Illegal Animal Trade In Indonesia

    Illegal animal trade is a serious case in Indonesia that tragically ignore by both society and the government itself. Indonesia is home to three of the world's most endangered species. This type of crime threatened the existence and the diversity of fauna in Indonesia, which is in fact, the country that holds most of earth’s flora and fauna. Based on the research from several articles and animal organization website, Indonesia have the fund to solve this program however, that fund is being used as a corruption money. My reason for choosing this aspect is because this type of problem grows more rapidly every day without any serious act to put a stop, so I hope this writing will give awareness to the public.

    Based on my findings on the internet, Indonesians started to use this wealth of natural resources for themselves rather than think of what should they do to conserve them. In contrast, they take the animals from the wild, hunt them, killed them and sell their organs to people. Certain animals like tigers, elephants, exotic birds can be treated as such. Another way they trade the animals to the customers are selling them as pets, even though the animals they hunt aren’t supposed to be domestic pets. Certain animals like Loris, orangutans, exotic birds can be sold as. Statistics of the illegal animal trade is staggering for me. According to our research, in the year 2009, 70 bird markets in 58 different cities has traded 183 species of bird. Including 14 of them has sold various kinds of parrots, 21 of them sold primates, 11 of them sold rare singing birds, and 13 of them sold raptors. One specific example in Bali, an illegal animal trade shop, named “satria”, is the largest animal market in the island. Having a record of selling 35 parrots in January 2012, including the Moluccan parrot, the Red Lory (Eos bornea) and the Rainbow Lorikeet (Trichoglossus haematodus)

     This type of problems exist because due to the economic condition in Indonesia is quite poor and unstable, a lot of Indonesian have no choice but to sell these exotic and rare animals, or easy money in short. Also, because the lack of human resources and funding for the prevalence of illegal wildlife trafficking in the country. The most significant information is the continuously growing of this type of illegal operation with many numerous case that being reported. Although there are lots of animal campaign and organizations that have the rights to save these animals such as WCS, WWF, and even National Geographic, the bad news is, that they can’t really put a 100% stop on it because for example; when they try to save, they got heavily armed resistance since the illegal trader are funded by local syndicate or terrorist. Next, the role of the government itself didn’t give any real effort to help and assist the animal organizations. Unlike any other countries, Indonesia is still very high on corruption and the politicians are playing with the money that supposed to help these animals. 

      Illegal animal trading is very tragic. The killing, the selling and the hunting is just absolutely not appropriate for these rare and exotic animals. Yes, there are a lot of people which are not care that much for these animals. But if these animals are kept being hunted and sold to their wrong habitat, these magnificent animals can exist in a short amount of time.