Operation Thunder
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What Could Go Right? is a free weekly newsletter from The Progress Network written by our executive director, Emma Varvaloucas. In addition to this newsletter, which collects substantive progress news from around the world, The Progress Network is also home to the anti-apocalypse conversational podcast also called What Could Go Right?.
Seahorses hidden in snack boxes. Turtles stuffed into luggage. A polar bear carcass, tiger cubs, and thousands of rare, blue-tongued lizards. All of this and more has been found at various points in the history of Operation Thunder, a global crackdown of the illegal wildlife trade. Run by Interpol and the World Customs Organization (WCO), it is now in its eighth year.
Operation Thunder’s latest haul, announced this month, included the rescue of nearly 20,000 live animals, all of them endangered or protected species, as well as thousands of tonnes of animal products and timber. The animals will all be repatriated to their country of origin or rehabilitated in conservation centers.?
When possible, their DNA will also be collected to support prosecutions, as in the case of the oryx—a type of antelope—pictured below, which were seized in Iraq. Operation Thunder also resulted in the arrests of 365 people and the identification of six transnational criminal networks.
Operation Thunder is just a small dent in the black market for illegal wildlife products, which is worth over 20 billion USD per year and linked to other forms of organized crime, like money laundering and arms trafficking. As the illegal wildlife trade has grown, however, so too has?a coordinated approach to fight it.
The first edition of the program, Operation Thunderbird, was conducted in 2017 across 49 countries and saved over 8,000 animals. Operation Thunderstorm followed in 2018 and Operation Thunderball in 2019.
At the time, it was unclear if the operations would remain a short series. “It is not something that we aim at doing only for once and for the sake of having a nice press release,” Henri Fournel, then the coordinator for environmental security at Interpol, told National Geographic in 2019. “This is, for us, the foundation of a new era where customs and police will work hand-in-hand against wildlife and timber traffickers.”
Since then, Operation Thunder has become an annual event that now encompasses 138 countries. The number of seizures, as well as the number of recovered animals, has roughly doubled since its start. (One note: while Operation Thunder is funded by a number of partners, the United States Agency for International Development is one. Since the agency was gutted, it’s unknown if the same levels of funding will continue into 2025.)
Interpol agents gather intelligence before the monthlong operation and share it with local police, customs officials, and border control. They then descend on airports, borders, checkpoints, and postal hubs, using trained dogs and x-ray scanners to search for contraband. They even check scrap yards, taxidermy shops, garages, and pet fairs.
The full list of seizures from Operation Thunder 2024 is here. Among the live animals were 12,427 birds, 5,877 turtles, 1,731 other reptiles, 33 primates, 18 big cats, and 12 pangolins, the scale-covered mammals that protect themselves by curling into a ball. The list also includes a tonne of sea cucumbers smuggled into the US from Nicaragua.?
Operation Thunder 2024 was the largest rescue ever of illegal wildlife trafficking, and it just occurred under our noses.
—Emma Varvaloucas
P.S. The chance of the asteroid we wrote about last week hitting Earth has risen to over three percent. If you want to be involved in the science behind planetary defense, one of our amazing?readers wrote in about Asteroids@home,?an open source project to identify asteroids that?are too far away or small to be included in existing sky surveys.?Anybody?can participate by downloading a computer program and letting it run in the background!
By the Numbers
1.4M: The square kilometers of the Arctic Ocean mapped for the first time this month, part of a project to map the?floor?of every ocean by 2030.??
<15M: The number of mink and fox pelts produced globally in 2023, down from 66 million in 2019. Bans on fur farming and public awareness of animal mistreatment have curbed the fur farming industry drastically.?
2018: The year global sales of combustion engine cars peaked. (Other datasets point to 2017.)
Quick Hits
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