Thieves Preying on Exotic Species

Missing marmosets, abducted alligators, purloined penguins: Thieves are targeting Europe’s zoos and safari parks to supply animal collectors who want to own ever more exotic species.

Conservationists say the practice is harming animals, threatening vital breeding programs, and adding to a flourishing illegal trade in exotic birds and animals.

“We live in a designer world and people are not satisfied anymore with a budgie or a canary -- they want something more exotic,” says John Hayward, a former police officer who runs Britain’s National Theft Register, the only national database of animal thefts in Europe.

He says that on average, zoos in Britain have suffered a major theft every week for several years, involving dozens of animals valued at thousands of dollars.

Conservationists fear the demand for exotic animals will put further pressure on wild populations, which thieves have already targeted for years.

Experts note, for example, that the trade in exotic birds -- both legal and illegal -- has decimated populations of African gray parrots, prized for their ability to mimic human speech.

Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds says 360,000 African grays were legally traded between 1994 and 2003, most of them into Europe, while many thousands more were illegally traded.

Zoo thefts made headlines in December when Toga, a baby jackass penguin, was stolen from Amazon World Zoo Park on the Isle of Wight off southern England. He has not been found.

On June 18, thieves made off with five rare marmosets worth several hundred dollars each from Drusilla’s Zoo at East Grinstead, south of London. Police later arrested two men and recovered four of the creatures, along with 14 other monkeys stolen from zoos in Devon and Cambridgeshire.

Hayward said primary targets were smaller monkeys -- including South American marmosets, tamarins from South and Central America and spider monkeys from Mexico and Brazil -- as well as large exotic birds such as macaws and flamingos and reptiles such as turtles and tortoises.

In the last three years, about 80 mostly small monkeys have disappeared from some of Britain’s more than 350 zoos, including several dozen large zoos and safari parks, Hayward says. Only a few have been recovered.

Hayward says some animals are stolen to order by professionals. “These animals are not tame, and you need to know how to handle and care for them,” he says.

The more exotic or endangered the animal, the higher the price. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds says a rare hyacinth macaw can fetch up to $45,000.

There are casual thefts too: In the late 1990s, a man abducted an alligator from a zoo in central England. “He took him to a party to impress his friends, then left him on the doorstep of a pet shop,” Hayward says.

Harry Schram, director of the 300-member European Assn. of Zoos and Aquaria, says 40% of European zoos have suffered thefts.

“This problem is growing. With more species being declared endangered and more regulation, people are going underground,” Schram says in a telephone interview from his office in Amsterdam.

Schram says police in the Netherlands and Belgium are trying to coordinate on the problem, “but this is really exceptional.”

“We have no idea of the extent of thefts in Germany, Switzerland and Eastern Europe and virtually no information on Southern Europe,” he says.

The zoo association says animals stolen in Europe probably go to European collectors, because other potential markets such as the United States and Japan tightly restrict animal imports -- and Middle Eastern countries are following suit.

Traffic International at Cambridge, in eastern England, which monitors trade in endangered animals across Europe, says that from 1996 to 2000, British customs officials annually seized about 450 illegally imported consignments. An estimated 17% of those were live animals, mostly reptiles, parrots and macaws.

U.S. zoos also suffer thefts. In 2000, two golden eagles and a bald eagle were stolen from the Santa Barbara Zoo, apparently for their feathers. Also that year, teenagers stole two koalas from the San Francisco Zoo.

In 2000, thieves took 16 lion cubs from a zoo in Jakarta, Indonesia. In the Middle East, four masked thieves grabbed a lion cub from a zoo in the Gaza Strip last November.

Many zoos are now increasing security and some are tagging or implanting computer ships in their animals.

Kath Bright, manager of Amazon World Zoo Park, said penguin parents Kyala and Oscar mourned the loss of 3-month-old Toga for several weeks.

“We think Toga may have been stolen to order, because this was not an opportunistic theft,” she said.

There has been a happy ending: On Feb. 14, Kyala and Oscar hatched another chick, dubbed Temba, meaning hope.