Soary Randrianjafizanaka noticed an absolutely rancid smell coming from a building in Toliara, Madagascar. What she discovered was simply heartbreaking.
Soary is a regional head of Madagascar’s environmental agency, and when she set out with local police and colleagues to investigate the stench, she wasn’t quite prepared for what they were going to find.
When they opened the door, it was unlike anything she had ever seen before in her entire career. There were thousands of radiated tortoises, an endangered species, covering the entire floor, crammed up against one another.
The stench was coming from the urine and feces of thousands and thousands of tortoises.
“You cannot imagine. It was so awful,” she told National Geographic. “They had tortoises in the bathroom, in the kitchen, everywhere in the house.”
After painstakingly going through the home, counting all of the tortoises, they found that there were 9,888 live radiated tortoises and sadly, 180 dead ones. Now, it was time to remove them from this horrible environment.
Using six trucks, Soary and rescuers made multiple trips back and forth to Turtle Village, a private wildlife rehabilitation facility 18 miles away. They worked until the early morning hours.
Na Aina Tiana Rakotoarisoa, a veterinarian that is helping take care of them was saddened to see that 574 more tortoises ended up dying in the next couple weeks due to dehydration or infection. The rest of the tortoises are said to be alive and doing relatively well, given such terrible circumstances.
Authorities have an idea of who is responsible for the horrible ordeal. Two men, and a woman who was the owner of the house, have been arrested. Soary says that the men were in the middle of burying dead tortoises on the property when the authorities arrived.
Rick Hudson, president of the U.S.-based Turtle Survival Alliance, has been helping with the rescue efforts and says that the small to medium-sized tortoises would have been smuggled out of the country. They are certain it was a bigger organized crime ring than just the three people.
“We don’t know exactly who the big person is, but we know there’s a big boss,” she said.
According to National Geographic, “taking radiated tortoises from the forests is illegal in Madagascar, and a treaty signed by 182 countries and the European Union bans commercial trade of the species.”
The radiated tortoise is coveted due to its yellow star pattern on their shells. They are targeted by poachers who sell them as bush meat or taken to SE Asia or China where they are sold to reptile collectors.
The radiated tortoise population has fallen from 6 million in 2013 to approximately 3 million today. They are now listed as ‘critically endangered’ – one category away from ‘extinct.’
In 2008, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature changed the species’ designation from ‘least concern’ to ‘critically endangered’ which is a four-category jump – a rare occurrence.
Now that the tortoises have been rescued, it is unlikely that they will ever be released into the wild. Dangers of poachings are far too threatening for the species that they have a much better chance of survival in captivity.
Although these tortoises are safe, the battle of protecting this species is far from over.
“In 2015 authorities confiscated 453 live radiated tortoises from Madagascar’s Ivato International Airport, for example, and 316 were seized in southeast China in 2016 as part of a scheme involving an airport employee who snuck them to his apartment after they arrived from Madagascar,” reports National Geographic.
To learn more about this species, head to the IUCN website for more information.
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