Word: galster
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...Europe travel the region to stock up on snakes, geckos, flying lizards and other exotic pets. But the sheer scale of demand from China makes everything else pale into insignificance. Up to 80% of the illegal wildlife smuggled out of Southeast Asia is headed for China, says Steve Galster, who heads WildAid's Bangkok office. Illegal traders have had to adapt to the changed marketplace. "I had to take a crash course in Mandarin," laughs Hendrawan, an affable young Indonesian who runs a sprawling wildlife processing facility in South Sumatra. "My family is Chinese but we don't speak...
...reptile abattoir. "They always ask for more, but snakes are getting harder and harder to find, especially the pythons. The minimum size is 2.5 meters. It used to be we could find many of even 7 and 8 meters but now we are happy with 4 meters." WildAid's Galster says a better solution is to eliminate demand. "If we could get the Chinese public to stop buying and consuming this stuff," he says, "it would have a huge positive impact...
...organization launched a print- and TV-ad campaign in mid-2001 that shows fishermen slicing fins off sharks and kicking them back into the sea to die. The ads also warn that fins might be contaminated with mercury. The campaign has been a surprising success, says Steven Galster, director of WildAid's Southeast Asia office, who cites a recent survey in Thailand in which 32% of the respondents said they had given up the pricey delicacy. "Sharks," he admits, "usually don't elicit much sympathy...
...office of J. Walter Thompson, the New York City-based advertising agency that created the campaign for free. The charge: false claims by WildAid have caused their sales of shark dishes to drop by 50%. Last week in court, David Lau, secretary-general of the association, personally cross-examined Galster, alleging that the American conservationist had staged videos and faked photos of dying sharks. To TIME, he also claimed that Galster must have doctored the samples he sent to the lab to test for mercury (all of which Galster denies). Later, outside the courtroom, Lau seethed: "Foreigners shouldn...
After pretending to examine the remains for quality, we got down to bargaining. Leonid asked for 50 million rubles (about $11,000) for the skin and bones. Following a rehearsed script, I said it was a lot of money and wanted to think about it. Galster gave the poacher my binoculars as a gesture of good faith. Later Galster reported Leonid to a local biologist and was told that this was not his first transgression. As we left Krasny Yar, Galster pondered the delicate problem of telling Vladimir Shetinin, the head of the Amba antipoaching team, that he had given...