Smuggled, Beaten and Drugged: The Illicit Global Ape Trade<br />“The way they do business,” he said of ape traffickers, “makes the Mafia look like amateurs.”<br />After hundreds of searches, Mr. Stiles found an Instagram account offering dozens of rare animals<br />for sale, including baby chimpanzees and orangutans dressed in children’s clothes.<br />“If you spend a lot of time in there,” Mr. Kesidi said, “the color of your skin changes.”<br />For years, Mr. Stiles has performed undercover research on wildlife trafficking across Africa, but recently his work has taken him off the continent.<br />Mr. Stiles knew what Tom was hoping for: to sell the infant orangutans to a private collector or unscrupulous zoo, where they are often beaten or drugged into submission<br />and used for entertainment like mindlessly banging on drums or boxing one another.<br />“Transporting an adult chimp is like transporting a crate of dynamite,” said Doug Cress, who until recently<br />was the head of the Great Apes Survival Partnership, a United Nations program to help great apes.<br />“Even if we can rescue them, it’s very difficult reintroducing them to the wild,”<br />said Mr. Cress, the former head of the United Nations Great Apes program.<br />Since then, he has plunged deeper and deeper into the ape world, becoming the lead author of “Stolen Apes,” a report published by the United Nations in 2013<br />that was considered one of the first comprehensive attempts to document the underground ape trade.<br />“They have consciousness, empathy and understanding,” said Jef Dupain, an ape specialist for the African Wildlife Foundation.
