The Big Smoke

Four London pictures. In the first, children play on a Clapham housing estate with a rare breed of monkey. In the second, a woman stalks down a catwalk in a coat made of white python skin. In the third, a large tank of putrid coral is unpacked by aquarium staff at London Zoo. In the fourth, a house in Croydon is raided to reveal more than 100 animals kept in cramped and dirty conditions – including 17 flying squirrels, 12 bush babies, 25 sugar gliders and 48 different types of turtles, tortoises and terrapins.
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Though very different, each scene represents a microscopic part of a multinational trade worth between £5-£10 billion a year, linking protagonists as diverse as Islamic militants, the Russian mafia, London market traders, and the Western fashion industry. On the black market its profit levels bear comparison with those of the international drugs and arms trades. Its many tentacles extend to the souvenir industry, Chinese medicine, bush meat dealers, ivory traders, and collectors with a ‘Noah’s Ark’ complex, who want pairs of as many exotic breeds as they can get hold of to stock their private zoos. The UK is pivotal in this ruthless world of exotic animal dealing, and according to the WWF, London is a key point of exchange, with Heathrow airport seeing the highest level of animal seizures in the country, whether it’s suitcases filled with sedated birds of prey from Thailand or tanks filled with rare corals.

Chief Inspector Andy Fisher, head of the Metropolitan Police Wildlife Crime Unit, tells Time Out: ‘By fighting these crimes here in London, we can have an impact on the most remote places on Earth.’ Over the last ten years, his unit has seized more than 30,000 products made from endangered species, including the largest ever haul of shahtoosh shawls – £353,000 worth – which are made from the fine underfleece of the endangered Tibetan antelope. Up to five antelopes can be killed for each shawl, and at its height the poaching industry was wiping out 20,000 a year., though the landmark prosecution in 2000 of the Mayfair firm responsible for importing the shawls has had some impact. This May anti-poaching patrol officers from Tibet visited Fisher and told him that – although the threat of extinction has not gone away – because of reduced consumer demand illegal slaughter of the animals has dimished.

In a meeting at the Hague last month, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) discussed what the UN has called the worst extinction crisis since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago, caused by loss of habitats, pollution, rising human populations and climate change. It’s estimated that three species are going extinct an hour – and one of the species at greatest risk is the tiger. When the Metropolitan Police relaunched its Operation Charm last November, it drew attention to two stuffed tigers – one a ten-day-old cub – which it had seized from the Islington taxidermist ‘Get Stuffed’. Operation Charm is currently the only police initiative against the illegal trade in endangered species, and its key focus is illegal remedies in Chinese medicine – which have created a demand for tiger bone that has reduced the tiger population in the wild to less than 5,000 – in stark contrast to 100,000 in 1900.

While wildlife conservation organisations around the world battle to stop species disappearing, for many collectors in the endangered animal trade an animal’s rarity only adds to its cachet. ‘We live in a designer world,’ declares John Hayward, the retired police officer who runs the National Theft Register, which investigates crimes involving animals stolen from zoos. ‘There are people who have loads of money who won’t be content with a canary in a cage or a goldfish in a bowl. They’ll go for the more rare, endangered species. We call it the ‘Mona Lisa’ complex.’

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