Kevin Laurie didn't know he was about to discover an illegal animal murder and trade center when he walked into a shop in the Guangzhou district of China. But then he saw the
thousands upon thousands of dried seahorses being sold there.
Sign on to the petition to urge the Chinese government to crack down on the seashorse slaughter.
Kevin was worried because he knows that
millions of seahorses are being captured from the wild and murdered for human uses (Chinese medicine and sometimes even decoration).
Many species of seahorses are listed as "threatened" or "endangered," so how are shops like this still killing and selling them? In fact, a lot of them are protected by the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Apparently this doesn't matter in China.
Project Seahorse estimates that tens of millions of these creatures are being pulled from the ocean each year. That is an astonishing number.
What makes this even more devastating is the fact that seahorses actually have an elaborate family structure, meaning that by taking them out of the ocean, their remaining families members suffer a great loss
. Seahorses are actually life-time monogamists, too, and these mass deaths disrupt those partnerships.
Please join me in calling for a clamp down on this seahorse trade!Photo Credit:
Kevin Laurie / Facebook