A plan to bring the lynx back to what had become unfamiliar territory in New York State also ended disastrously. But scarcity in the wild is actually a plus to wildlife traders. Some countries are tightening penalties. Chinese panda smugglers get life sentences. Despite some positive enforcement steps, the illegal wildlife trade is still very profitable and, in most countries, the penalties for getting caught are not very severe.
Tiger skins seized in New Delhi by the Indian police.
The penalties for killing tigers remain very light in India. When a Senegalese bird dealer makes the two-day trip along rutted roads from Kedougou to Dakar, for instance, he is expected to lose a third of his 15,000 passengers. And the damage isn't limited to the birds themselves. In Argentina, and in many other countries, the most popular way to catch valuable parrots is to cut down their nesting trees, which in Argentina alone accounted for the loss of 100,000 quebracho trees in the 1980s. Although habitat destruction is probably the major factor pushing endangered species into extinction, civil unrest plays a part, too.