Commercial Products and live Specimens

Coats made from Endangered Animals

Craft Products from elephants ivories

Animal's skin


Walking down to the street in the city you will bumped into pet shops where sold birds for example parrots, beetles, and lizards or even souvenir shop you might come to these products such as butterflies or beetle specimens of even a tiger skin purse! Wildlife products are everywhere! From this, we can know that human obtain a variety of valuable commercial products from nature. This is one of the sub-factors of human-caused reductions in biodiversity.



Where does the wildlife product come from? According to the Environment Science, A Global Concern that I have referred, most of the wildlife product sources come from developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America with the richest biodiversity in the world. On the other hand, Europe, North America, and some of the wealthy Asian countries are the principal importers. Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong buy three-quarters of all cat and snake skin, for instance, while European countries buy a similar percentage of live birds.
Cunningham& Saigo, 2005.


The profit of wildlife trading is significant as I got some information from the Report of Congressional Research Service on International Illegal Trade in Wildlife: Threats and U.S. Policy by Wyler& Sheikh, 2008 which show some value of wildlife trading. The price of the wildlife trading is shown below:

Title: Selected Illicit Wildlife Trade and Estimated Retail Value

Illegally Traded

Wildlife Estimated Retail Value

1.Elephants $121-$900 per kilogram of ivory

2.Rhinos $945-$50,000 per kilogram of rhino horn

3.Tibetan

Antelopes $1,200-$20,000 per shatoosh shawl

4.Big Cats $1,300-$20,000 per tiger, snow leopard, or jaguar skin; $3,300-

$7,000 per set of tiger bones

5.Bears $250-$8,500 per gallbladder

6.Sturgeon $4,450-$6,000 per kilogram of caviar

7.Reptiles and

Insects

(often live) $30,000 per oenpelli python; $30,000 per komodo dragon;

$5,000-$30,000 per plowshare tortoise; $15,000 per Chinese

alligator; $20,000 per monitor lizard; $20,000 per shingleback

skink; $8,500 per pair of birdwing butterflies

8.Exotic Birds

(often live) $10,000 per black palm cockatoo egg ($25,000-$80,000 per

mature breeding pair); $5,000-$12,000 per hyacinth macaw;

$60,000-$90,000 per lear macaw; $20,000 per Mongolian falcon

9.Great Apes

(often live) $50,000 per Orangutan

Note: Price traded in US Dollars.

Sources: Compiled from U.S. government agencies, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and media sources.



From this you can identify clearly this is a profitable trading. But the matter of fact is, this trading is consider inhumane because in the process of hunting, animals sometime are killed such as elephants, tigers , leopards and rhinos in order to get their ivory, bones, and horns. As a result, the population of this wildlife are decreasing year by year for example, in 1977, there were 1.3 million elephants lived in Africa; by 1997, only 600,000 remained. Other example is fewer than 1,500 Indochinese tigers are broadly distributed throughout Thailand (the centre of the Indochinese tiger's range), Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos, southern China and eastern Myanmar (formerly Burma).



For more information, you can access to Nature web site:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/elephants/poaching.html http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/tigers/plight/slide_04.html



As a conclusion, in my view point that commercial wildlife products and live Specimens have an impact on the state of wildlife population.