Indonesia busts grisly online trade in wildlife skulls
Indonesian authorities have shut down a macabre trade in wildlife skulls and parts online, seizing 94 items and detaining two people who had been selling to overseas buyers including in the United States and the United Kingdom.
The majority of the 78 skulls seized are believed to belong to primates including the Orangutan, raising the alarm on the targeting of the Critically Endangered ape for the exotic souvenir trade. The skulls of bear, babirusa and civet were also seized along with hornbill beaks, bear claws and shark teeth.
According to an Indonesian Forestry Ministry press release authorities kick-started their investigations into the case about two weeks ago after receiving information from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) about a confiscation of protected animal parts in the US that had originated from Indonesia.
Their search eventually led them to the Sukabumi Regency on 18 March where an enforcement team nabbed the owner and the person responsible for selling the skulls and parts overseas.
The Forestry Ministry’s statement also detailed that the duo is believed to have operated for a year and made more than ten transactions with the US and UK.
This case demonstrates the pivotal role of information sharing and international cooperation between governments to tackle trafficking driven by specialty collector interest”, said Kanitha Krishnasamy, Director for TRAFFIC in Southeast Asia. “We commend the governments involved and hope to see more of such collaboration across the region to disrupt such crime”.
This week’s bust also echoes that of a Dutch national Eric Roer who was sentenced to two years in jail by an Indonesian court in 2019 for illegally trading in wildlife parts, including crocodile, monkey and marine turtle skulls, from Indonesia.
He was convicted of shipping handicraft goods made of endangered animals from Bali to a partner in the Netherlands beginning in 2014. These operations were uncovered following a search of Roer’s partner’s warehouse in the Netherlands that was traced back to Roer using shipping documents found in the warehouse.
The fascination and demand for animal skulls as souvenirs, artifacts and jewellery is not a new phenomenon in Indonesia, particularly in the case of primate skulls.
TRAFFIC's data shows a sustained trafficking in primates in Indonesia, with at least 369 seizures on record during the past 10 years, with confiscated whole animals totalling 1,195 individual primates. At least 16 primate skulls were seized during the period, seven of them of Orangutan.
Most recently, a study by the Oxford Wildlife Trade Research Group at Oxford Brookes University in the UK showed that between 2013 and 2024, researchers recorded more than 750 carved and uncarved primate skulls sold to mainly foreign tourists, with sales increasing over time.
