Revealed: the scale of trade in rare animals

John Mooney, The Sunday Times, 21 February 2010

The young man who drove into the car park of the Outlet shopping centre in Banbridge, Co Down, last Friday morning may have looked like a typical shopper, but he was there to sell, not to buy.

Richard Potter, a pet-shop owner who has a lucrative sideline selling rare and endangered species, had arrived to seal his latest deal.

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In Potter’s case, some of the lemurs were found to have no microchip implanted. Some of the article 10 papers that Potter produced when confronted by the police were irregular.

Rob Parry-Jones, the regional director of Traffic Europe, a wildlife trade-monitoring group, said document fraud of this kind was one of the biggest challenges in regulating the wildlife trade.

“Traffic is aware of a number of instances where reptiles have been imported with documentation claiming they were bred in captivity, when in fact they were collected from the wild,” he said.

“In other instances, permits have been used to import specimens legally, but are then copied and used to launder smuggled specimens,” he said.

More at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article7035080.ece