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Article snippet: There are far easier things to do than find an international ape smuggler. For six months I searched for illicit dealers selling gorillas, orangutans, bonobos or chimps. Thousands have been lost in an underground business that makes millions of dollars off endangered animals and caters to rich pet collectors and unscrupulous zoos. Many apes are traumatized, and even if they are eventually rescued they’re “all goofed up,” in the words of one specialist, having endured serious abuse at the hands of their captors. I began at the source, motoring hundreds of miles upriver in a precarious, pencil-thin canoe in the Democratic Republic of Congo to an area where many bonobos have disappeared. Then I traveled to Thailand, where some of the biggest wildlife gangs operate. When I finally found an ape trafficker and had him on the phone, I stumbled over what, exactly, to say. All my instincts told me to hammer him with questions like: Where are you getting your apes from? Who are you? But my role was to observe his illicit operation firsthand, which meant not scaring him off. It was a journalistic pickle. The trafficker introduced himself as “Tom,” clearly a fake name. He had been discovered by Daniel Stiles, a well-known wildlife researcher in Kenya and a source of mine for years. Mr. Stiles had seen Tom’s online advertisements and arranged a deal. The plan was to meet in Bangkok, where Mr. Stiles would give Tom around $15,000 for two endangered baby orangutans, enabling th... Link to the full article to read more