4 - Online Illegal Trade in Reptiles in the Netherlands

Summary

Introduction

In recent years, the illegal wildlife trade has received increasing attention. In the political debate, the focus is mainly on iconic species such as elephants, rhinoceroses, and tigers, but reptile populations are also seriously harmed by the illegal reptile trade. For example, reptiles are an easy target for criminal groups because they can often survive for a long time under poor transport conditions, reptiles are quiet, and they can easily be transported in suitcases or postal parcels (Altherr 2014). It has been determined that between 2010 and 2014, approximately 64,000 live wild vertebrates with protected status were seized; 95 per cent of these seized animals were reptiles (D’Cruze and Macdonald 2016).

Even though the illegal trade in reptiles is often associated with Asian origin countries, Europe is one of the biggest markets for illegal reptiles. This has been illustrated by research showing that the majority of all live animal seizures in the European Union (EU) over a ten-year period were reptiles (van Uhm 2016a). Sometimes the seizures concern reptile species from Europe, but many reptile species do not occur naturally within the EU. In fact, the majority of the illegal reptiles is first being imported from outside the EU and then the reptiles are freely traded within the EU borders (Gussow 2009; Sollund and Maher 2016; Mărginean et al 2018; van Uhm et al 2019; Sollund, this volume).

The Netherlands is an important player in the illegal reptile trade, both as a transit country and a destination country (van der Grijp 2016; van Uhm 2016b; Janssen and Leupen 2019). For example, the Netherlands is in the top ten of EU countries that import endangered reptile species, but a substantial part of the legal trade actually has an illegal origin (Janssen and Leupen 2019). In addition to many live reptiles for the pet market, reptile products are on the market as belts, boots, bags, meat, medication, shields, skulls, skeletons, teeth and taxidermy (Auliya et al 2016; Harvey 2017). The more scarce, attractive and expensive some rare endangered reptiles become, the more interesting they are on the reptile black market (van der Grijp 2016).