Wildlife CSI
CHRIS SHEPHERD FELT frustrated and furious when he heard of yet another attempt to launder wild-caught echidnas through Indonesia
Transporting native Australian fauna overseas is tightly regulated but traders in Indonesia exploit loopholes in the legislation and these echidnas came with paperwork that described them as captive-bred. As director of the South-East Asian branch of wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC, Chris suspected the paperwork was fake. He knew successful breeding of echidnas in captivity was almost unheard of and shared his concerns with conservation biologist Dr Phoebe Meagher and her Taronga Zoo colleagues.
“One of Chris’s biggest frustrations was that his team knew a lot of the poachers were forging documentation for echidnas that had been caught in the wild and putting them down as captive-bred,” Phoebe says. “I knew this couldn’t be right. Taronga, as a leading Australian wildlife and conservation group, has only been able to
