A tiger skeleton soaks in rice wine in Harbin, China. There is a growing, clamoring demand for tiger bone wine, a tonic made by steeping a tiger carcass in rice wine to produce an extremely expensive elixir. It’s thought to impart the animal’s great strength, a status symbol product bought or gifted by the elite: government officials, military officers, and wealthy businessmen. Photo courtesy Save the Tiger Fund

A tiger skeleton soaks in rice wine in Harbin, China. There is a growing, clamoring demand for tiger bone wine, a tonic made by steeping a tiger carcass in rice wine to produce an extremely expensive elixir. It’s thought to impart the animal’s great strength, a status symbol product bought or gifted by the elite: government officials, military officers, and wealthy businessmen. Photo courtesy Save the Tiger Fund

But without knowing exactly what’s going on, wildlife agencies and researchers can’t stop these killings. So Nikkita Patel turned to HealthMap, a tool the Boston Children’s Hospital created 10 years ago.The tool searches multilingual news aggregators and forums for media reports, parsing them for relevant keywords. It was already tuned to the wildlife trade, in part because animals can be vectors for disease spread. HealthMap records the key information in each article, such as the location of the reported illegal transaction, and keeps a tally of the number of individuals from each species traded. Patel’s research, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, relies more on that data than previous illegal wildlife trade work. “It’s looking at who the key players are,” Patel says, “and how to best break down trade networks.”... In other words, some data is better than no data. Because the media reports on these animals more frequently, Patel hopes that the data on them was more complete. “We thought that selecting the animals that had the greatest number of reports would perhaps be better reflection of what’s happening in the real world,” she says. With more work, law enforcement might even be able to develop her maps into real-time analysis tools. That’d be a real step toward breaking the trade networks. “As an illicit trade, they’re flexible in changing their routes,” Patel says. But it’s hard to outrun raw data.

This kind of analysis would be familiar to law enforcement—researchers have used similar methods to track the drug trade. But whether it would work on wildlife in the real world is still an open question. “The authors are attempting to analyze media-derived information, which will contain some accurate data, but unless it has been officially verified, it should always be regarded as suspect,” writes Richard Thomas, the Global Communications Coordinator for TRAFFIC, an international organization that monitors wildlife trade, in an e-mail. And an outright blockade of illegal animal trade in, say, China—one of the countries Patel identified as a key node—certainly wouldn’t be easy.

The illegal global rhinoceros trade network before (top) and after (bottom) a hypothetical targeted disruption.

Ultimately the elimination of cultural folk ideologies on the capitalist demand side should stop the illegal harvesting of wildlife. That such conspicuous consumption still motivates unsustainable practices cannot be minimized in its globally immoral turpitude. Moral suasion seems far too timid in the abuse of complex global economic trade relationships and infrastructure and the demands for serious policy solutions should become paramount, as they perpetuate premodern barbarity and ignorance in the modern name of wretched excess.For example this news piece provides an information node: (trigger warning) Police in central Vietnam on Monday seized a 120-kg frozen tiger carcass in a "suspicious" truck heading north on National Route 1A in Nghe An Province.

The illegal global rhinoceros trade network before (top) and after (bottom) a hypothetical targeted disruption.