WildAid Interview

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Every day you and I get bombarded with negative news. And just like our bodies, become what we eat, our minds become the information that we consume. If you want to stay positive, it’s so important that you also listen to stories that inspire you and uplift you. In this podcast we interview leading experts dedicated to solving the world’s most pressing problems. And if you stick around, I promise you will not only be as informed as if you watched the news, you will be uplifted, inspired, and have more positive energy in your life. Welcome to Great.com Talks With.

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Welcome to the Great.com talks with Peter Knight from WildAid.org, and if you haven’t heard of them, they are an organization that works to reduce the global consumption of wildlife products, as well as increasing support for conservation efforts. And Peter, welcome. Thank you. So I would you say that was a short introduction, but how would you introduce your organization to someone that might not be familiar either with your course and the challenges that you’re facing?

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So we were set up to try and end the illegal wildlife trade in our lifetimes, and that goal, we think is attainable at least to getting it to such a small degree that it doesn’t continue to impact the environment as it has done so. The illegal trade in wildlife is billions of dollars a year, everything from insects to fish to tigers to rhino horn. It’s a massive industry and it has been making some progress in recent years. But as you can imagine, it’s a big, big challenge.

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Ok, so when I was imagining what life I was imagining exactly the rhino horn like you described, but I didn’t think of fish.

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If you look at fish, there is massive illegal fishing going on in the world. So whether it’s fishing from within marine reserves or fishing beyond quotas, that’s all illegal wildlife trade. And so on that side, we’d be doing a lot of work to try and strengthen marine protected areas, which are kind of the national parks in the sea. We’ve been helping governments get proper enforcement systems, proper detection systems. So, for example, the biggest projects in the Galapagos Islands. And people have been hearing the news recently about how Chinese fishing fleet has been off the Galapagos Islands. And what we’ve done in Galapagos is we’ve helped them build a satellite vessel monitoring system so that they can actually detect where these boats are. They can detect if they’re illegal fishing. And the islands now are very well protected. They have these systems, they have airplanes, they have well-trained rangers, and they’re actually very well protected. But in many marine reserves around the world, it’s literally a line on a map and it doesn’t have any real protection. There’s no real enforcement going on. So that’s what we’ve done. The Marine side. And on the broader side, what we’re really best known for is our unique approach to try and reduce the demand for wildlife products.

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Because when you look at the wildlife trade, you have the supply, the animals in Africa, in the safari parks and things like that, they are protected by rangers. And that’s largely supply side efforts to protect them. But there’s also the demand for ivory and the demand for rhino horn. And while there it is different from other organizations, we’ve come in and sought to impact that demand, which we believe is the driving force behind the illegal wildlife trade. And I think we’ve seen the trade in drugs. You know, he spent something like twenty five trillion dollars on trying to enforce our way out of stopping the drugs trade. But the demand remains very strong for drugs and we’re losing that war. And so, frankly, with endangered species, we’d be able to see in real time how we managed to move people off endangered species products on the demand. That and that’s what we’re primarily known for. And a lot of the work has been in China.

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It makes me happy to hear that an organization like you is using new technologies to make sure protected areas remain projected and. Doing something about the demand seems like a very wise, long term approach. So. My limited knowledge tells me that there is a demand, for example, for rhino horns in China. How can you go about lowering that demand? It seems like something that is ingrained in the culture.

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Well, first of all, if you think culture is a static thing, then you haven’t been to China recently. I mean, Chinese culture is changing, even though there are deep rooted practices which have gone on for a long time. Mean if you went to China today and you’re gone 20 years ago, you wouldn’t recognize it in Beijing today. Looks a lot more like any other city around the world than it did that 20 years ago. So culture is already changing and really our challenge is to make this part of that cultural change. So our methodology has basically been to use Western advertising techniques. So quite sophisticated advertisements using CGI, speeding bullets and things that hopefully are memorable and stick in people’s minds. And then we have a whole series of ambassadors from around the world, over three hundred now, people like Jackie Chan, Yao Ming Chow, who’s a very famous musician in China. And so the messages are not being delivered by us. They’re being delivered by local people in local languages, hopefully in very catchy and persuasive ways. And we’ve managed to get tremendous support from the government in China, but also from the media in China. So I campaigned last year we had about two hundred thirty million dollars worth of donated media space. So by producing very high quality materials, hopefully they’re interesting and exciting.

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They’ve got top celebrities and stars on them. That means we can get the free media space to get the scale to actually have not sort of the regular NGO campaigns that are kind of very small. And you see a poster here, but massive billboard campaigns. For example, we just had a campaign in China on Ivery with the Chinese customs in every port of entry in China. So every airport, every crossing, there were these billboards, there were posters, there were TV ads running. And the scale has been phenomenal. And that’s been all donated by that local media. So using that, what we’re trying to do is make these practices socially unacceptable. And when you have icons like Jackie Chan, like athletes, like musicians all coming in saying this isn’t cool anymore, and that does rub off and it rubs off with the youth, but also with the older generations. And we actually find that, you know, some of the older people. So, for example, a typical rhino horn user is probably a man in their 70s or 60s. And you’re not necessarily going to influence that person. They’re probably very set in their ways and not going to react to an advert. But I mean, we’ve had this happen. If their grandchildren say, granddad, you can’t do that anymore, you’re killing the rhinos, then that can have an impact on the person.

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And we’ve seen this with smoking. United States children have very often been the influences. So you’re not in these campaigns trying to necessarily change the consumer who may be very opinionated and very old fashioned and also probably not exposed to too much media because they have been exposed to media. They’re probably aware that rhinos are in trouble and it’s because of the rhino horn trade. But you’re trying to get the society around them and then it becomes socially unacceptable and then, you know, you reduce the demand. So in the case of rhino horn, for example, in Taiwan many years ago was the biggest consumer rhino horn in nineteen ninety three by nineteen ninety five, there was almost no rhino horn consumption going on because it’s been such a big campaign there that people thought it was socially acceptable to do it. And now in China, for example, in the last seven or eight years, the price of rhino horn has gone down by two thirds. Now, the number of rhinos has gone down as well, so it’s not that it’s gone down because there’s more supply coming and it’s gone down because people have realized and understood that, for example, in Vietnam, people used to believe that a cure cancer and now people understand that’s not the case.

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So both the price of ivory has gone down by two thirds. The price of rhino horn has gone by two thirds. Consumption of imports of shark fin to China has gone down by 80 percent. And so these campaigns, backed by the governments in these countries, have, I think, been very successful. We still got more to do, of course. But if you can release the tension at that end, if you can lower the demand, it gives the people on the ground, the enforcement people, the chance to then fight their war. And it is a war on the ground or more even terms. And we’ve seen the poaching of elephants go down. But really good news at the beginning of this year from South Africa, the poaching of rhinos was down 50 percent, which may be partly due to Kovik shut down. But it’s definitely a move in the right direction. So it’s a kind of a one two punch. You have to have the enforcement on the ground. You have to have the laws. You have to have customs looking for smuggling cases. But you also need the public, particularly the consuming public, to be on board and to be moving away from these habits, which are clearly unsustainable.

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Right, and it seems like it’s moving in a direction where you might not even need so many rangers to protect against poachers because you’re using this modern approach to influence people and change culture. And I really like that you’re trying to do it from the inside using local celebrities in these countries and. So the government is paying for this and they are giving you free advertisement space, or how is it working in the case of China?

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Because obviously a lot of the state media, we’ve had tremendous support from state media in China, but also private, too. I mean, private citizens want to do that bit by having compelling materials. We have a whole network of private vendors that also give us deep discounts. For example, billboard companies usually only pay the price of the printing and they give us the space for free. So there are some philanthropic companies out there that are also helping people like Jaycee Ficco. The Billboard company has been a tremendous supporter of our work. And, you know, you just create a situation where the norm becomes to not consume consumption, to consume wildlife products. So, you know, in covid came out there in China, they cracked down on the live wildlife markets. And we still currently think that covid originated in horseshoe bats and they’re not quite sure how it got into human beings. But one theory is it was true, the wildlife trade, and it was through pangolins, which are an endangered species, which are consumed and do carry coronaviruses. But it hasn’t been definitively proven. This was the case of the source. But you probably still have that market and we found that they closed down, which is thought to be the origin of this. So the good news about that is when that happened, there’s a lot of people and the Chinese public came and said, look, why are we still doing this? This is crazy. Why are we still eating wild animals and bringing them into our cities and mixing them up? So there’s been a massive sensitization within China and now the Chinese government has come in and they have basically closed down both these markets.

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There’s been some fake reports that they’re still open, they are open. The government comes down really hard on them. But it’s also closed down the breeding places where some of these are coming from. Eighty thousand facilities have been closed down in China. And so it’s been a mindshift. And so, you know, we’ve seen that you need the laws, but you also need the public on your side and public opinion. So we’re doing campaigns now to explain to people these connections. And, of course, you know, previously SARS was proven to be from Civicus in the wildlife track. HIV came from primates to primates to from monkeys to apes to humans by the bushmeat trade. And so we know this is a major conduit. And so we’re now working with that to say, look, this isn’t just about saving the animals. This is also about protecting ourselves and wildlife trade, live wildlife trade in particular is definitely a high risk for an introduction of new diseases. And we’ve known that for a long time. But we’re getting more and more cases. Of course, covid things like SARS impacted Asia, didn’t really impact the rest of the world, had minimal economic impact compared to covid, which is literally close to the planet down. And even if this time it proves that we find out ultimately that it wasn’t pangolins, it could have been handled very easily, could have been the next time, it could be penguins. And so, you know, we’re hoping that the tiny silver lining around this massive, horrible cloud that is covered could be that we take a more serious attitude to stopping live wildlife trade.

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I really hope so. It makes me sad in my heart when I see images of these wild animals being in kind of cages and being exploited. So it really makes me want to see those changes happening.

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I’m not alive investigating while I’ve tried for a long 30 years now. And you know that if you wanted to design a system to get diseases to jump from species to species, you couldn’t do it better than the wildlife trade. The animals are usually stressed. They’re in awful, unhygienic conditions. They all get mixed together. And they said their immunities are low. I mean, one study showed that the infection within rats which were being traded went from five percent in the farm to fifty five percent by the time they reached the restaurant. So this is an accelerator. It’s a combination of disease. It’s ideal, almost lab know, lab petri dish to get new diseases. And so to allow that to go on around the world on a large scale is frankly crazy. And it’s not just China. You know, Southeast Asia, places like Vietnam have restaurants where I’ve seen bats, which are a major carrier of viruses due to their physiology. You know, there’s parts of Africa where primates and monkeys and things like pangolins and civets are still part of the bushmeat trade. They transported life. And so this is just another timebomb waiting. And if we can’t now, after the lessons of covid move forward on this and I don’t know when we’ll be able to.

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So are you guys working on the bushmeat in Africa as well, because it seems like well, from my limited knowledge, I would think that I look at it from China or in Africa, something is going to happen. And I remember thinking this a year ago, I saw some TED talks.

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It’s yeah, I mean, is China, South East Asia and West and Central Africa kind of the hot spots for this bushmeat trade and in endangered species? And we know the primates are very dangerous. They’re so close to human beings. It’s not a big jump for disease to come from a monkey or in human beings. We know that the rats are a bad idea, believe it or not. We know that pangolins and small cats like civets are also disease carriers and we know some birds and then that bats in particular carry a lot of viruses. And so these are things we should not be going anywhere near. And so we’re doing campaigns now in Nigeria, for example, we were actually in November before this all broke, we were in Nigeria. The actor Djimon Hounsou looked at the pangolin trade there, and there were pangolins openly on sale. And we were with someone who was rescued from the markets. And there were also crocodiles and all kinds of other things illegal on sale openly and no enforcement. So the big campaign we’re

working on now is that and the live wildlife markets, because when you have the animals live next to each other, obviously there’s much more potential for disease to spread than if they’ve already been butchered and frozen or something like that, but also to stop the high risk species.

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There is some bushmeat trade in places like Africa where people do rely on it for a source of protein. There’s a thing called a grass cutter, which is almost like a rabbit almost, and they breed like rabbits. And that’s been harvested sustainably for quite a long time. It’s not a it’s not in threat of endangerment and it’s not a big disease. But that’s some of that stuff that will go on inevitably. But the commercial trade in some of these high risk species needs to stop. We need to stop bringing live animals into cities, which, of course, you know, we were in Lagos. It’s a city of twenty one million people. What if someone in the bush eats bushmeat and they get sick and they’re in a village and maybe five other people get infected? That’s one thing. You bring it into a city of twenty one million. And pretty soon, not only do you have a lot of people infected, but you’ve also floated out the country around the world. We’ve seen that with how it can spread so much. So we were looking for some common sense approaches to reduce this both through legislation and better laws and better law enforcement, but also through public education.

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That brings me into I’m curious, what are the next steps for your organization, what would be a great success for you guys in the next 10 years to come? What is realistic and what is a great success?

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We want to save the pangolins first.

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Could you define what a pangolin is for non-native speakers?

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Well, yes, and it’s basically a scaley answer. It’s the only mammal that has scales of keratin like your fingernails. And because they are like keratin, which is also a rhino horn, they are used in traditional Chinese medicine. And so there is a demand and that is also bushmeat demand in Asia and in Africa to eat them. Apparently they taste like chicken with pretty small little things. But they breed very slowly. They’ll have one baby maybe every two years. So they can’t really deal with high predation, that is very shy, very elusive, very hard to find them. And you find literally tens of thousands of them have been found, brought together, shipped around the world, often live, and they become very endangered. And so that now the world’s most trafficked now. And so before this even started working on trying to protect them, we were working with education. And we actually did an ad about three years ago where we had somebody sit eating pertaining to each pangolin and they put gloves on, they put a mask on. Now, there is a familiar sense. And that thing was saying, if you’re eating pangolin, there’s a risk that you could contract a new disease. And so we were already working on this before this broke, but we’re now expanding that to look at other species. So we’ll we’d like to see happen is what’s happened in China. Now, they come up with a new list of what can and can’t be. And so the catalyst is now very, very short. And this for the species and the quail and pheasants, like 10 bird species, basically game birds that we would recognize anywhere in the world.

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All around the world, people eat pheasant, quail, venison, wild boar and things like that. The certain species which are semi, semi domesticated. And that’s that’s relatively OK. So China is now down that very short list. Everything else is off the menus and dogs as well as cats and dogs is not on the list. And that hasn’t been reported widely anywhere, but it’s not on the list. So technically, that cannot be used as food in China anymore. So we’ll see. But so far, it’s being very strictly enforced. And we need that shift in other countries as well, because still in Vietnam and Lao Myanmar and other countries in Southeast Asia, these things are still restrooms. But we think every country can have this clean list, a very short list of what’s OK. Everything else is taboo. Instead of having an ever longer list of thousands of endangered species, which nobody knows what they like, the very short list of easily recognizable species, that’s easy to enforce. It’s easy for the public. So we’d like to see that all around the world. And then we’d like to see public education around that all around the world. So people are aware of the risk. They are aware of the disease risks, as well as the endangerment of the animals. And it’s just not popular anymore. It’s seen as something that’s crass and dangerous, which it is. It’s a huge danger, not just to the animals, but to human beings and to our economies. Look at the economic impact of, you know, we can’t afford the mess now.

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It would be cheaper doing something about it. So I’m torn between two places now and have one big sense of relief in my body because. The improvements in China in this area were much bigger than I was aware of, so I feel really happy about the trajectory of the Earth from that. And on the other hand, I understand that you guys still have some way to go. So imagine now someone listening to this feeling, OK, I want to help out in some way. I want to take us all the way to a place where we only eat this short list of animals. What can someone do to help out and stay updated with your organization?

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So please, we actually have a petition and the trade dot com, which people can sign onto, which is going to the government as well to essentially achieve that, but also come and visit while they dig in and have a look there and

try and follow us on that newsletter so that you can start the news. As you say, this hasn’t been reported. The Chinese, unfortunately, people love bad news. They don’t like good news. And so these positive reactions and we want to say, look, let’s encourage China, let’s ask other countries to do the same, hasn’t been widely reported. You can get all that kind of information and stay in touch with this blog and hopefully become a supporter and be one of the family and also communicate to other people, to your friends and families and people around the world what’s happening. A lot of it is peer to peer communication. You know, we can do advertising, we do this. But obviously person to person can be very persuasive.

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Peter Knight, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with great outcome today. Thank you. And for you listening. If you enjoy this, the purpose why we do this podcast is for you to get good news and stay informed at the same time. And this was a great example of positive changes that is happening in the world all the time, but that you might not be aware of unless you watch inspiring, uplifting conversations like the one we just had. And if you would like for more people to be able to listen to conversations like this, please go into your podcast app and hit subscribe that would really help us to get into different top lists and then more people can listen to interviews like this. Thank you so much for listening and we’ll see you in the next episode.

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