57-year-old Susan Tate of Anglesey, Wales got the shock of her life when police officers and a BBC Crimewatch film crew showed up at her door. The former biology teacher wasn't secretly selling drugs or carrying on an illicit casino in her basement, instead, she was harboring illegally possessed stuffed wild animals.
One of them, a red squirrel which is considered endangered in the United Kingdom, she had bought on eBay for just $50. Ask eBay to stop the sale of stuffed animals trophies on its platform? While the squirrel is shocking, it's not the only stuffed critter you can get on the website.
A quick search brings back everything from deer heads to whole stuffed pheasants. But if you do a little more digging you can find other less common and far more protected wildlife. A wild-shot
vervet monkey sells for around $1,500 and
a stuffed endangered Barbary macaque sells whopping $1800. The fact that these animals are killed for trophies is troubling enough. But what is also upsetting is that a multibillion-dollar technology company like eBay is making facilitating the sale and making money off it.
According to
The Mirror, an online publication based in the United Kingdom, the sale of such items is banned by the online auction site but a quick search for "
hunting trophy monkey" leads you directly to the two stuffed monkeys in question which are being sold by a vendor in Russia. When the Mirror enquired with eBay about the listings they said they were quickly taken down.
But days later Care2 was able to easily find them. The company says they "have filters in place to block prohibited items" and that they "constantly monitor our marketplace to enforce" such prohibitions. Unfortunately, despite all of their filters and technology, it doesn't seem to be working.
Please sign this petition to tell eBay that there is no excuse to allow such sales to take place on their platform. Ask them to ban the sale of all wildlife trophies and improve their filters to make sure they can never appear on their site again. 