2 minute read
Research
Can’t start anything without research.
How it Began
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Ever since I was a child wildlife has been a big part of my life. I grew up with a lot of wild animals and pets around me. The pets I had varied from parrots, a pigeon, rabbits and the common dog back home in El Salvador. This sparked my interest in wildlife from a young age. From watching a lot of animal and nature documentaries it motivated me to explore the illegal wildlife trade for my thesis. Throughout my early research with the illegal wildlife trade I realized that the topic was very broad. The next step was to find a sub-topic within it and focus on it.
Diving in Further
Researching further within the illegal wildlife I found out that the demand for exotic pets is a substantial driver of global wildlife trade (cited in 22% of 374 reports on this topic), others including luxury goods and food (35% of reports) and traditional medicine (25%) (Moorhouse, 2017). Out of those sub-topics I wanted to focus on the illegal exotic pet trade.
When looking into the exotic pet trade I realized that the growth of social media exposure of the exotic pet trade has amplified; which has expanded both legal and illegal wildlife markets (Siriwat, 2018). It created a stage for viral videos on social media, which creates a want for the animals.
Diving Even Further
Most my research on the exotic pet trade started off with watching a couple of short documentaries on YouTube, to then looking for longer documentaries. The documentary that helped me understand the seriousness of the issue was an episode of Crimes Against Nature by National Geographic. The whole episode was focused on the illegal trade of the slow loris, it showed me horrible conditions the animals are put in.
Nothing shown about the trade was ethical. After that I looked through different articles mainly on National Geographic which had a lot different information about other animals in the trade. Through this research I understood what my projects purpose was, and that was to explore on the experiences of these poor animals.
