The Exotic Pet Trade
Look at him
Do you see his mother’s blood spill onto his fur?
His face buried in her limp body unable to muffle
his family’s screams ringing through the rainforest,
rifle shots and the thud of ten bodies to the ground.
Machetes carve through the chimpanzee troop
to him.
His little fingers cling to his mother’s arm
as a boot rolls her over and
a stranger peels him away.
His mother’s devoted embrace replaced
by chains indenting his skin,
padlocked to a fate he no longer owns.
Car doors slam shut and through the slits of a crate
he stares into darkness as black as the market that demands him
with trauma as embedded as the bullet in his bones.
Listen to her
Do you hear theft’s sinister whisper?
Nothing but a bird barely breathing inside a suitcase.
Her voice disabled by drugs
beak taped shut and wings cracked
in criminal secrecy.
All her wildness stuffed in a toilet paper roll
as if she is disposable and not endangered,
stacked atop dozens of other tropical prisoners
each crammed in their own cardboard casket,
buried alive but not for long
because theft has not only an undertone but
a death sentence.
No food no water and no other survivors.
Her eyes dart in the dark with a jolt of turbulence
as a fledgling bleeds out beside her.
Millions more
across the animal kingdom are
ripped from their homes and strung out
across continents,
each being connected not by blood
but blood shed.
A human can so carelessly trade someone’s future
for currency
creating a wicked equivalent
between life and merchandise
at the expense of entire ecosystems
for fascination
purchasing a once wild animal for their home
while their child’s stuffed toy flung on the floor
has more freedom
for entertainment
exploiting a neglected collection of
enfeebled bodies and splintered instincts
in rows of solitary confinement called a roadside zoo.
Do you see him?
He survived an atrocity to slump in a cage,
his intelligence shackled and succumbing
to the madness and apathy of imprisonment.
Do you hear her?
She was plucked from a gene pool too small to recover
and now crestfallen in solitude she sings
the requiem of a species.
The exotic pet trade.
It is a degrading scam
because a pet
is not born in the rainforest
stolen from the canopy
reliant on wilderness,
because trade
is quite a gracious term for torture.
And yet it is the animals who are locked up
to serve an unnatural life sentence
for human crimes
concealed by ignorance and corruption.
The wild is waiting for witnesses.
Do you stand?
Stori Smith
Conservationist and Sr staff writer for SAFE Worldwide
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