By: Ann Summers
A tiger skeleton soaks in rice wine in Harbin, China. There is a growing, clamoring demand for tiger bone wine, a tonic made by steeping a tiger carcass in rice wine to produce an extremely expensive elixir. It’s thought to impart the animal’s great strength, a status symbol product bought or gifted by the elite: government officials, military officers, and wealthy businessmen. Photo courtesy Save the Tiger Fund
Ultimately the elimination of cultural folk ideologies on the capitalist demand side should stop the illegal harvesting of wildlife. That such conspicuous consumption still motivates unsustainable practices cannot be minimized in its globally immoral turpitude. Moral suasion seems far too timid in the abuse of complex global economic trade relationships and infrastructure and the demands for serious policy solutions should become paramount, as they perpetuate premodern barbarity and ignorance in the modern name of wretched excess. Ultimately, even an approach that intersects culture, ecology, and economy using geoinformation science is still limited by the quality and quantity of the data network created. Patel’s methodology provides one filter, but ultimately enforcement may require more serious geospatial positioning data to enforce any changes in conservation policies.
But without knowing exactly what’s going on, wildlife agencies and researchers can’t stop these killings. So Nikkita Patel turned to HealthMap, a tool the Boston Children’s Hospital created 10 years ago. The tool searches multilingual news aggregators and forums for media reports, parsing them for relevant keywords. It was already tuned to the wildlife trade, in part because animals can be vectors for disease spread. HealthMap records the key information in each article, such as the location of the reported illegal transaction, and keeps a tally of the number of individuals from each species traded.
Patel’s research, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, relies more on that data than previous illegal wildlife trade work. “It’s looking at who the key players are,” Patel says, “and how to best break down trade networks.”…
In other words, some data is better than no data. Because the media reports on these animals more frequently, Patel hopes that the data on them was more complete. “We thought that selecting the animals that had the greatest number of reports would perhaps be better reflection of what’s happening in the real world,” she says. With more work, law enforcement might even be able to develop her maps into real-time analysis tools. That’d be a real step toward breaking the trade networks. “As an illicit trade, they’re flexible in changing their routes,” Patel says. But it’s hard to outrun raw data.
For example this news piece provides an information node: (trigger warning) Police in central Vietnam on Monday seized a 120-kg frozen tiger carcass in a “suspicious” truck heading north on National Route 1A in Nghe An Province.
This kind of analysis would be familiar to law enforcement—researchers have used similar methods to track the drug trade. But whether it would work on wildlife in the real world is still an open question. “The authors are attempting to analyze media-derived information, which will contain some accurate data, but unless it has been officially verified, it should always be regarded as suspect,” writes Richard Thomas, the Global Communications Coordinator for TRAFFIC, an international organization that monitors wildlife trade, in an e-mail. And an outright blockade of illegal animal trade in, say, China—one of the countries Patel identified as a key node—certainly wouldn’t be easy.
Abstract
Innovative approaches are needed to combat the illegal trade in wildlife. Here, we used network analysis and a new database, HealthMap Wildlife Trade, to identify the key nodes (countries) that support the illegal wildlife trade. We identified key exporters and importers from the number of shipments a country sent and received and from the number of connections a country had to other countries over a given time period. We used flow betweenness centrality measurements to identify key intermediary countries. We found the set of nodes whose removal from the network would cause the maximum disruption to the network. Selecting six nodes would fragment 89.5% of the network for elephants, 92.3% for rhinoceros, and 98.1% for tigers. We then found sets of nodes that would best disseminate an educational message via direct connections through the network. We would need to select 18 nodes to reach 100% of the elephant trade network, 16 nodes for rhinoceros, and 10 for tigers. Although the choice of locations for interventions should be customized for the animal and the goal of the intervention, China was the most frequently selected country for network fragmentation and information dissemination. Identification of key countries will help strategize illegal wildlife trade interventions.wildlife trade network analysis key player elephant rhinoceros
Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
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Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
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Flowers For Socrates 
Excellent first submission, Annie. Welcome aboard!
Annie I concur with Gene’s sentiments..
“Ultimately the elimination of cultural folk ideologies on the capitalist demand side should stop the illegal harvesting of wildlife. That such conspicuous consumption still motivates unsustainable practices cannot be minimized in its globally immoral turpitude. Moral suasion seems far too timid in the abuse of complex global economic trade relationships and infrastructure and the demands for serious policy solutions should become paramount, as they perpetuate premodern barbarity and ignorance in the modern name of wretched excess.”
The problem is that these cultural ideologies, wretched as they are, have come down through the centuries in Asian culture. If men of means believe that powdered Rhinoceros horn will give them sexual potency, than the killing of these magnificent animals will continue, until the killers are physically stopped by government intervention. The pursuit of money and power can well lead to the destruction of our world by sociopathic greed.
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Welcome! Anything that stop or slow down the poaching of endangered species is good news.
Welcome, Ann!
Thank God for the many men and women across the world waging life, limb and means to expose this horror and its consequences.
I see more and more connections between the 2 fronts, the Western/Asian front where disposable income creates a demand, and the local African/Asian front where war and strife and the associated breaks in law and order, combined with a lack of development/jobs lead to poaching as a remunerating means of supply. The hard work of the wildlife guards and their tireless, dangerous work is being shared with us through documentaries and writings, and they see that there are many people in the West who support what they do and are trying to push laws and raise funds that insures their sacrifice isn’t wasted.
Once this local to international connection is firmly established, and the means and support, along with the information flows faster both ways, we’ll see better results.
I wouldn’t want to have to explain to a child that the reason there are no more white rhinos or tigers in the wild is that people killed them for money and superstition.
It says a lot about our character as a species. None of it good.
Gene,
It’s not just the people who kill the animals that I blame. It’s the people who pay lots of money for these animals/animal parts and create a market/demand for them.
I thought that was implied in the “superstition” part, Elaine. You are of course correct. No black market exists without demand.
“Superstition” brings in this unnecessary perspective that albinos are being poached in some parts of Africa, Tanzania specifically, for occult, nefarious purposes. In the same news segment, right after I was done lamenting the rhino massacred for his horn, I am told about the albino murdered for his body parts!
Human beings, what a waste of humanity!
This actually ties in with a previous post about slavery and ownership, and poaching is another expression of “claim” and ownership”.
Forensic science and remote control drones are helping to slow down or stop poaching where the technology can be deployed. Statistical models were developed to predict crime hotspots in the US and for catching IED placement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those same statistical models can be used to predict where poachers might strike.
Using remote control aerial vehicles, both fixed wing and multi-rotor ‘copters with First Person View (FPV) technology created for model aviation hobbyists, allow aerial surveillance for a tiny fraction of what it costs to look for crooks with full size aircraft and helicopters. Besides, the drones are electric powered by long life batteries, making them nearly silent, especially when compared with the noise of a helicopter.
The operant word here is “where they can be deployed.” Some areas are too dangerous. Local warlords or even poacher-friendly governments may keep the technology from being used.
Dead cat flavored wine. As if I needed another reason to not drink.
Great post. It hits squarely on one of my irritants. When I left Asia and its wars long ago I ceased hunting personally simply because I no longer wanted to kill anything, four legged or two. I will subsist on livestock husbandry of animals not endangered. Now knowing hunting is done for sometimes small parts of various endangered species bodies is maddening to me. And done in places with few opportunities in order to “feed” a distant market, with money, for mystical reasons makes even less sense.
No question that “demand” is the driving force and focus on that will be necessary to stop this abomination. Frequently the intial suppliers are doing the only thing they think will enable their own survival and means to acquire money. That said, even those unfortunate souls must be stopped as well. Clip the problem at both ends so to speak, but I’d focus first on the demand end.
We in the developed west also have some abominable practices, such as “trophy hunting” just for a skin or head to mount. Those who hunt abundant species and eat what they hunt don’t bother me, although I’ll no longer do it myself. I’m not being hypocritical at all, for the reasons cited drawn from war. I cannot help but look down on the “trophy hunting” crowd…Lord, there isn’t even a monetary reason to do it, just human ego. We also seem to “fear” wolves, and seek to annihilate them, regardless of their integral part in predatory ecology, as demonstrated successfully in Yellowstone Park. I’ve been within a couple feet of wild wolves, more or less by accident while trying to photograph them. I saw no fear in their eyes, nor an impulse to attack me as food…what I saw was curiosity in wolves that had reached stage 3 in L David Mech’s list of wolf approachs to humans. Now when in a war setting I often saw fear in the eyes of local national civilians, and that fear was of anyone in uniform, from either side. When my squad made an attempt to remove the anxiety by stacking our weapons and interacting with them on their level, it always worked…that’s not saying it would always work, just that it did for me.
“Clip the problem at both ends so to speak, but I’d focus first on the demand end.”
Agreed.
An insightful article about fighting a foolish and evil business and interesting data visualizations to boot… I think I’m in love!
Great first post Annie! Welcome!