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Friday, February 28, 2025

Poachers dump animals into sea from Venezuela

by

1731 days ago
20200602

More than 47 birds drowned af­ter they were thrown in­to the sea by their cap­tors who at­tempt­ed to evade cap­ture by the Coast Guard in Ce­dros yes­ter­day morn­ing.

By the time the Coast Guard of­fi­cers fished out the wick­er bas­kets with the birds, the ma­jor­i­ty were dead and the oth­ers even­tu­al­ly died.

They com­prised of 20 Hahn’s macaws, 22 Caiques and five Or­ange-winged par­rots.

A card­board box with a num­ber of bullfinch­es was al­so dumped, but their car­cass­es float­ed out to sea be­fore they could be re­trieved.

Ini­tial in­for­ma­tion was that mon­keys were al­so res­cued, but the Coast Guard has since stat­ed that no mon­keys were dis­cov­ered.

It is be­lieved that the birds were be­ing smug­gled in­to the coun­try from Venezuela to be sold on the black mar­ket.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­port, around 6.36 am, the Coast Guard ves­sel was on pa­trol when the pirogue was spot­ted.

The crew mem­bers be­gan throw­ing the wick­er bas­kets and the card­board box over­board as the Coast Guard ves­sel pur­sued and in­ter­cept­ed the pirogue. The of­fi­cers then fished out the bas­kets.

The men, who re­side in Ce­dros, and the birds were tak­en to the Ce­dros Po­lice Sta­tion where the Forestry Di­vi­sion was con­tact­ed.

Game war­den 11 Richard Ram­lo­gan and his col­league Bis­han Mad­hu went to Ce­dros where they in­ter­viewed the men.

How­ev­er, it is be­lieved that the men came from Venezuela, and in keep­ing with COVID-19 pro­to­cols would have had to be test­ed for the virus be­fore they could be de­tained at the sta­tion.

As a re­sult, they were warned of their in­tend­ed pros­e­cu­tion and re­leased with­out be­ing charged.

Guardian Me­dia was told that on com­ple­tion of the pa­per­work the men will be served with sum­mons to ap­pear be­fore a mag­is­trate to an­swer the charges.

They are like­ly to be charged with more than 47 counts of pos­ses­sion of pro­tect­ed an­i­mals with­out a per­mit and hav­ing a sec­ond sched­ule an­i­mal in the closed sea­son. Those of­fences car­ry a max­i­mum fine $10,000.(SW)


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