EXCELLENT BOOK ON EXOTIC ANIMAL TRADE IN THE US

[Guest guest]

Following the Paper Trail: Exposing the Trade of Exotic Animals

The Satya Interview with Alan Green

 

Alan Green is a professional journalist who spent four years researching and

writing the extraordinary book Animal Underworld: Inside America’s Black Market

for Rare and Exotic Species published last year by PublicAffairs. Green recently

spoke with Catherine Clyne explaining the intricacies of the animal trade—where

they come from and where they end up.

 

How would you describe Animal Underworld to people who are not familiar with the

book?

Animal Underworld is about the laundering of exotic species and I mean that

almost in the way that drug money is laundered from one bank to another. What I

learned and what I try to document in the book is that exotic species are moved

from place to place to place. You can think of it as if they are relayed, being

handed off from one person to another, kind of shunted through this pipeline in

hopes of making them disappear. They start their lives in what we think of as

legitimate institutions—such as zoos or university research laboratories—and

when those animals are no longer necessary or wanted, when there are too many in

the collection, those so-called " surplus " animals have to be moved out. And

there’s a system that’s been developed to move those animals out and sell them,

resell them, sell them again, move them on down the line; so ultimately the

paper trail disappears and everyone along the line has deniability if it becomes

known that an animal has ended up in a bad place.

 

If we see for example a canned hunt (or private hunting preserve) and someone

shooting exotic animals in a cage; if we see animals ending up in a basement

cage in horrendous conditions: everyone along the line can say " well those

weren’t my animals, " and in most cases no one will be able to prove where the

animals came from. Animal Underworld is an attempt to document how those animals

are indeed moved through a system—where they start their lives and where they

end up—and to show with real paperwork how this kind of don’t-ask-don’t-tell

system works and how everyone plays this game with a wink and a nod: " Here take

my animal, move it along down the line, " so that ultimately no one will be able

to point a finger and say " Aha! You’re doing bad things with your animals! "

 

Can you give an example of a paper trail?

Papers must be filed, typically in the state Department of Agriculture, that

chronicle the movement of animals from one state to another. Let’s say I run a

roadside zoo in Virginia, and I get animals in the spring and close in the fall

because I’m a seasonal operation. If I want to send animals to an auction, say,

in Ohio, I need to file paperwork with the Virginia Department of Agriculture

that shows I’m sending those animals out of state. So there is a paper trail.

The trick is to figure out whether people are indeed filing the required

paperwork and then to find it all. What we find is that in perhaps 85 percent of

cases people aren’t in fact filing those documents.

 

So animals are moved in the middle of the night—iin trucks with no

documentation—aand people are selling animals behind the scenes (perhaps at an

auction) so there’s no record of the transaction. But in at least some cases

records do exist and I try to follow the trail from point A to B to C so that I

can say with certainty: " Here’s where an animal started its life, here’s where

it went to, here’s where it was sold, and here’s who was buying at those

auctions. " For the first time I’m able to reveal the system by which all these

animals are being moved from place to place.

 

There are many levels of record keeping. They may be at different federal

agencies, for example, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, state and local

agencies, police agencies—it’s all a matter of getting and piecing them all

together, hoping that you can figure out the truth about individual animals as

they move during their lives from perhaps dozens of venues until, in many cases,

a bad fate awaits them at the end of their lives.

 

Were you able to track the life of an individual animal?

When I set out to do this project, my hope was that I’d be able to chronicle the

movement of one animal from its birth to its death. Through all the paperwork I

collected I was actually able to do that in the case of a reindeer. He was born

on a game farm in the Yukon in Canada, then sold at an exotic animal auction in

Missouri, and was bought by an elderly couple who raised reindeer along with

other animals on their game farm in Iowa.

 

The reindeer was named Honker by this couple. When the husband died, caring for

the animals became too hard for his wife so she sold Honker and the other

animals. She resold Honker at the same auction in Missouri where he had been

bought a few years earlier. Honker was bought by a game farmer in Wisconsin. Ten

days later a client flew in from Indiana and shot Honker and, in the same day,

shot two other animals—a white tailed deer and a mule deer. The records were

falsified to make it look as if he shot three white tailed deer. Honker was then

brought to a local taxidermist.

 

It turns out that the guy who shot Honker was an official supporter of Safari

Club International, an organization that claims to abhor canned hunts because

they don’t encourage fair-chase hunting. Ironically, Honker ended up as a trophy

in this guy’s house in Indiana. That was what happened. But finding the records,

linking them to show that this was Honker was the proverbial needle in a

haystack.

 

Do zoos have a role in the trade of exotic animals in the U.S.?

If you look at the front-end of the pipeline through which animals are sent,

zoos are indeed there. Zoos have been among the greatest providers of animals to

the exotic animal trade. There are a huge number of tigers in private hands in

the U.S. being bred like beagles by dealers who find ready places to sell them:

That’s the legacy of zoos. They don’t sell tigers anymore because they know

people are watching.

 

So now we are seeing other species on the market instead. Zoos have a huge

so-called surplus problem. They have nowhere to send the surplus animals so they

dump them on dealers who re-sell them. So zoos, even though they’ll dispute it,

are in fact at the head end of the pipeline because they don’t want to breed

responsibly and are always looking for new species to replace the ones that the

public has grown tired of. Zoos are creating ready markets for new batches of

animals that become big in the trade.

 

What do you mean by " breeding responsibly " ?

Giraffes, for example, are a big pull at zoos. Zoos have what they refer to as

" charismatic megafauna. " These are the flagship species, the animals that are a

great draw. People don’t go to the zoo to see the miniature hippo or the Père

David’s deer. They go to see the panda and the giraffes and just about any kind

of baby. Zoos are by and large a baby factory because that’s what brings people

through the door.

 

Zoos have master plans for collections. A classic example is the National Zoo,

which has determined as part of its master plan that they’ll have three

giraffes: two adults—a male and a female—and one baby born every two years. Each

time a baby giraffe is born every TV station in Washington does a story, which

in turn brings out the public in huge numbers. But with the new baby, there are

now four giraffes because a baby was born two years earlier. All of a sudden

that two year old giraffe is shunted to the background. Two years earlier an

adoring public was standing there pointing at that spindly-legged baby giraffe,

but now what are they going to do with it? The zoo will say " well we can’t keep

it. " If it’s a male, daddy is going to fight with it; if it’s a female, daddy is

going to want to breed with it, so we better get that two year old out of here.

 

I would call that irresponsible breeding because the zoo knows that they will

have to get rid of that giraffe and they know—because history tells them so—that

there is no good place to send it. At any given moment, when they try to find a

home for that unwanted giraffe, there are probably going to be 50 or so AZA

[American Zoo and Aquarium Association—the self-regulating organization of

accredited zoos] zoos that are also looking for a home for their unwanted

giraffes. As an AZA accredited zoo they are saying: " We are a cut above. We are

members of an elite club. We trust other members of this club to be good trading

partners and so we can entrust our animals to these zoos with great comfort. "

 

But there are a lot of giraffes in search of homes and very few zoos that are

looking for them. Where are they going to send it? There are no takers. That

means that they’re going to have to send a giraffe outside of the club. If only

accredited AZA members are good guys, sending it outside the club more or less

ensures that the standards you believe are notable will not be met.

 

This isn’t pure speculation. Early in the 1990s the National Zoo had a year old

surplus giraffe named Michael whom they entrusted to a dealer who brought him to

an unaccredited roadside zoo in central New Jersey. Michael was paired with an

adult male giraffe—the very scenario that the National Zoo wanted to avoid and

the sort of thing they claim they will never do, because Michael would be

threatened by daddy. The adult male kicked and broke Michael’s neck, and killed

him.

 

So the AZA zoos shirk their responsibility. It’s expediency; we don’t want the

animal, it’s not part of our master plan, let’s get rid of it, let’s send it to

a dealer and cross our fingers that it never comes back to haunt us.

 

What would you say is the public’s involvement in the continuation of this trade

of surplus animals?

I would say that by and large, the public is in total ignorance. When the public

comes out to see a new-born, everyone is goo-goo eyed over the baby, and I admit

there is a great allure about baby animals. Before I started doing this research

I was just as ignorant. If one day, the zoo has six zebras and next time you go

back there are five, who would know? No one counts. With the new babies, people

never ask: " where did the other animals go? " because if you think about it, why

should we?

 

We have entrusted people who work at the zoo to do right by us; they are the

ones who care for the animals on a daily basis. When you go to the zoo

everything at least looks good; you don’t see abuse. Concrete and steel are

changing to what looks like a natural habitat. Certainly, fake trees are not the

same as real trees in the wild, but the illusion is powerful and we feel

comforted that they are trying to do right by the animals. If you talk to zoo

keepers they do indeed care about the welfare of the animals and work hard to

care for them.

 

If we ever ask the question " Hey mister, wasn’t there another giraffe here?

Where did it go? " , " It went to another zoo, " " Well, OK, that sounds good enough

to me. " Most AZA zoos are municipally funded, certainly they are not taking our

tax dollars and doing bad things, are they? So there’s a kind of trust going on.

I would say that once the public finds out about this phenomenon, if they don’t

take steps to force the zoos to change, then the public is equally culpable.

 

The whole exotic animal trade is like a pyramid. At the top there are a small

number of institutions—for the most part reputable—that have a lot of animals

that flow to the bottom, to auctions, dealers, canned hunts, roadside zoos, etc.

If you cut off the flow from the top of the pyramid, from AZA zoos and

universities, you can cut off the industry. If you cut off access to surplus

animals, it will reverse the trickle-down effect.

 

The public can make that choice. If indeed the problem is that it’s a baby game

and there is only room for a fixed number of species, will the public be willing

to put up with a birth every four, six or eight years to ensure that the two

year old doesn’t get sent to a bad place? Is the public willing to spend money

for a retirement facility for animals that are off exhibit? Is the public going

to decide they want some combination? " Well, we don’t want to pay more money,

but we don’t want the animals sent to bad places. " So are we willing to approve

humane euthanasia to ensure that animals don’t go to dealers and possibly end up

in bad situations? A lot of people can’t deal with the idea of euthanasia.

 

If zoos and other establishments are unwilling to change, the public should

demand disclosure of where surplus animals are going. As a matter of public

record, these institutions will be forced to disclose what they are doing. Once

you embarrass these institutions by exposing their involvement in the trading of

endangered animals—when they know that everyone is watching—they won’t be so

cavalier.

 

What was the greatest shock and/or disappointment that you had while doing this

project?

The most troubling revelation was that I realized that no matter who trumpets

how much they care, they’re all in it together. That isn’t to say that all AZA

members don’t care—some have taken steps to change. But all reputable zoos are

doing business with disreputable zoos and dealers—which they ridicule. They are

hypocrites. If you look at the pipeline, as the animals move further and further

down there are any number of terrible places they can end up.

 

The greatest shock for me was to see how the animals become product or fodder.

At the auctions, for example, it’s as if people are selling carpets. No one

knows anything about the animals. They become nameless, walked anonymously

through the display ring like replaceable cogs in money-making ventures.

Everyone seems to be capitalizing.

 

Even those who own exotic pets think that what they’re doing is " good " for

endangered species—chaining a tiger to a pipe in the basement. They think

they’re conservationists. But these animals will never be repatriated into the

wild and they’re not doing them any good. It’s a pet-of-the-month club that is

fueled by American fickleness. We have not thought through the consequences.

 

 

Baby Lions for Sale!

The USDA, which enforces the federal Animal Welfare Act, has nearly 17 pages of

regulations pertaining to the handling and transportation of dogs and cats, but

the care of snow leopards and other wild animals is dismissed in just seven

pages. And the exotic species are guaranteed much less protection: Domestic

kittens, for example, can’t be sold in commerce until they’re two months old and

fully weaned, but a day-old lion may be carted to an auction and sold to the

highest bidder. What’s more, government prosecutors, as a rule, have virtually

no interest in protecting these animals. Given a choice between pursuing a

drug-trafficking case or an animal-permit violation, prosecutors rarely opt for

the latter.—From Animal Underworld

 

 

Canned Hunts: The Newest American “Sport?By Diana Norris, Norm Phelps, and D. J.

Schubert

 

Adapted from Canned Hunts: Unfair at Any Price (The Fund for Animals, 2001).

 

 

In 1994, an investigator for the Humane Society of the United States made an

undercover video that opens with a Corsican ram standing tall against the

skyline, his head raised to catch the breeze. Suddenly, a man dressed in

camouflage rises into the picture to launch an arrow from a compound bow that is

all wheels and pulleys. At the twang of the string, the ram jerks his head

around and a moment later the razor-sharp arrow slices into his flank. Letting

out a bellow of pain and terror, he lunges forward into the wire fence that

blocks his escape. The hunter, no more than twenty yards away, reloads and

shoots. Another strike in the flank and another bellow as once again the ram

hurls himself against the fence. The hunter is deliberately aiming away from the

head and shoulders to avoid any risk of spoiling his trophy. “If you fall,?he

yells at the ram, “fall the right way. I don’t want you bending my arrow.?The

slowly dying animal sinks to the ground and huddles trembling against the bottom

of the fence.

 

This is the world of canned hunts, one of America’s newest and fastest-growing

sports.

 

No Kill, No Pay

Canned hunt customers have little in common with the hunters of American

folklore and fantasy. Typically, they live in a city or suburb, are part of a

two-career family, enjoy professional or managerial careers, and have more

disposable income than free time. Accustomed to trading money for time, they are

willing to pay for convenience, and they expect results. Canned hunts—variously

known as “game ranches,?“hunting preserves,?or “shooting preserves?give them

both. As North Dakota’s Cedar Ridge Elk Ranch tells visitors to its website, “If

you don’t have the 10 days to two weeks normally needed to hunt for trophies

with someone else, and you want ACTION, and you want to ‘bring it home,?then

Cedar Ridge Elk Ranch is the place for you.?

Although they may differ in other details, all canned hunts share two defining

traits. First, they are commercial hunts on private property; customers pay for

the privilege of stalking and killing their victims. Secondly, the operators

have stacked the deck against the animals to the point that all who lay their

money down are virtually guaranteed success. Do you want the head of a

record-class markhor (a sheep native to the Middle East) to hang on the wall of

your den? For $12,500, the Triple Seven Ranch in Texas will arrange for you to

shoot one. If exotics are not to your taste, Pennsylvania’s Glen Savage Ranch

will put a white-tailed buck with world class antlers in your crosshairs for a

mere $9,995. With this kind of money at stake, canned hunt operators leave

nothing to the luck of the chase. Game ranchers are so confident that they

regularly ply potential customers with some variation on the canned hunt’s most

popular theme: “No kill, no pay.?“You are guaranteed a pig,?says the website of

Idaho’s European Wild Boar Hunt, “or your money will be refunded.?

Tipping the Balance

Jim Posewitz spent 32 years as a biologist with the Montana Department of Fish

and Game. One of hunting’s most passionate defenders, he is much in demand as a

speaker by hunting organizations and state wildlife agencies. In Beyond Fair

Chase (Falcon Press, 1994), which is widely viewed in the hunting community as

the bible of ethical hunting, Posewitz makes this statement, “Fundamental to

ethical hunting is the idea of fair chase. This concept addresses the balance

between the hunter and the hunted. It is a balance that allows hunters to

occasionally succeed while animals generally avoid being taken.?Canned hunts are

considered to be unethical by the standards of the hunting community because

they employ four techniques to tip Jim Posewitz’s “balance?to the point where

the hunters always succeed and the animals never avoid being killed.

 

First—and this is key to the success of the other three techniques—they employ

full time guides. The guides know every inch of the preserve; they know where

the animals are at all times; they know when and where the animals like to eat,

drink, and bed down; and they know all their hiding places. The victims may be

able to run—at least for a little ways—but they can’t hide.

 

Second, most hunting preserves are surrounded by “game proof?fences. Canned hunt

operators claim that if the fenced area is larger than a few acres, the animals

are “free-roaming?and the hunt is no different than a traditional hunt conducted

without a fence. This is untrue. Prevented by the fence from evading the

surveillance of the guide, the animals are as much “sitting ducks?in a 500 acre

enclosure as in a five acre pasture. A canned hunt will take more time and

effort on 500 acres than on five, but the victim’s chances of escaping the

hunter are about the same either way. All that the larger enclosure accomplishes

is to give the customers the illusion that they are actually hunting an animal

when in reality they are simply slaughtering with a bow or a rifle instead of

the captive bolt pistol used in slaughterhouses. If this were not the case,

canned hunts would not be advertising “no kill, no pay.?

 

The third technique hunting preserves use to turn wild animals into easy targets

is the feeding station. A guide places the victims?favorite food in a trough at

the same time every day. The animals are not only conditioned to visit the

feeding station on schedule—so the customer isn’t inconvenienced by having to

wait—they also lose much of their fear of the human who provides the food. Then

one day the provider shows up with a hunter in tow, and the animal is shot while

waiting patiently for dinner.

 

Finally, many canned hunts offer exotic animals as victims, including bobcats,

elands, musk oxen, oryx, yaks, and zebras. Most often these animals are bought

from dealers, who in turn buy them primarily from zoos. These former zoo animals

have been hand-reared and are habituated to humans. They see no reason to flee

when the hunter and guide approach. For all practical purposes, they are tame.

 

Municipal zoos depend heavily on baby animals to attract paying customers. When

these baby animals grow up, they are typically disposed of to make room for the

next crop who will draw in new crowds of customers. Since the public would not

tolerate the animals simply being killed by the zoo, they are sold to dealers,

who in turn sell them to research laboratories, roadside petting zoos, and

canned hunts. In this way, the zoos can claim to have no responsibility for the

ultimate fate of their “surplus?animals. This pivotal role of municipal zoos in

the inhumane commerce in wildlife, including wildlife destined to end up in

canned hunts, has been extensively documented by investigative journalist Alan

Green in his groundbreaking expos?Animal Underworld (Public Affairs, 1999; also

see interview in Satya, July, 2000).

 

“Alternative Livestock?Criticism of canned hunts is growing—both in the animal

protection community and the hunting community—with the result that several

states have taken action to ban them, at least partially. Often, however, these

efforts are woefully inadequate. New York, for example, bans the hunting of

exotic mammals in fenced enclosures of ten acres or less. Since the ban does not

cover native species, such as white tailed deer (the most popular canned hunt

victims), and allows canned hunts of exotics within fenced enclosures of eleven

acres or more, it is largely cosmetic.

 

The defense of canned hunts comes from an unexpected quarter: state agriculture

departments, which typically refer to the animals as “alternative livestock?and

view them as a way to increase the profitability of farms and ranches. It is not

coincidental that America’s first canned hunt was created on a cattle ranch (the

Y.O. Ranch outside of San Antonio); that Texas, America’s premier cattle

ranching state, is home to more than 500 canned hunt operations, and that canned

hunt operators brag about using breeding, feeding, and culling techniques

perfected by the cattle industry. But if the wildlife on hunting preserves are

“alternative livestock,?doesn’t this mean that the customers are not hunters at

all, but “alternative butchers??And if the preserves are, in reality,

“alternative slaughterhouses,?shouldn’t they be subject to the federal Humane

Slaughter Act, which requires that animals being slaughtered be rendered

instantly unconscious and not allowed to suffer while they die? If the Act were

applied to canned hunts, they would all be shut down immediately, since there is

no way to preserve the illusion of hunting while complying with that standard.

 

How You Can Help

In Montana, a major hunting state, a successful voter initiative on last

November’s ballot outlawed canned hunts. The Wyoming legislature has banned the

private ownership of “big game?animals, thereby making most canned hunts

illegal, and Oregon has achieved the same end by banning the hunting of all

“exotic mammals and game mammals?that are privately owned. In this context,

informed, courteous ex-pressions of opinion from members of the general public

can have a real impact on state legislatures. Please write letters to your

representatives and send along a copy of The Fund for Animals?report Canned

Hunts: Unfair at Any Price (available from the address below).

 

Diana Norris is Grassroots Coordinator and Norm Phelps is Spiritual Outreach of The Fund for Animals.

 

D. J. Schubert is a wildlife biologist and president of Schubert and Associates.

To receive a free copy of the report from which this article was adapted,

contact Diana Norris, The Fund for Animals, Ste. 301, 8121 Georgia Ave., Silver

Spring, MD 20910, or email dnorris.

 

Animal underworld: Tracking the trades

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Jul/Aug 2000 by

Green, Alan, Goldston, Linda

 

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Seldom-reviewed records provide gold mine

 

It all started as a two-week newspaper assignment - and turned into a fouryear

book project that involved following a pair of bear cubs 500 miles, poring

through hundreds of animal records and tracking exotic animals with the help of

everyone from federal officials to family and friends.

 

The result was Animal Underworld: Inside America's Black Market for Rare and

Exotic Species. It looks at the exotic-animal industry and the laundering of

unwanted zoo and research castoffs as they are sold and resold until the paper

trail goes cold.

 

It began through my volunteering at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Keepers

there told me about questionable animal-handling practices at Reston Animal

Park, a roadside menagerie in nearby Fairfax County, Va. While checking boxes of

court records, I found receipts showing that the National Zoo had supplied

animals to this petting zoo. Other records showed that some other zoos, such as

the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, also had sent " surplus " animals to Reston

Animal Park. I set out to discover if this was an anomaly or standard operating

practice among reputable zoos.

 

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As I followed the paper trails to and from these zoos, I maintained a focus on

the Reston Animal Park - in particular, a pair of bear cubs displayed there.

Although officials of the animal park were close-mouthed about the bears'

origins, I unearthed documents at the Virginia Department of Agriculture and

Consumer Services showing that the bears were owned by a Wisconsin animal dealer

who, a decade earlier, had pleaded guilty to such federal offenses as illegally

supplying bears to an exotic-meat broker. I hoped to learn the fate of these two

bears when the petting zoo closed for the winter. I got my chance in a telephone

conversation with a zoo cashier: She offhandedly mentioned that the bears would

be leaving the zoo the following morning, heading back to the Wisconsin " zoo "

from which they had come. So I showed up at 5 a.m., hid nearby, then followed a

truck some 500 miles to its destination in northwest Ohio.

 

This journey, five months into the reporting project, was a major turning point

in the story. When I later set out to find records detailing the bears'

relocation, I realized state and federal officials knew nothing of the animals'

whereabouts. That experience left me wondering how many exotic animals were

similarly disappearing in this country.

 

Interstate moves

 

At the heart of Animal Underworld are certifiGates of veterinary inspection,

commonly known as " health certificates. " These records often have been

overlooked as sources of information, but I believed they could show subsequent

transactions and expose the activities of dealers, breeders, auction houses,

hunting ranches, and others engaged in the sale and resale of exotic creatures.

 

But because animals are typically moved many times, only records from virtually

every state capital could provide the true means of exposing the trafficking in

these species. I visited 27 state capitals and searched through more than 2

million health certificates. I gathered records from four states via FOIA and

hired researchers (or enlisted the help of friends and family members) in 11

states. Interviews with agriculture officials helped determine that some of the

remaining states had virtually no exotic-animal traffic, and so were bypassed.

 

As I visited more states and added more transactions to the databases created

from these records, answers finally began to emerge. For example, I found a

document in Des Moines showing that in September 1996, an Iowa woman sent six

reindeer to a Missouri auction. In Jefferson City, Mo., I found another document

showing one of these reindeer was sold at the auction to a Wisconsin man.

Working backward, I traced this 5-yearold reindeer to its birth in the Yukon and

its sale, years earlier, to the Iowa woman at another auction. Working forward,

I was able to identify the Wisconsin buyer as the owner of a canned hunt. Via

FOIA, I collected records showing that in October 1996, a patron of the hunting

preserve shot the reindeer.

 

Law enforcement records from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources

identified the hunter as William Backman, of Aurora, Ind. Taxidermy records

obtained by FOIA showed that Backman was a regular patron of this canned hunt,

and a year earlier had killed another reindeer. A search of the Internet

revealed more about Backman, including his business and an appointment by the

governor of Indiana to the state's Natural Resources Foundation an organization

dedicated to conservation, and seemingly opposed to the sort of for-pay hunting

with which its secretary was involved. Further digging revealed that Backman was

also an official scorer for Safari Club International, a pro-hunting

organization whose code of ethics opposes canned hunts. After repeated requests

for comment, Backman finally confirmed that he had in fact shot the reindeer in

question.

 

Some of the other documents I used included court records, taxidermy records,

and Internal Revenue Service 990 forms, which detail the fiscal activities of

not-for-profit organizations. I used computerized records made available by

state departments of fish and game.

 

Wide-ranging sources

 

More than 350 people were interviewed for Animal Underworld. Many of the

interviews involved ongoing law enforcement proceedings, and were off the

record, as were many with state and federal wildlife and animal care

authorities. I also relied on a network of bureaucratic tipsters, who became my

eyes and ears in state and federal offices. In some cases, these agency workers

monitored the daily flow of paperwork for those records that they knew would be

useful.

 

In addition to the wildlife officials, sources included experts in everything

from disease transmission to the daily care of animals rescued from laboratories

to private citizens ill-equipped to provide care to these animals. I also did

fly-on-the-wall reporting at venues such as exotic-animal auctions.

 

Further, I set up the fact-checking procedure and supervised a full-time Center

for Public Integrity employee to ensure the accuracy of each statement. Every

person or organization mentioned in the book was contacted for a follow-up

interview. Every transaction culled from documents was verified with those

filing the paperwork. In this way, zoo directors, animal dealers, safari-park

operators, university spokespersons, and others got an opportunity to explain

the revelations I unearthed from documents or learned in other interviews. Some

took the opportunity to speak, while others asked for more time. Some were never

heard from again.

 

BY ALAN GREEN

 

Alan Green has been a senior associate at the Center for Public Integrity since

1997. His book won an IRE Award this year.

 

Copyright Investigative Reporters & Editors Jul/Aug 2000

Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved