In February 2016, Richard Lewis, a wildlife conservationist working in Madagascar,
was contacted by a veterinary clinic with an unusual request. “Someone
went to a vet and said: ‘Can you take a microchip out of a
ploughshare?’” Lewis recalled. “So they called us.”
The ploughshare tortoise
is one of the rarest tortoises on the planet: with fewer than 50 adults
thought to be left in the wild, each one is worth as much as $50,000 on
the global exotic pet market. Like gold or ivory, their very rarity is
part of what drives smugglers’ interest. Lewis runs the Madagascar
programme of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, which operates a
captive breeding site where ploughshares are reared for more than a
decade before being released into the wild. Both buying and selling
ploughshares, or keeping them as pets, is illegal, and the breeding site
is heavily defended, with barbed wire and round-the-clock armed
security. As a further measure against smuggling, the organisation
implants every ploughshare it encounters with a microchip. Anyone hoping
to remove the microchip is likely to be involved with tortoise
trafficking..
read more..
No comments:
Post a Comment