of his proposed plans with Safari Talk. "We have a vast amountof land available throughout rhino range states. The day we reach a point where demandoutstrips supply will be the day that the rhino will be doomed anyway. With the status quoand current poaching levels, that day is approaching very fast for rhinos."

Conservationists and activists have a straightforward counter: Poaching an animal is a hell ofa lot cheaper and easier than farming them. And because horn has been illegal for so long, the
http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0121-hance-hunting-bans.htmlhttp://news.mongabay.com/2013/0121-hance-hunting-bans.htmlhttp://www.rhinorescueproject.com/http://www.psfk.com/2012/12/rhino-poaching-prevention.htmlhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2195803/Farming-rhinos-legalising-sale-horns-worth-gold-save-extinction-claims-farmer.htmlhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2195803/Farming-rhinos-legalising-sale-horns-worth-gold-save-extinction-claims-farmer.htmlhttp://safaritalk.net/page/articles.html/_/articles/john-hume-private-rhino-owner-and-breeder-pr-r31http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0121-hance-hunting-bans.htmlhttp://www.rhinorescueproject.com/http://www.psfk.com/2012/12/rhino-poaching-prevention.htmlhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2195803/Farming-rhinos-legalising-sale-horns-worth-gold-save-extinction-claims-farmer.htmlhttp://safaritalk.net/page/articles.html/_/articles/john-hume-private-rhino-owner-and-breeder-pr-r31


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trade is already dominated by criminals, not ranchers, and its unlikely legalizing horn isgoing to convince crime bosses in Asia to drop poaching and set up rhino farms in Africa,especially when the trade in its current form is still a relatively low-risk enterprise. In anycase, without any sort of standardized licensing system, it would be impossible to sort outwhich horns were legally harvested or not, which would make smuggling illegal horn even

easier than it already is.

As it stands, legalization could be a long-term solution, but in the current environment itwould only make cracking down on poaching and crime rings even more difficult. Perhaps ifhorns themselves were more securely permitted and identified, if rangers were betterequipped to crack down on poaching, and if the rampant corruption that allows the Asian sideof the trade to go on were eliminated, then a legal rhino trade could flourish. But as it stands,the criminal elements running the trade aren't going to give up poaching and smuggling to setup rhino farms.

Whether its legal or not, the most fundamental problem with the rhino horn tradealong with

much of the trade in illicit wildlife partsis that its entire demand is based on one hundredpercent pure, unadulterated bullshit. It cant be repeated enough: Rhino horn is made of aninert biological compound that has zero medicinal or psychoactive effects. Zero.

The mind-meltingly insane truth is that the slaughter of

thousands of rhinos is fueled by a giant lie.

That means that people are spending $30,000+ a pound to do what amounts to cutting uplines of fingernails, or having someone treat cancer by eating hair. That people are spendingso much on horn as medicine is depressing enough in its own right, partly because manyusers are desperate people whove been misled. But its nearly impossible to overstate thestupidity of pretending that rhino horn is a party drug or hangover cure. It makes the VIP

bottle service crowd dropping tens of thousands of dollars a night on "ultra-premium liquormarked up 1,000 percent by clubs seem rather practical in comparison.

Cracking down on poaching, smuggling, and corruption is an incredibly important part oflimiting the species-threatening effects of the trade. Yet the mind-meltingly insane truth isthat all of these efforts, the slaughter of thousands of rhinos (along withtiger farming,bear

bile extraction, and so on), and a massive revenue stream for organized crime is all fueled bya giant lie.

Rhino horn has become more valuable than gold despite the fact that it has literally no usefulproperties. That people worldwide believe otherwise is absurd. If the trade is to be trulystopped, people need to learn that horn doesnt cure cancer, it doesnt make you party harder,and its certainly not bling.

We need to see some really radical responses from law enforcement that really put in placesome very serious penalties as deterrents, and people need to be campaigning to make the

people that do this look foolish, Allan said. They need to learn that theyre being conned,and theyre going to have to wise up.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/world/asia/13tiger.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/world/asia/13tiger.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/laos/7950161/Inside-a-bear-bile-farm-in-Laos.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/laos/7950161/Inside-a-bear-bile-farm-in-Laos.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/laos/7950161/Inside-a-bear-bile-farm-in-Laos.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/world/asia/13tiger.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/laos/7950161/Inside-a-bear-bile-farm-in-Laos.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/laos/7950161/Inside-a-bear-bile-farm-in-Laos.html


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Killing the trade from a purely enforcement angle is impossible, partly because of the sheersize of the trade, and partly because its reactionary. Arresting a guy with a horn doesnt

bring a dead rhino back to life, and if the rhino population declines, thats a crucialdistinction.

Awareness thus needs to take the forefront, especially when it comes to demand. SouthAfrican citizens have becoming increasingly vocal about protecting their ecological heritage,as have many citizens affected by the trade. (Kenyans, for example, havepicked up their ownguns to assist rangers in protecting elephants.) South Africa's rhinos were even named thecountry's top newsmakerby the National Press Club, a decision that was met withcontroversy.

Building popular support against the trade has been more difficult on the demand side. Peopleneed to learn that objectively, horn is worthless, unless youre the rhino thats been killed forit. If demand isnt curbed, the alternative is an economy whose bubble keeps swelling, fueledmost worryingly by the obscenely rich along with speculators looking to hoard horn in case

rhinos go extinct, which will send the price of horn soaring beyond even the ridiculousheights its hit now.

If the growth of the rhino horn market continues at its current pace, extinction does become avalid concern. However, the alternative is equally plausible. Black rhinos face the biggest riskof extinction, but their population growth in recent years offers hope that they could reboundif the pressures of poaching are mitigated. And while South Africas white rhinos are firmlyin the crosshairs of the trade, theyve also received a large amount of popular attention in the

past few years, which more recently has been converted into action. For all the convolutedparts of the trade, thats whats most important, as the only way to completely end the trade isto convince people that trick cures and fake highs arent worth throwing away the worldswildlife.

The Incredible Scale of Wildlife and Forest Crime

Explained in Just Two Minutes

Wildlife trafficking and forest crime is worth at least $17 billion a year worldwide, whichmakes it such a big industry that it's impossible to encapsulate its breadth in one or a dozen

posts. But the above video from the EIA and Traffic/WWFdoes a great job of distilling thebreadth of wildlife and forest crime down into two minutes. If you want it summed up evenfurther, try this: In every corner of the world, people are poaching, stealing, selling and

buying protected species.

While I'm not normally a fan of text-heavy videos, in this case it works because the figuresare simply astounding. Rhino poaching in South Africa has increased 50-fold in the last fiveyears. 30 percent of the world's timber comes from illegal sources. More than 5,400endangered Asian big cats have been poached since 2000. And in many of those cases, themillions and billions made are being funneled into the pockets of criminals, corrupt officials,

and militants. It's fairly overwhelming, so what can you do? Supporting the above
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/world/africa/to-save-wildlife-and-tourism-kenyans-take-up-arms.html?smid=re-share&_r=0http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/world/africa/to-save-wildlife-and-tourism-kenyans-take-up-arms.html?smid=re-share&_r=0http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/world/africa/to-save-wildlife-and-tourism-kenyans-take-up-arms.html?smid=re-share&_r=0http://www.france24.com/en/20130119-rhino-named-south-africas-top-newsmakerhttp://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/press-club-criticised-over-2012-newsmaker-1.1454918#.UP18NYnjn3whttp://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/press-club-criticised-over-2012-newsmaker-1.1454918#.UP18NYnjn3whttp://www.eia-international.org/http://www.traffic.org/http://www.traffic.org/http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/world/africa/to-save-wildlife-and-tourism-kenyans-take-up-arms.html?smid=re-share&_r=0http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/world/africa/to-save-wildlife-and-tourism-kenyans-take-up-arms.html?smid=re-share&_r=0http://www.france24.com/en/20130119-rhino-named-south-africas-top-newsmakerhttp://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/press-club-criticised-over-2012-newsmaker-1.1454918#.UP18NYnjn3whttp://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/press-club-criticised-over-2012-newsmaker-1.1454918#.UP18NYnjn3whttp://www.eia-international.org/http://www.traffic.org/


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organizations is a start, but more than that, the trade won't go away until more people aremade aware of how destructive it is. Spread the word, folks.

The Softer Side of the DarknetA few years ago Gawker published a revealing report on Silk Road, a website on the Tornetwork that we've all come to know and love, which they claimed was nothing more than ahive for scum, villainy, and of course lots of counterfeit money, drugs, weapons, and otherthings that make our religious idols weep.

It wasn't long before bloggers and reporters were screaming bloody murder because they had

ordered and received two grams of decent quality Afghan hashish in their snail mail. Those

brave souls who clicked some more and Googled some Tor addresses also bumped into

websites of people claiming to be contract killers ("Solutions to common problems! No fish

too big, no job too small!"), a bunch of Rule 34-affirming terrible porn (welcome to the

ZooNecro-chan!) and of course a reasonably safe haven for kiddy fiddlers. Since then the Tor

network has of course also been in the news for its great role in the workings of Wikileaks,

Anonymous, and even the enabling power its anonymity brought rebels in the Arab Spring.

But all this paints a picture that I feel is a little bit unfair. Even on the Tor network, not

everything is hard-edged crime, drug deals, and cyber fugitives. Even there, hidden amongst

the piles of shit, war, and filth of the human kind (I really didn't need to know the kiddy porn

wiki has a category named 'hurtcore'), under the mud of human mental and social excrement

lie gems of fluffy adorableness waiting to shine their light into the darkest corners of the

darknet. Yes, even here the human desire for creativity and expression manifests itself!

Therefore I present to you: some of the softer sides of the darknet.

Consider, for example, Silk Road merchant ChristineBeckley11. Self-described as a laid-back

student trying to scrape some bitcoins together (at the time of writing, bitcoin probably wasn't

the cut-throat bubble business it is now) so she can buy some magic mushrooms. And what

services might she offer? Does she sell her urine to fetishists? Extreme camgirl shows? Lord

no. For0.55 she'll send you a beautiful, touching custom-made poem within 48hours. Her only review even praises its artistic merit.

ChristineBeckley11's assortment also offers fortune cookies (0.06) which, as it would

seem, are pretty popular among folks who usually buy party packs of angel dust.

A merchant named BodyInAction sells everything the average Lance Armstrong could wish

for, from growth hormones to EPO, all of course for the higher goal of self-improvement.

The fact that BodyInAction's ethical standards differ from the average lifestyle consultant
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doesn't stop him from offering quality olive oil. After all, even the beefcake lifter lifestyle

deserves the joys of a proper and tasteful frying pan lubricant.

Considering anarchists and dealers on the internet aren't commonly known for their excellent

grammar and writing, we turn to merchant Apluspapers. In trueBreaking Badstyle, this

English-teacher-gone-wrong offers his services as a ghostwriter for all your ads, as well as

for university essays and theses up to the MA level (lazy college seniors, turn your ears). You

see, it's not only murderers, but also plagiarists that can profit from the anonymous internet.

Which terminal disease has driven this seemingly soft-hearted man to such desperate acts of

crime remains shrouded in mystery.

KJohn is a weathered seller of acid and medical marijuana, which also seems to have brought

him closely in touch with the zeitgeist of this eon. His connectedness is expressed to the

unsuspecting drug-shopping junk in prose from his own keyboard about the cosmic dawn of

enlightenment which awaits us in the year 2013.

KJohn most likely never paid much attention to Notorious B.I.G.'s Ten CrackCommandments, of which number four tells us to "never get high on your own supply." Alas,these warming words of hope and spiritual development are no doubt more encouraging tothe average Silk Road buyer than the nihilistic ideas of a Hungarian spambot programmer.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the Tor network someone started the website Bittit, a place where

one can sell photos for bitcoins, or simply post them hoping for a donation. Why not useregular photo sharing services? Is this Flickr for those who are convinced Flickr is a systemof capitalist oppression they need to escape from? Possibly it's a special kind of exhibitionistwho'll only upload their photos to a website hidden at a seemingly random 16 digit URL. Ormaybe they're all just crypto warriors who've grown so accustomed to the darknet that they

just don't know better than obscure sites like these. Perhaps the uploaded photos can offer usa glimpse into their lives.

Among some rather nice landscape photography and cheesy pics of plush weed toys on

someone's couch, we find the gents in the bottom right corner. The uploader notes that "it wasone of those kinds of parties." That is was. The party lifestyle of the darknet is an epic one,

and appears to include sweet homemade costumes of your favorite sci-fi characters.

By the way, the magnificent "crayfish shaking hands with Yoda while Dwayne Johnson looks

on from wall" on the top left easily tops a lot of work seen at yearly art school final exams.

Thanks to the continuous support of the US Naval Research Laboratory, the Electronic

Frontier Foundation and many NGOs, the Tor network can survive to support countries


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where freedom of press is not a given, or where panoptic censorship severely limits thefreedom of speech online.

But on a smaller (and cuter) scale we also find rebels who fight the evil powers of oppressors.After a cease and desist by Hasbro Inc. in 2011 took down the famous My Little Pony

repository ponyarchive.eu, where once one could view and enjoy all episodes of theanimation seriesMy Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, it wasn't long before in the darkrecesses of the Tor network the alter ego YayPonies was born, still offering the same messageof peace, friendship and ponies.

A cease and desist order concerning My Little Pony is pure internet poetry in itself, so to

conclude this selection of wonder, a few words from that text:

I for one sleep more peacefully knowing that bitter internet criminals have a considerablyincreased chance of becoming peace-loving bronies thanks to the freedom fighters of

YayPonies.

Bach, Einstein, Darwin, Rachmaninoff, John Adams, they all got down with their cousins.

Big deal. Of course there are naysaying genetic experts, like Joan Scott, a counselor who

once explained to NPR, the biological complications that can arise from inbreeding. But for

most, those worries pale in comparison to shame of society and the criminal

consequences that canoodling cousins can face.

The Nation's Top Climate Scientist Predicts an "Ice-

Free, Human-Free" Planet

"Burning all fossil fuels could result in the planet being not only ice-free but human-free."

That's a direct quote from our nation's top climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen. The good

doctor, and longtime head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, just quit his dayjob, apparently so that he could spend more time making apocalyptic pronouncements.

Unfortunately, nobody's more qualified to make such predictions than Dr. Hansen. As theveritable founder of American climate science, he was the first to effectively recognize andsound the alarm regarding the threat of an excess accumulation of carbon dioxide in theatmosphere.

In recent years, Hansen has spent an increasingly large chunk of his time working to raisepublic awareness about climate changewriting books, getting arrested protesting at theWhite House, doing talking head spots on cable, all while continuing to research the nature of

the beast he was facing down. Since he began his activism, that many-tentacled beast has
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only grown more ornery. Worldwide emissions haven't slowed a single puff of carbon-filledsmoke. The Arctic is melting, and so is Antarctica. Temps are rising faster than predicted.

And that's the subject of awhite paper Hansen published last night, which aims to clear up

some of the questions he's received in the wake of his departure. The biggest chunk of itfocuses on "The Venus Syndrome"the question of whether global warming might ever getso bad that our climate resembles that of the totally inhospitable second planet from the sun.

His answer is: well, almost.

Hansen explains that "if we burn all the fossil fuels it is certain that sea level wouldeventually rise by tens of meters. The only argument is how soon the rise of several metersneeded to destroy habitability of all coastal cities would occur. It is also possible that burningall fossil fuels would eventually set off a hyperthermal event, a mini-runaway."

By mini-runaway, he means an event fed by feedback loops like melting permafrost or, ashappened during the Paleocene, the mass melting methane hydrates (yeah, that's the stuffJapan is currently trying to mine). See, as ocean and air temps rise, more methane-rich stufflike permafrost and hydrates melt. Methane traps more heat than carbon, and speeds thewarming. This amplification effect means drastic warming can be triggered much faster thancurrent models predict.

But could it ever get as nasty as Venus? Hansen says yes, theoretically. "Earth can 'achieve'Venus-like conditions, in the sense of ~90 bar surface pressure, only after first getting rid ofits ocean via escape of hydrogen to space," he writes. "This is conceivable if the atmospherewarms enough that the troposphere expands into the present stratosphere."

Hansen goes deeper into the science,dive into the paper here. But his conclusions should beread by everyone, so I'll quote him at length:

The picture that emerges for Earth sometime in the distant future, if we should dig up andburn every fossil fuel, is ... an ice-free Antarctica and a desolate planet without humaninhabitants. Although temperatures in the Himalayas may have become seductive, it isdoubtful that the many would allow the wealthy few to appropriate 6 this territory tothemselves or that humans would survive with the extermination of most other species on the

planet. ... But it is not an exaggeration to suggest, based on best available scientific evidence,

that burning all fossil fuels could result in the planet being not only ice-free but human-free.

Bear in mind, these are the words of a scientist, not a preacher going on about the rapture.This is how the nation's top climate scientist imagines the future: a desolate, swelteringwasteland where the rich, ensconced in their Himalayan fortresses, battle to keep the

barbarians at the gate. Againthat's a vision sprouting from the prognosis of science, notapocalyptic sci-fi. If we want to be sure to prevent it from playing out, maybe we'd betterkeep some carbon in the ground, just to be safe.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130415_Exaggerations.pdfhttp://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130415_Exaggerations.pdfhttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/why-japans-methane-hydrate-exploitation-is-game-over-for-climatehttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/why-japans-methane-hydrate-exploitation-is-game-over-for-climatehttp://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130415_Exaggerations.pdfhttp://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130415_Exaggerations.pdfhttp://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130415_Exaggerations.pdfhttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/why-japans-methane-hydrate-exploitation-is-game-over-for-climatehttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/why-japans-methane-hydrate-exploitation-is-game-over-for-climatehttp://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130415_Exaggerations.pdf


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The Next 5 Billion: What Do You Think?

In the coming decades, five billion people -- the majority of humanity -- will come online forthe first time, mostly in parts of the world ridden with conflict, instability and repression.

We've spent much of the last year traveling to those parts of the world to witness the newdigital age firsthand. And we've seen many things:

In Tunisia, we met with former revolutionaries. After ousting longtime dictator Ben

Ali, they decided to channel their energy toward becoming Android developers. In Afghanistan, we learned of an entire village that revolted against the Taliban when

the extremist group tried to seize their phones.

In Kenya, we've seen Maasai nomads without home electricity or running water

nonetheless pay for items with their mobile devices.

In North Korea, citizens risk their lives and harsh punishment in order to obtainsmuggled phones and tablets and take an even greater risk to venture close to theChinese border so they can capture a signal.

In Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, we saw that while police hide their identities with masks,

citizens are sometimes willing to take out their mobile phones and share warnings onsocial media.

In Iraq, following the return of looted artifacts, we were able to put the entire museum

online so the world could experience the country's rich history.

In Chad -- the poorest country on earth with less than 1 percent of the population able

to access electricity -- we met activists who were using the Internet to add a layer oftransparency to the oil and gas sector.

In Myanmar, a country that until 18 months ago had been under military dictatorship

for half a century, we met a transitional government using Gmail as its email serviceand even found a former Google employee who had returned home to do a Burmesestartup.

In Pakistan, we met a group of women who were attacked by the Taliban with acid.

Their physical scars carry an unfair stigma that makes it hard for them to find work,but the Internet allows them to run businesses and interact with the world despitethese challenges.

In Israel, one of the only things that the Israelis and the Palestinians seemed to agree

on was that they love using the Internet.

The list goes on.

The world is not perfect, and with more connectivity we have greater visibility into thechallenges that exist in every corner of the globe. There's room for optimism and there's roomfor pessimism, but above all we must start with understanding. So we're publishing a book,The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. It looks at thegood and the bad that awaits us, and describes some ways we might navigate these
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challenges.

As you think about the next five billion to come online, what makes you excited and

afraid? What stories do you have of surprising twists on the front lines of this new

digital age? Leave a comment; on Monday, April 29 we're giving signed copies of our

book to the 15 most insightful comments chosen by The Huffington Post, and we'd loveto hear from you!

Reducing Black Carbon and Other Short-Lived Climate

Pollutants Could Reduce Sea Level Rise by a Third

Recently we learned that nearly 3.5 million people are killed each year by indoor air

pollution, much of it caused by black carbon soot. It's a health problem for sure, andit's a climate change problem, both of significant sizedespite the general lack of

media attention focused on either aspect.

Now, a well-timed report coming out of the National Center for Atmospheric

Research really shows the very powerful effect that reducing black carbon (that

purple haze in the image above), as well as other short-lived air pollutants, can

significantly slow sea level rise. The pollutants: methane, tropospheric ozone,

hydrofluorocarbons, and black carbon.

Compared to carbon dioxide all of these pollutants come out of the air quicklyparticularly black carbonlasting anywhere from a few weeks in the atmosphere to a

couple decades, versus the centuries CO2 can last. So reducing the emissions of all

these can have a much more rapid effect than can cutting CO2though reducing

that is still critical as it's the dominant greenhouse gas which humans have any

control over.

How much can cutting these pollutants reduce warming and slow our rising seas?

The scientists found that by cutting back on all these pollutants can temporarily slow

sea level rise by about 25 to 50 percent, due to slowing temperature rise. By 2100, if

we cut back on these pollutants, as well as reduce carbon dioxide emissions, sealevel rise over the coming century can be reduced by at least 30 percent.

Previous research looking just at the effect that reducing black carbon pollution

found that Arctic warming could be cut two-thirds by 2030 by doing so, with a

decrease in warming of 0.5C.

But we have to act quickly: To slow sea level rise that much, we have to essentially

start cutting down on these pollutants right now. Delaying action until 2040 reduces

the potential for reducing sea level rise by one-third.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/air-pollution-kills-more-people-than-aids-and-malaria-combinedhttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/air-pollution-kills-more-people-than-aids-and-malaria-combinedhttp://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=127586&org=NSF&from=newshttp://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=127586&org=NSF&from=newshttp://slash/http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/air-pollution-kills-more-people-than-aids-and-malaria-combinedhttp://motherboard.vice.com/blog/air-pollution-kills-more-people-than-aids-and-malaria-combinedhttp://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=127586&org=NSF&from=newshttp://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=127586&org=NSF&from=newshttp://slash/


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What does that mean for coastal cities? We're not talking about sea levels being

three feet higher than todayto use a pretty middle-of-the-road estimaterather

justabout two feet, or potentially less. Something some of the world's most populous

cities would still have to take very seriously, but it would give them more time to

prepare.

Where's this pollution coming from?

Black carbon pollution comes from a couple of main sources: Older cooking stoves

burning wood, dried dung, some other form of biomass; older diesel engines. There

have been ongoing efforts to replace these older cookstoves with similar newer

models that both use less fuel and reduce emissions, but they have yet to show clear

resultsold habits and preferences are hard to break.

Methane, again, comes from a variety of sources: leaks in natural gas production are

an easily remedied source; as is capturing it from landfills. Less easy, at least

technologically, is reducing methane associated with livestock agriculturethough

reducing the amount of meat and dairy we eat is a good start. Stopping methane

from permafrost melting and seeping up from the ocean floor, both caused by global

warming, is much more problematic to stop.

Tropospheric ozone--which is different in location that the ozone that's responsible

for all sorts of health problems, as well the ozone layer higher up in the atmosphere

that we want to keep intact--comes the reaction of nitrogen oxides, carbon

monoxide, and volatile organic compounds in the presence of sunlight. Reducing

tailpipe emissions from motor vehicles, reducing industrial emissions, as well as

chemical solvents can help here.

Hydrofluorocarbons, used to replace the ozone layer-depleting CFCs, have a

seriously high warming potential, even compared to methane. Unfortunately demand

for them is expected to increase in the coming decades as more of the world

decides, like the United States has, that using air conditioning is the best thing since

indoor plumbing. HFCs also come from a variety of industrial processes. It's worth

noting that previous research by the EPA has shown that phasing out HFCs

altogether could slow global warming by a decade.

Air Pollution Kills More People Than AIDS and Malaria

Combined

Last week the World Health Organization came out with a study,published in The Lancet,that comes to the sobering conclusion that air pollution kills more people around the worldevery year than are killed by AIDS and malaria, combined. Where's the outrage?

Looking at stats from 2010, the report found that 3.5 million deaths a year are caused byindoor air pollution, with 3.3 million dead from outdoor air pollution. The total amount is less
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the world is not perfect

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