#trafficking
Tell Facebook to crack down on wildlife traffickers
#Facebook #Wildlife #Trafficking #Trapping #Caging #Avaaz #Petition
" Dear friends,
Wildlife traffickers are making a killing.
They’re snatching terrified cheetah cubs and tiny orangutans from their mothers and trapping them in cages. They are reducing these sensitive beings to mere merchandise, racking up millions from a cruel criminal trade, pushing endangered species to the brink of extinction.
And they’re not building their market in dodgy back-alleys. They are hiding in plain sight, right next to us on social media, selling wild animals or their butchered body parts on private Facebook groups with thousands of members.
This ends here and now.
As the world’s biggest social media company, Facebook could hunt down wildlife traffickers online. But they won’t prioritize it unless they face massive public pressure. That’s where we come in: with a million voices, we could win over the people Facebook really cares about: its employees and big advertisers that won’t want to sell next to wildlife criminals.
Cute animal pictures and videos are a cornerstone of social media. But platforms like Facebook have become safe havens for poachers and traffickers trading live animals, elephant tusks and rhino horns instead.
Wildlife trafficking is one of the most lucrative criminal industries, worth up to 23 billion dollars each year. Traffickers have played cat and mouse with the law for decades. Now social media is giving them unprecedented opportunities to develop an online marketplace where endangered species are the commodity -- and they’re prospering under Facebook’s watch.
But Facebook could turn the tide and help save thousands of endangered species by mobilizing its unparalleled resources to shut down wildlife trafficking on all of its platforms.
So here’s the plan: if a million of us speak out, we can move its biggest advertising clients to tell Facebook to hunt down traffickers, and get Facebook employees to amplify our call inside the company.
The global ecological crisis is threatening our planet’s beautiful wildlife more than ever, and if we don’t act now, future generations may only know some of our most majestic species from books. That’s why time and again, our movement has come together to fight for life on Earth, standing side-by-side with nature’s defenders, and bringing the voices of animals to the halls of power. This is our chance to protect what we hold dear and win a major battle against some of the cruelest things humans are inflicting upon other species today.
With hope and determination,
Ruth, John, Luis, Anneke, Kaitlin, and the entire Avaaz team"
Out of Africa: How West and Central Africa have become the epicentre of ivory and pangolin scale trafficking to Asia
Out of Africa details how endemic corruption, weak or absent rule of law, low levels of development and hotspots of armed conflict have left the region wide open to exploitation by well-organised transnational criminal gangs.
Since 2015, Nigeria has emerged as the world’s primary exit point for ivory and pangolin scales trafficked from Africa to Asia. During the past five years, it has been implicated in global seizures of more than 30 tonnes of ivory and 167 tonnes of pangolin scales – the equivalent of at least 4,400 elephants and many hundreds of thousands of pangolins.
#wildlife #trafficking #ivory #pangolin #Africa #Asia #EnvironmentalInvestigationAgency
