Online retail sites hosting ‘thousands’ of illegal animal product trades in China

A survey of 15 Chinese retail websites over a two-year period has revealed a booming trade in illegal wildlife products including ivory, rhino horn and tiger bone. The British wildlife trade monitoring network, TRAFFIC, said it found thousands of adverts for illegal wildlife products and more than half of posts in recent months were for ivory. Conservationists say China is the world’s largest consumer of illegal ivory, with skyrocketing demand fuelling the slaughter of tens of thousands of African elephants each year.

There are transactions of illegal wildlife products which were not captured by TRAFFIC’s monitoring. This indicates that trade-volumes on e-commerce platforms might be even higher.

Report released by TRAFFIC, a British wildlife trade monitoring network

China is also home the world’s largest online retail market, with firms such as Alibaba among the most prominent. To avoid clampdowns, online vendors use codewords like “African materials”, “yellow materials” and “white plastic” in place of ivory. TRAFFIC said it consistently found “around 1,500” new adverts for such items every month for the last two years. As well as ivory, it tracked offers of rhino horn, leopard and tiger bones, hawksbill turtle shells, pangolin scales, hornbill casques and the horns of the saiga, a critically endangered antelope.

Technology Ivory