Debbie Banks: In South Asia, they’ve recognized a long time ago, as part of their conservation approach, that tigers are an apex predator. They’re there as a keystone species, an umbrella species, a flagship species. And by saving tigers, we save so much more. And I think that larger ecosystem value of tigers has been recognized earlier in some parts of their range than elsewhere. I know there’s a lot of talk about, well, you’re just focusing on a charismatic megafauna species, but saving tigers saves so much more.

Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your host, Mike DiGirolamo, bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal Land. Today on the newscast, we speak with Debbie Banks, the campaign leader for Tigers and Wildlife Crime at the Environmental Investigation Agency. She talks with me about the global state of tigers and the 12-year-long effort to double their population, known as the Global Tiger Recovery Program, which ended in 2022 and is now in its second iteration, the GTRP 2.0. She outlines the success stories of rebounding tiger populations in places such as India and Nepal. Where they continue to decline, such as in Southeast Asia, she unpacks the drivers behind this decline, including wildlife trafficking, the demand for tigers, and what is holding nations back from stricter enforcement on trafficking. The state of tigers is as nuanced as the solutions to protecting them. A few commonalities stand out, she says. Nations need to get serious about combating wildlife trafficking through law enforcement, demand reduction campaigns, funding for conservation efforts, and stricter social media enforcement to combat the circulation of images and the sale of tiger parts, which she explains that large tech companies have the capacity and the technology to do right now. But one thing she highlights that is worth pointing out is that, as a charismatic umbrella species, tigers, when protected, could help nations meet some of their other international commitments under the Convention on Biological Diversity. When you protect tigers, you protect ecosystems and other species, making the case for centering tigers in conservation efforts a strong one. Debbie Banks, welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s great to have you with us.

Debbie: Thank you for having me.

Mike: So I’ve gotten you on the show today to discuss tigers. They are one of the most funded animals in the world from a conservation standpoint. But despite some gains in population, their status is still pretty fragile. They’ve lost around 95% of their historical range, if I’m not incorrect about that, and they stand at about 5,574 wild tigers. What can you add to what I’ve just said there? Can you fill us in, in a nutshell, where do tigers stand globally?

Debbie: Tigers are still very much at risk of extinction in the wild. So as you say, they’ve lost a large part of their geographic range to habitat loss. But they are still very much persecuted for their body parts, which are used for various different reasons, and so heavily poached for the international trade. And this story is very much a mixed bag of localized successes and elsewhere just stagnation and a lack of political and financial investment to bring tigers back from the brink in some places.

Mike: You mentioned to me on a phone call that we had earlier that the picture is quite nuanced, and so you were saying that some nations were experiencing declines while others were experiencing population rebounds, such as India and Nepal. Please take your time, but can you detail this for us? What are the nations which are seeing success right now?

Debbie: It has been really encouraging to see success in parts of South Asia. So in India, Nepal and Bhutan, the wild tiger population is recovering, in some places stabilizing and returning to parts of their range within those countries that they hadn’t been before. So that’s really exciting to see. In Thailand, there are also now signs of populations recovering there. It’s still a very different story in other parts of Southeast Asia. Cambodia, Lao and Vietnam, the wild tiger has gone. And that’s despite those three countries also being part of the Global Tiger Recovery Program, which was officially launched in 2010. So it is a sad state of affairs that we’re not seeing the same commitment and efforts across the tiger’s range.

Mike: We’ll get to the nations that are struggling. I first want to focus on the nations that are seeing some success. So what are they doing exactly?

Debbie: There are lots of different factors that have led to the population recoveries in South Asia. One is a very long history of protecting the wild tigers. So back in the 1970s, as far as India’s concerned, and the launch of Project Tiger and the Wildlife Protection Act, there’s been a tiger conservation philosophy in India that is very well established, coupled with the cultural significance of the tiger to parts of South Asia, where the tiger is both revered, feared, as a deity. It’s invoked. The tiger is the vehicle of the gods. So there are a lot of cultural connections that are important as part of the conservation fabric and landscape of South Asia. And ultimately, of course, it’s the people. If there wasn’t the historic levels of, again, culturally linked coexistence and tolerance, then there wouldn’t be tigers today. It’s in large part thanks to the people who live with tigers that they are still surviving, so that has provided the foundation. And of course the government has invested a lot of money in these countries in supporting a conservation framework.

Mike: And also in Nepal, they’re rebounding as well. Can you describe why that is occurring there?

Debbie: In Nepal, a very similar situation in terms of the historical commitment to tiger conservation, or to conservation in general, of a pro-conservation approach. And again, a lot of cultural connections and government investment. So I think that’s been really important. These are countries where there’s a long history of conservation amongst the public as well, sort of conservation-minded. So there’s public support for conservation. And then there’s a lot of the non-government organizations, national and international, that have a space to operate in partnership with the people that live with tigers and in partnership with governments. So it’s a landscape that welcomes and fosters conservation. In some parts of Southeast Asia that hasn’t been quite the same. And I would say not just Southeast Asia, but East Asia and China as well. For many years the tiger was seen as a commodity, valued more for the components, some of its body parts, rather than being valued as a live wild tiger. So in South Asia, there’s obviously a lot of tiger and wildlife-related tourism. So there are various economic benefits that are well established to having wild tigers. There’s, as I say, the cultural and aesthetic and intrinsic value of the wild tiger is recognized perhaps more in parts of South Asia than in parts of Southeast Asia. But yeah, I think that’s part of the difference. If, for example, you go back to the 1950s under Mao in China, tigers were declared an agricultural pest and a bounty was put on their heads. So there was a long period of time where thousands of tigers were being killed for that purpose. At the same time, tiger bones were very much in demand, and still today, but historically for traditional Chinese medicinal use. And so that led to the tigers of China being perilously close to extinction. And of course that demand for tiger parts has spilled out into neighboring countries. And as I say, some countries have withstood that pressure better than others.

Mike: You’ve already started to detail this for us, but Southeast Asia is in a quote-unquote tiger crisis, so to speak. And several subspecies are really experiencing some large declines. Can you tell us what those subspecies are and what’s the driver behind those declines?

Debbie: If I may, we tend not to think nowadays of subspecies at the level that we used to. So we used to think of the Malayan tiger, the Indochinese tiger, the Bengal tiger, et cetera. A lot of the current thinking amongst the scientists is that we’re talking about mainland tigers across South and Southeast Asia and Russia, whereas a separate subspecies is the Sunda tiger that exists still today in Sumatra and would have been in Bali and Java. So there are conflicting opinions amongst the scientists as to what we mean by subspecies nowadays. But certainly in terms of subpopulations of tiger, since 2010 tigers have disappeared from Vietnam, Cambodia and Lao. And that’s really tragic. And the reasons why they’ve become extinct still exist today. Snaring for capturing tigers to trade their body parts has been a direct threat. And then also the farming of tigers, particularly in Lao, for example, perpetuating the trade, including the domestic and international trade in parts and derivatives of these captive-bred tigers, so completely going against the kind of conservation philosophy we see in South Asia. We have this approach to farming and treating the tigers as commodities. And in that kind of environment where you’re stimulating demand, perpetuating the desirability of tigers, it’s going to be virtually impossible to bring tigers back into the wild.

Mike: It’s an interesting thing to think about because, I mean, that demand, so to speak, the financial demand could technically speaking exist in India, but the cultural significance of the tiger, from what I hear you’re saying, trumps that. Is that the defining difference, do you think, or one of them at least, that helps keep the tiger population robust?

Debbie: I think one of the reasons, yeah, I think it’s one of the reasons. The cultural significance, the historical political and public commitment, the recognition that tigers are, there’s obviously intrinsic and aesthetic and cultural value of the tiger, but there’s also the benefits tigers bring in terms of local economy, with visitors coming to see tigers. And most of those visitors are from within India. Most of the tourists that go to see tigers in the wild are from India. So it’s not dependent solely on international visitors.

Mike: So you work with the Environmental Investigation Agency, and obviously your organization has a lot of insight into trafficking and environmental crime. A fact that people listening may be aware of, or maybe they might not be, is that there are more tigers living in captivity than living in the wild. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe that’s the case. And I’m curious to hear from you, does that have an intersection with the tiger trade? Does that have any kind of exacerbating factor, or does it interact with the demand for tigers?

Debbie: It interacts with the demand for tigers, and again, it feeds into the policies and therefore where money is invested in some of the tiger range states. So yes, there are more tigers in captivity than there are in the wild. And these are mostly tigers that can never be returned to the wild. They don’t have conservation value in terms of being suitable to return to the wild, particularly those that are in what we would call captive facilities of concern. So those could be some of the big tiger farms where there’s speed-breeding tigers purely for the purposes of raising them to maturity, and then when they die, their body parts are put into trade. It could be quite large facilities that have hundreds of tigers, all the way through to facilities that may not breed tigers but keep them and then raise them to maturity and slaughter them upon commission by buyers. So there’s an everything in between. So it’s quite a diverse landscape of businesses and enterprises that are involved in this. Some of them are licensed. They masquerade as zoos, if you like, or centers for edutainment, which is a new word, a combination of education and entertainment. But ultimately their body parts likely end up in trade. And we see a lot of that trade from those captive-bred tiger parts and products mingling with the trade of wild tiger parts and products, especially in Southeast Asia. So at various points of the trade chain, the parts of captive tigers converge with those of wild tigers, so that the criminal networks that are profiting from the tiger trade are profiting from multiple supply chains. And so that is a major concern. The tiger farms in particular, the term that we use to refer to these facilities of concern, are particularly found in Lao, Vietnam, Thailand, China, and South Africa, which is obviously not a tiger range state, but they have unregulated keeping and breeding of tigers to supply the trade. So those are the areas of primary concern in terms of tiger farming. There are, of course, tigers in captivity across other parts of the world. And there was a period of time where captive tiger parts and captive tigers were coming out of the Czech Republic and finding their way into the trade controlled by Vietnamese criminal networks. So tigers in captivity are, of course, vulnerable wherever they are.

Mike: What stops that? You said that at a time they were coming from the Czech Republic. Presumably that has stopped since then?

Debbie: Yes. The Czech Republic enforcement inspectorate uncovered cases of tiger parts and tiger products, tiger bone and glue, being exported. And they very quickly got on the case and disrupted the networks involved, and also have really led the way to strengthen regulations across the European Union regarding the keeping and breeding of tigers, to restrict it to conservation purposes, which in itself is quite controversial, or not so much controversial, but quite deliberated on, I think. The conservation NGOs and many of the accredited zoo associations are in alignment about conservation purposes being those tigers that are part of scientifically recognized conservation breeding programs where it’s very selective breeding to maintain genetic diversity of the captive population in the event there is absolutely no option but to release tigers from that stock into the wild at some point in the distant future. But that’s very few tigers, relatively speaking, in captivity that are required for that purpose. There are, as I say, many zoos that claim to be keeping tigers for conservation purposes where those tigers are not part of those scientific programs, are not part of those stud books, if you like, and they’ll never go back into the wild. And for the official zoos, the accredited zoos that are part of these scientific breeding programs, it is about maintaining genetic diversity and critically, as near-natural behaviors as possible. So it’s certainly not the kinds of facilities in Southeast Asia where they’re just being bred rapidly. They’re clearly not in conditions that are remotely like the wild. It’s a very different story.

Mike: Obviously the Czech Republic has a different level of resources and people to deal with a situation like that. But is there something that other nations could learn from what the Czech Republic did that you think could be implemented, regardless of whether or not the nation has a ton of funding to make an impact?

Debbie: Yeah. I think this is about rule of law. This is about credible investigation and enforcement. And I think the suggestion that law enforcement and investigation, as it relates to wildlife crime, should be, we should be seeing a level of investment that is sufficient at national levels. Now, this is wildlife crime. Organized wildlife crime is not a new subject. And the governments of countries where there continues to be a significant challenge, including from trade in captive-bred tigers, have been receiving millions of dollars in aid through capacity building and training. I think it’s not a good enough excuse nowadays. Perhaps if this was 20, 30 years ago. But this has been discussed and deliberated, and considerable finance has been put towards law enforcement capacity. So this is more an issue of political will, say for example in a country like Lao, where it’s been a political choice not to pursue the kinds of investigations that are required to disrupt this trade. It’s been a political decision to turn a blind eye and say, oh, these tiger farms can just convert to zoos. Everything will be fine. And that’s not good enough. And I think there are other countries in the world, other tiger range states, which you wouldn’t consider to be the wealthiest of range states, but tigers are recovering. So I don’t think that can be used as an excuse. You’ve got Nepal, for example. And the commitment there, and has created a space where financial investment has, because of the political will, generated results. So I think that is a good example of where the investment has turned into results.

Mike: So I hear you saying that this isn’t so much an issue of lack of funding or whatnot. It’s more just, is the political will there to actually do the enforcement? I sometimes hear it said that also decreasing the demand for the species in the first place is one way to reduce the trafficking and the environmental crime here. But I guess this might be a chicken or an egg question. Would enforcement be a way to reduce demand? Is that the way forward rather than trying to do public awareness campaigns? Or would it be better just to have a combination of both?

Debbie: There’s a lot to unpack there. First, I would never say that funding is not an issue. There is inadequate investment in tiger conservation in general. Across their range, there could be more investment. And I think the contrasting examples of Nepal and Lao were just about how what funding has been made available, how that’s been applied. So that is definitely a political will issue there. But certainly one of the problems that the tiger range state governments and those involved in conservation on the ground, whether they’re communities or NGOs, face is the funding cycle. Three-year, five-year funding cycles are not a long-term solution to a species that is, at least for the foreseeable future, a conservation-intervention-dependent species. We’re always going to mean needing to do something around tiger conservation. Because even when you have tiger conservation success, as we see in South Asia, are the government, the communities, and the conservation community, as well as the people living with tigers, are they ready for that success? And so we do see increasing areas of conflict as tigers are recovering in particular areas, often at higher population densities than anyways, they are obviously now in greater occupation outside protected areas. So tigers are moving throughout the country more, and where they are appearing in parts of the country where communities have not lived with tigers for a generation or so, then you start to see more conflict issues. So there’s definitely, even with success, a need for investment to manage that, maybe thinking about managing so that tigers naturally recolonize some of the empty forests within those countries. As I say, there’s recovery, but there are still places where those tigers could disperse into if managed. So there’s always going to be a need for some intervention, and there’s always need to be funding for that. And there’s a lot of effort to look at sustainable financing for tiger landscapes, which is an initiative that’s been launched by the Tiger Conservation Coalition, and the UNDP is leading some pilot programs there to look at so that the foot doesn’t come off the gas halfway through a project and an initiative. These are long-term initiatives. Tiger conservation requires that long-term investment. So I just wanted to reflect on: is funding the issue? Yes, absolutely. We need demand reduction, and enforcement is a part of that while also influencing other factors. So I think the investment in demand reduction for tigers is thoroughly inadequate. There’s been a lot of focus on the use of tiger bone used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat arthritis and rheumatism. But tiger bone is also used to make a tonic wine that in China might be consumed as a general health tonic. It might be purchased and gifted as a sort of non-financial bribe. But in parts of Southeast Asia, tiger bone wine is marketed more as a male virility product. So even with bones and its consumptive use, there are different demand drivers. And then you have tiger skin, which is used as luxury home decor, as a semi-taxidermied specimen to decorate the floor, the wall, the sofa. And that’s very much a prestige, a status symbol demand. And, again, skins that have been processed in that way are often gifted as non-financial bribes. So it’s not just for personal use. It’s connected to corruption and bribery. Teeth and claws, often very much overlooked by the enforcement community as, oh, it’s just teeth and claws, are actually highly prized as expensive jewelry. They’re fashioned into jewelry set in silver and gold with gemstones. And you’ll find towards just after the poaching end of the trade chain, where the commodity may have changed one or two hands further along the trade chain, the teeth and claws are the first part to be sold because they are quite valuable. They can recoup the cost, the capital outlay, in the poaching and the initial trafficking, and they’re very easy to dispatch. They can be carried on the person, they can be sent by post. So they’re a very low-risk, high-profit part of the tiger. But they do get overlooked in terms of demand reduction and in terms of enforcement. But demand reduction is a good term to use because it combines the targeted consumer behavior change campaigns, as I say, that do need to be nuanced, because different body parts are used for different purposes in different places. So that is very much a need that is woefully inadequate at the moment. And then you have your demand reduction as a result of law enforcement and publicizing cases, particularly cases where there’s been seizures, arrests and convictions throughout the trade chain. So not just where a consignment has been intercepted crossing one border to another, but where, at the consumer end of the trade chain, publicizing those cases can influence consumer decisions as well. And the third component of demand reduction is strong policies and legislation that are clearly articulated. We’ve seen a huge problem within China, for example, where the government has allowed the domestic trade in the skins of captive-bred tigers. And there have been licenses given for companies to make bone wine that’s marketed as containing tiger, whether it contains tiger or whether it contains something else, that the forensic analysis hasn’t been shared. But certainly, that has created a very ambiguous situation over the years as to what is legal and what is not legal. So China’s very good at enforcing against illegal trade, but it has created this sort of fuzzy internal market as to what’s legal. And that domestic market really undermines law enforcement in the country and elsewhere, and undermines any efforts to reduce demand. So that continues to be a problem. So clear communication of policies, and really, it shouldn’t be difficult for us all to commit to ending all trade in all parts and derivatives of tigers from all sources. But I think those contribute to demand reduction.

Mike: We want to spend some time talking about the Global Tiger Recovery Program. There’s a previous one and now there’s a new one, 2.0. But we want to dissect the first one very briefly, and maybe some of the things you’ve talked about here will explain this question. But I think it’s fair to say that it wasn’t entirely successful and it didn’t really do what it was set out to do. Why is that?

Debbie: So the Global Tiger Recovery Program is a government-led initiative and a commitment in 2010 to double the world’s wild tiger population from, I think the level then was about 3,200. And today, 2022 was the deadline, the population was just over five and a half thousand. And as indicated, it’s been patchy success. From 2010 all the way through to today, the vast majority of those wild tigers are in India. So it’s been consistent that around 60 to 70% of the world’s tigers have survived there. So although it’s not doubled to the 6,400, there has been an increase, but, as mentioned, that increase has been largely in South Asia. And the reasons, in part, are the lack of sustained investment and absolutely the lack of political will to address, and well, to prevent tigers going extinct since 2010, and to subsequently address those factors and failed to create space where tigers could recover in those states where they’ve disappeared. So that is, in a nutshell, where we are. But 12 years was always going to be, that was based on the Chinese zodiac, the 12-year period. So 2010 was the Year of the Tiger, and 2022 was the next Year of the Tiger. So that 12-year phase was in part selected for those reasons. I think if you’d asked, well, and as many did ask, the scientists, a 12-year timeframe may have been perfectly reasonable for countries in South Asia, where that commitment and foundation already existed. But it was always going to be a long shot where tigers were extremely close to extinction. So I think that, retrospectively, it was an absolutely essential move to bring together leadership from the tiger range states to initiate that commitment. And yes, there have been some failures, but I think the key is, with the Global Tiger Recovery Program 2.0, setting more stringent, or maybe stringent is the wrong word, setting more useful indicators of success. I think between 2010 and 2022 there were several what they called stocktaking conferences where the governments would come together and share their good news, their bad news, et cetera. I have to say, mostly sharing their good news and a lot of patting themselves on the back, and their indicators of success were not necessarily the most meaningful. And so I think the question is whether GTRP 2.0 has more meaningful indicators of success.

Mike: Let’s look at that really quick, because I was going to ask, what’s the material difference between the first plan and 2.0 in your perspective? What’s the defining difference here?

Debbie: I would say, on paper, that the main difference is that there is an indicator framework for GTRP 2.0, which sounds very policy-wonk speak, but rather than the individual governments deciding themselves on what success looks like, there’s a sort of collective agreement on what success looks like and what benchmarks they should be working towards and reporting on. One of the, so that is on paper a step forward. In practice, what we need to ensure is that there’s still that stocktaking, if you like, those opportunities for the governments and other stakeholders, whether that’s conservation NGOs, intergovernmental bodies, donors, community representatives, to be able to participate in those stocktaking conferences and to challenge where a government claims something is happening, where it might not be the case actually on the ground. So I think that’s going to be a real test of GTRP 2.0. But I think what’s required is candid inputs to verify whether those indicators are being met. And that’s just within the Global Tiger Recovery Program. And obviously at national level, there’s the National Tiger Action Plans, which have been updated since 2010. And again, looking at the national level, are those goals being met? And whether or not they’re being met is as much an issue for the Global Tiger Recovery Program as it is for the wider global biodiversity framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Likewise, are countries delivering on their commitments under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, CITES? Are countries delivering on their commitments under the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, which has a role to play in disrupting the transnational criminal networks involved in tiger and other wildlife trafficking? Trying to have that national tiger focus, but also thinking up to what are the governments meant to be doing in a way that will contribute to tiger conservation. I think you were asking about why South Asia has had more success than parts of Southeast Asia or China. I think one of the other reasons is that perhaps in South Asia they’ve recognized a long time ago, as part of their conservation approach, that tigers are an apex predator. They’re there as a keystone species, an umbrella species, a flagship species. And by saving tigers, we save so much more. And I think that larger ecosystem value of tigers has been recognized earlier in some parts of their range than elsewhere. I know there’s a lot of talk about, well, you’re just focusing on a charismatic megafauna species, but saving tigers saves so much more. And we’ve even seen very recent research confirming that tiger forests capture more carbon. And then there’s this relationship between forests without tigers. They are far poorer in biodiversity and climate mitigation terms.

Mike: This ties into exactly what I was going to ask you, which is that it seems like just protecting tigers, it does help nations meet all these other environmental commitments that you have outlined. So it’s an umbrella species because tigers need lots of space to live and lots of forest. And I think it’s fair to say you must protect the forest and keep it standing to protect tigers. So could nations simply meet all these other targets they have of protecting forests by simply protecting tigers, because by doing so, they’re protecting the habitat as well?

Debbie: I think the tiger as a flagship species, if the presence of the tiger is seen as an indicator of the success of all of the environmental and transnational criminal and anti-corruption commitments that governments have made, I think we would be in a much better place in the world. I think the tiger is recognized as the striped water god in some parts of its range, recognizing that the forests that the tiger lives in are the source of many great rivers that supply millions of people with water. So they are a brilliant flagship species for that purpose. There’s always going to be parts of the landscapes where, or tigers don’t just live in forests, they live in grasslands and mangrove swamps. They are quite indicative of the success in meeting some of these other wider biodiversity commitments. I think it would be a little bit different if you’re looking purely at crime and wildlife crime because there are many other species that are trafficked.

Mike: Right.

Debbie: That may not live in the same, for example, marine species, for example. You can discount that, I’m just, that’s a response to explain why.

Mike: No, it’s good. It’s a great point. So what is then an empty tiger forest? Because that is a thing. Can you explain what that is and why do they become so?

Debbie: Empty tiger forests are parts of the landscape, forests in particular, but also grasslands, mangrove swamps, where tigers could survive but for various reasons have been wiped out from those areas, either direct targeting of the tigers for their body parts to enter trade, or because of prey decline or habitat loss and fragmentation that created barriers. So there are empty forests in parts of the tiger’s range, even in parts of South Asia, that they could recolonize if there is a safe way for tigers to move from their source sites back to these empty forests, and if those empty forests are adequately protected and the prey populations recover. So I think if you ask scientists in India, for example, they’ll say that although there may now be over 3,600 tigers in India, there’s still enough forest and habitat for many more, potentially 6,000 tigers if those empty forests were filled. But that is going to require safe spaces in between, like corridors, if you like, or stepping stones. So when tigers leave protected areas, they’re able to hop to these safe stepping stones to get to forests that they can naturally recolonize. So I think there’s a lot of potential for there to be more tigers in the wild, but as we’ve discussed, conservation success also needs to be planned for. And certainly if tigers are returning to their former range that is now currently empty forest, then there’s a lot of work to be done to pave the way, to prepare people for the potential return of those tigers. But that is a decision that has to be made by the communities and by people on the ground in the tiger range states.

Mike: Last question. Other than all the measures which you’ve diligently outlined in great detail, is there a low-hanging fruit that you think could really be done right now immediately, regardless of the GTRP 2.0? Big takeaway to protect tigers right now in 2026?

Debbie: I think one thing that we haven’t mentioned so far is the accountability of the private sector, and by that particularly the online social media companies. Because if you’re a consumer, you can find tiger parts or sell online extremely easily. And that creates an air of, they’re very accessible. It creates an air of acceptability and it perpetuates and stimulates the demand for tiger parts and products. And it is prolific. I cannot tell you, our investigators are sending us almost daily photos and videos of tiger parts and products being offered for sale online, particularly across Southeast Asia and China. So that is relatively low-hanging fruit in the sense that we’re talking about multibillion-dollar companies that have the technology, the algorithms, to kick wildlife traffickers off their platforms. It should be an absolute no-brainer that they invest the money and technology to do that. I think that will have a huge impact on demand if that happens, especially if they make sure that people know why they’re being kicked off the platforms, and they have the technology to make sure the account holders can’t come back. So I think we call that low-hanging fruit because there’s money within those companies to make that happen.

Mike: Debbie Banks, thank you so much for speaking with me today. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Debbie: Thank you for having me.

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