Pets and Pelts: The Illegal Trade of Cheetah

Hello everyone!

Please join us on Thursday Sept 1 for Patricia Tricorache’s seminar titled Pets and Pelts: The Illegal Trade of Cheetah at 3:00 in Rm 345 in the Michael Smith Natural Resource Building. There will be a meet-and-greet at 2:30 with snacks and beverages before her talk.

Patricia began tackling the issue of illegal cheetah trafficking in November of 2005, when she was working as the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF)’s assistant director for strategic communications. At the time, little was known about the magnitude of this illegal trade. It was then that Patricia organised a group of stakeholders, including the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority and the United States Embassy for the confiscation of two cheetah cubs held illegally at a restaurant in a remote area of Ethiopia. The confiscation took place with the support of military personnel, which attracted unexpected media attention and numerous reports of illegal cheetah trade or ownership throughout the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. From there, she began collecting data on illegal cheetah trafficking, which she later expanded with her research into cyber-commerce in collaboration with PEGAS (Project to End Great Apes Slavery). This research, which covers numbers, routes, and drivers for demand and supply, has served to bring attention to the much-ignored issue of live animal trade, and was key to support the inclusion of illegal cheetah trade in the CITES (Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species) 16th Conference of the Parties. Though Patricia is now based out of Mexico, she is Research Associate in the Evangelista Lab at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory (NREL) at Colorado State University as an expert in Illegal Wildlife Trafficking for East Africa and the Middle East.