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Sunday 05.02.2012

Don't pack the whale meat

Inspectors at the Anchorage airport will seize it...

Every time Chris Andrews opens a package or inspects a passenger in his job as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife inspection officer at Anchorage's Ted Stevens International Airport, he chances an even more bizarre discovery, reports the Anchorage Daily News.

Andrews has worked at the airport, one of the busiest cargo ports in the world, for more than 10 years. He's pretty much seen it all. He and the state's three other inspectors are federal law enforcement agents charged with inspecting wildlife imports and exports.

Anchorage's airport is an especially lively posting. Every year 2 million metric tonnes of cargo pass through the airport, a refueling hub and U.S. gateway for flights from Asia that was last ranked as the fifth busiest cargo airport in the world.

Inspectors average at least one seizure per day. Most come from commercial cargo packages but some come from international air passengers clearing customs at the airport.

"About 90 per cent of the passengers don't think they're doing anything wrong," Andrews says. "Though when someone brings in a mounted sea turtle you would think that they would know better."

Sometimes inspectors see repeat offenders, like the woman who tried over and again to bring in boxes of dried sea horses (valued for medicinal properties in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan but illegal to import) to Anchorage.

Seized items are kept in a nondescript warehouse off of a suburban road near the airport. The complex includes a walk-in freezer where evidence materials in ongoing illegal poaching cases -- such as carcasses of bears and walruses -- are kept.

There's another room of evidence. It's a macabre museum of wildlife trafficking: There's a purse made out of a monitor lizard from North Africa, hemorrhoid cream made from endangered musk deer, bottles of clear liquor from Thailand with whole snakes suspended inside.

The collection includes a large whale vertebra, commercially canned whale meat, elephant toenails, leopard jackets and the skin of a python and a bottle of bear fat.

Wildlife inspectors, who often have backgrounds in biology or zoology, must be able to quickly identify hundreds of species of animals.

Some of the saddest cases he's seen involve live animals shipped as cargo, including a monkey in a cage shipped with taped-up snakes. The snakes got loose and killed the monkey.

Inspectors must be able to deal with unhappy travelers whose rare coral and ivory souvenirs are being confiscated.

Penalties can range from confiscation with an appeal process in court (people rarely appeal, Andrews said) to jail time and fines of more than $100,000.

A few years ago, American hunters traveling from Alaska to the Kamchatka area of Siberia to hunt bears became a problem when they started bringing back exotic souvenirs like ring seal skins and bear claw necklaces.

"We had to actually start giving briefings because the tourist souvenirs they were bringing back -- well, we could fill up this room," Andrews said. The briefings tended to make the hunters better at hiding things.