Here’s a video taken at the Faraday Muthi market, in Selby, Johannesburg, South Africa. The video was shot at the same time as the 17th
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) conference was
going on in the same city. If a
reasonably strong African nation such as South Africa won’t enforce its own and
international laws regarding illegal wildlife trade, what hope is there that
the trade will be stopped?
Yet at this Joburg market, a rather
well-known muthi market in fact, the video clearly shows rampant trade in
illegal wildlife products, most of which have very specific restrictions
attached to trade, if any is even allowed.
The person who took the video and shared it
with Blood Lions wishes to remain anonymous, but confirmed the video’s
authenticity to Traveller24 and that it was taken on Monday 3 October, saying
it was “alarming to see so many leopard skins available”.
In January this year the Department of
Environmental Affairs set provincial leopard trophy hunting quotas at zero for
2016, effectively banning leopard trophy hunting throughout South Africa for a
year.
This calls into question the origin of these
products, which include Pangolin skin, just moved up to CITES Appendix I as
critically endangered. Other illegal products include lion skins and bone as
well as endangered vulture species.
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