Why I Don’t Feel Guilty for Busting Wildlife Traffickers | Nat Geo Live

(Onkuri speaks)

Government agencies in many parts of the world either don't know much about the problem of wildlife trafficking or they might be understaffed, they might be under-trained, they might be under-equipped. So, we go in to help them and supplement their efforts. We give them investigation training; we sometimes act as decoy buyers to help them gather evidence that they need.

This is a typical seizure. Each one those little blue bags contains one balled-up pangolin. A typical seizure can have anything from 50-200 animals, and they are transported under extraordinarily unhygienic and inhuman conditions. They're just balled-up and stuffed into boxes. They may be, you know, half-starved and certainly dehydrated by the time they reach the market. Then to increase their body weight, they are force-fed flour and sometimes even cement just so they can make more money.

Another trade we worked on was the exotic pet trade. This is a fairly typical tourist night spot where these people walk around and they ask tourists to take pictures with slow lorises. These animals are all poached from the wild and their teeth are yanked out so they don't bite the tourists. And when we were working with the police team on this, one of my colleagues who doesn't always do investigations, she asked me, "Do you not sometimes feel bad about what you are doing?" In the sense that you are gaining the trust of these traffickers. Obviously, they like you and they talk to you nicely and then you get them arrested.

And I thought about it and I realized that no, I don't feel bad for them. - (audience laughter) - (applause) That's because once you go undercover and you start talking to them, you realize they feel nothing for these animals. One of the traffickers we talked to, she told us about how she would smuggle baby slow lorises. She would put them in little boxes, little cardboard boxes, and put all those cardboard boxes inside a big suitcase to send by air. The animals were sedated. And she told me that if all the animals survive, then obviously she was giving them too much air and she could cram in a few more the next time. But if less than half survive, then she would consider putting them in slightly larger cardboard boxes.