Usually animal smugglers try to take animals across borders by plane. (Suitcases are good places to hide your chameleon or your snakes.) But last week in Eastern Europe, a less-than-bright smuggler decided to use his bicycle.
A young man coming from Ukraine and heading into Belarus by push bike somehow thought that nobody would notice the 227 parrots he had strapped to his bike in six cramped cages. But they did. When border staff confronted him he dumped his wheels and ran back into Ukraine, never to be seen again.
The 225 parrots that survived the trip were kept at the border crossing overnight before being handed over to state vet inspectors. Let this be a lesson to future animal smugglers: The bicycle is not a practical method. We'd rather just train the parrots to fly over the border themselves and catch 'em on the other side. Not that we'd ever condone bird smuggling.
You know, we've never even considered packing snakes in our luggage, but it's one of the hottest trends in travel right now. The most recent trendsetter was a passenger arriving at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport who checked the snakes on his Korean Air flight. Customs officers found the reptiles when he touched down.
The icky part about these snakes on a plane is that they were already dead and packed with a dead bird and pieces of other birds. He faces a fine but the final punishment isn't clear because officials are still trying to work out what he planned to use the snakes for:
Right now our agents are a little leery about speculating on that, a federal spokesman said.
No matter how often we warn people that flying with crocodiles, chameleons or basically any animal is not really the best thing to do, there are always people out there who just won't take our advice.
Over the weekend, a young Saudi guy leaving Cairo was caught with snakes and crocs in his hand luggage, claiming he didn't know that transporting live reptiles was illegal. (Surely he'd wondered why normal people don't do it?) Along with a cobra that nearly slithered away, officers found no less than 250 baby crocodiles. That's a lotta reptile. We repeat again: leave your crocs in the river at home.
While other entrepreneurs/smugglers might try attaching crocodiles to their bodies on long flights, a Kenyan guy this week took a somehow more normal attitude to smuggling. On a flight leaving from Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, the main hub of China Southern Airlines, he was stopped at the security counter because he was wearing such a thick suit on a hot day.
When he opened his jacket, security officers didn't find crocs or even chameloens, they just found lots of clothes. The guy had decided that the clothing he wanted to resell in Kenya would be too pricey in excess baggage, so he'd decided to wear it: more than 100 pieces of men's and women's clothing. We definitely don't want the layer closest to the armpits.
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by amandak
