ABU DHABI // Online sellers doing a busy illegal trade in wild and endangered animals are now offering home delivery.
Instagram accounts around the GCC, with up to 50,000 followers, sell cheetahs, lions and other exotic “pets” and say they can deliver to your door.
Animal welfare experts say almost anyone with the funds can buy even the rarest animals, despite a draft law adopted by the FNC and the UAE’s compliance with an international pact to protect endangered wildlife.
One Emirati animal lover has been investigating how easy it is to buy wild animals. “Snakes, turtles, endangered turtles, spiders – at one point I asked a seller if he could find me a cheetah and he told me easily,” he said. “It’s ridiculous, you should hear the stories.
“A vet in Khalifa City A told me he had customers asking him how much it would cost to declaw their bear – a grizzly bear.”
Dr Sarah Elliot, director and owner of Dubai’s British Veterinary Hospital, has treated lions, snakes and other exotic animals, and said owning them was mostly the result of uninformed, “impulse purchases”.
“I think it’s safe to say that in Dubai, we live in an environment where, if you want something, you can normally buy it, which stops people from thinking through what they are going to do with it,” Dr Elliot said.
She said people seldom considered the long-term repercussions of buying an animal that only experts, with years of education and experience, could raise in captivity.
Although her veterinary clinic in Dubai has an obligation to care for animals, workers there try to dissuade people from buying exotic breeds.
Dr Elliot explains to customers that the animals they have bought or are thinking of buying are usually critically endangered.
Programmes looking to replenish such animals are competing with rich, misinformed exotic animal owners who often have more funds than the breeding projects.
“People come to us all the time and ask us our opinion on whether they should buy these animals, be it a slow loris or big cats,” Dr Eliot said.
“We tell them these animals are under Cites [Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species]. They should be used in breeding programmes.
“They become trophy purchases, an impulse purchase that is seldom thought through.”
Dr Salim Javid, acting director of terrestrial biodiversity at the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi, said buying a tiger or lion could quickly become a real danger.
“There is a fascination with the exotic nature of these animals,” Dr Javid said. “We all love animals, we all love nature, but that feeling is often misconstrued and could be dangerous.”
Owners often do not have the facilities to care for the animals as they grow and become increasingly aggressive, so they are likely to be abandoned without thought, he said.
Last year there were a string of cases in the UAE where cheetahs, lions and gazelles were found in neighbourhoods.
“If there were gaps in the past then the draft FNC law is looking to fill in those gaps,” Dr Javid said. “It will be helpful. The law is meant to curb those practices to make people not keep animals that are essentially dangerous to them and everyone around them.”
nalwasmi@thenational.ae
