On July 21, 2018 a witness reported seeing five rhinos being kept on standby, in crates, at Or Tambo Airport, Johannesburg, for at least 30 hours, whilst waiting for their final documents and visas, before being loaded on to a Turkish Airline Cargo, to be shipped through Madagascar, then Istanbul, towards Shanghai, on a 70 or more hour trip, to an unknown final destination in China.
The future welfare of these animals will never be monitored by any authority, ever, at their destination; they will probably be used in intensive (and unregulated) farming for the systematic breeding and removal of their horn, for traditional medicinal use and local beliefs.
This is only one case, however the shipping of iconic animals from South Africa to Asia is no surprise. Several Cargo companies and agencies, working full time from the South African airports, are in fact exporting a quarter of a million live birds‚ and over 8‚000 other live mammals and 54‚000 plant species over the last decade to countries in East Asia. South Africa is the largest legal exporting hub of living wild animals to international destinations with zero animal welfare, in particular, Asia and the Middle East.
Elephants, lions, leopards, giraffes, even cheetahs and tigers, (being tigers bred in captivity in South Africa) are exported each year, legally shipped alive or dead; they are sent to collectors, to zoos, private owners and circuses where they are kept in cruel conditions and exploited. They are confined in unsuitable spaces for entertainment, forced into tiny cages in shopping malls or in pubs behind glasses, alone, until they prematurely die or are purposely slaughtered for body parts use. Primates are used for traditional medicine or eaten with their brain removed while still alive.
No authority nor anti-cruelty legislation is, in fact, regulating or restricting the conditions to avoid the unimaginable circumstances in which these animals are kept, used or slaughtered once at destination.
Furthermore, the legal trade has been exposed for being consistently used by Asian criminal syndicates as a tool to launder a large number of poached items, endangered animals or parts, with the illegal trading of weapons on the side of this business.
The Convention on International Trading in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES), founded in 1973 by the United Nations Environment Programme to protect all non-human living things from cross-border exploitation, is completely failing in its mandate by allowing wildlife to be traded in these numbers, legally and illegally, to countries with zero animal welfare laws or protections.
The permits which were initially released through the CITES' Head Office in Geneva and had to follow a strict protocol are, since 2002, all cleared by local officials in the various countries; since then, such officials have repeatedly been accused of being careless and/or corrupted and their systematic transgressions reported to CITES, with no results. This is a farce.
We request the United Nations Environmental Programme begin investigating these processes and initiate a radical revision of the Convention laws, its policies and funding.
We also call for the immediate ban of any trade of wildlife to countries with substandard laws and protection policies for the safeguarding of wildlife in their countries.
SIGN THE PETITION!
