Smuggled, Beaten and Drugged: The Illicit Global Ape Trade
“The way they do business,” he said of ape traffickers, “makes the Mafia look like amateurs.”
After hundreds of searches, Mr. Stiles found an Instagram account offering dozens of rare animals
for sale, including baby chimpanzees and orangutans dressed in children’s clothes.
“If you spend a lot of time in there,” Mr. Kesidi said, “the color of your skin changes.”
For years, Mr. Stiles has performed undercover research on wildlife trafficking across Africa, but recently his work has taken him off the continent.
Mr. Stiles knew what Tom was hoping for: to sell the infant orangutans to a private collector or unscrupulous zoo, where they are often beaten or drugged into submission
and used for entertainment like mindlessly banging on drums or boxing one another.
“Transporting an adult chimp is like transporting a crate of dynamite,” said Doug Cress, who until recently
was the head of the Great Apes Survival Partnership, a United Nations program to help great apes.
“Even if we can rescue them, it’s very difficult reintroducing them to the wild,”
said Mr. Cress, the former head of the United Nations Great Apes program.
Since then, he has plunged deeper and deeper into the ape world, becoming the lead author of “Stolen Apes,” a report published by the United Nations in 2013
that was considered one of the first comprehensive attempts to document the underground ape trade.
“They have consciousness, empathy and understanding,” said Jef Dupain, an ape specialist for the African Wildlife Foundation.
