Meet the inland taipan and common taipan — two of the world’s most dangerous snakes. The inland taipan is estimated to be 20 times as venomous as a common cobra. A single bite of the fast, highly venomous Australian snake might be potent enough to kill 100 men. The common taipan, also one of the deadliest snakes in the world, has a kill rate second only to the black mamba, nearing 100%. Now imagine being on the same flight as these guys.
You might be forgiven if you thought this was the plot of a bad Hollywood movie, but this little incident actually happened a few months ago at OR Tambo International Airport when snake traders tried to smuggle the unique Australian snakes into South Africa using a children’s book collection box and James Bond DVD packaging.
”When we opened the boxes, those snakes were not happy chappies,” says Dirk (not his real name), a member of the Green Scorpions environmental task force. Dirk is one of the main investigating officers of wildlife smuggling at OR Tambo; he works with airport customs.
”Imagine if someone had been bitten. There is no antivenin in South Africa. It would have to have been flown in from Australia, more than 12 hours away, which would have been too late for the unfortunate victim. And one ampoule costs R300Â 000. Seven are needed to save a life.”
The taipans are not the only snakes Dirk and his team have had to deal with. Snake traders regularly send lethal packages to other snake traders. A rare snake often fetches thousands of rands.
Two weeks ago an illegal snake dealer in South Africa was caught when he negotiated a trade for mole snakes with a Canadian dealer. A few days later the snakes arrived from Canada, complete with the special edition T-shirt included in the package.
Snake smuggling is just a small part of the international R87,6-billion illegal wildlife trade and, as a major stopover in Africa, OR Tambo International sees its fair share of smuggled wildlife.
Green Scorpions spokesperson Makoko Lekolo says his unit is extremely proud of the impact it has made in curbing the trafficking through the airport. ”But more hard work is needed,” he says, adding that the Green Scorpions and customs team have sharpened their sting considerably in the past few months. The OR Tambo operation is a major part of the Green Scorpions’ work.
Apart from live snakes, spiders and scorpions are smuggled regularly through customs, usually nicely done up with ”ready made” custom-approved stickers. And smugglers don’t shy away from keeping the creepy crawlies on their person while the reptiles, insects or even mammals are heavily sedated. Live creatures such as scorpions and spiders are kept in sealed polystyrene cups in all sorts of places.
”The other day we confiscated a package filled with baby tarantula spiders,” says Dirk. ”When those little spiders came out, they had the attitude of big tarantulas.”
Smugglers wrap snakes and bird eggs around themselves using stockings or hide them under their pants. One smuggler had sedated birds in small cups wrapped around his leg.
Most often the wildlife products that Dirk confiscates are already dead. Collectors pay up to R100Â 000 for the privilege of having a rare moth or butterfly in their collection. Some collect the animals, or what is left of them, purely for the sake of fashion.
In the corner of Dirk’s office lies a pile of at least 100 handbags and 50 belts, all made out of the skin of the highly endangered Nile crocodile. ”For every handbag and belt you need one crocodile,” says Dirk. ”In that corner lie about 150 crocodile carcasses.”
Three rhino horns occupy a suitcase filled with children’s clothing and are stinking up the room. The blue suitcase became the coffin of the three black rhinos that were shot in Namibia for their horns.
New research from Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring programme of global wildlife fund WWF, discloses an alarming increase in the volume of rhino horns entering illegal trade since 2000, something of which the team at OR Tambo has first-hand knowledge.
Large quantities of ivory and rhino horns are smuggled out of the country each year, says Dirk.
”It is like looking for a needle in a haystack. With drugs you know the syndicates because drugs are quite a specialised product. But anyone can go out and take a wildlife product. It just makes our pool so much bigger.”
Dirk produces a bag of small, fish-like creatures. They are dried seahorses and some of these have swollen bellies, indicating that they were pregnant at the time. The WWF says at least 20 of the known 32 species are threatened by the unregulated trade of live seahorses for aquariums and dried seahorses that are sold as curios and as treatments in traditional Chinese medicine.
The organisation estimates that the trade volume of dried seahorses in 2002 was at least 70 tons, or about 25-million seahorses.
Despite the avalanche of cases, Dirk’s eyes light up as he relates how in the past two years OR Tambo’s customs officials, with the Green Scorpions, have increased their convictions against the wildlife trade.
”We are still catching only 5% of the smugglers. But that is in relation to the 0,005% that we caught previously. We are improving and these days it is becoming more difficult for wildlife smugglers to get away with their operations.”
When smugglers wrap their booty in foil, detection of the wildlife products becomes more difficult during machine scans. The foil fools the scanners into registering the objects as metal, the investigator says.
China is a big market for some of the products, such as rhino horn, rare medicinal plants and marine products such as shark fins and abalone.
But Dirk just smiles wryly when asked about the profile of a smuggler. He says there is no such thing.
In Europe the newest craze is to use rare plants for dietary supplements, he says. ”Everything and everyone is a potential smuggler and these days any flight can have smuggled goods on it,” he says. ”You look for shifty eyes and funny walks, but the smugglers have become so blasé that they don’t look nervous any more.”