What Happens When an Endangered Species Goes Viral

The internet was built on the fuzzy little bellies of adorable animals. But what happens when all those YouTube views actually helps drive the potential extinction of an entire species? That's exactly what's happening to the slow loris, a previously little-known primate found in the jungles of Southeast Asia. For decades the slow loris was a cute, but otherwise unknown animal.

Then came the tickle video. In 2009, a video of a slow loris being tickled under its arms went viral. But what most viewers didn't realize was that when a slow loris puts its arms up in the air it is actually a defense mechanism. This adorable video was actually showing a severely distressed animal.

Since the popularity of slow loris videos hit the internet, the rise in online trafficking of the nocturnal primate has surged.

Nearly 80 percent of the slow lorises captured by animal traffickers die before they even make it to the market, said Christine Rattel, the program advisor for wildlife conservation at the International Animal Rescue in Indonesia. The creatures' teeth are clipped, a painful procedure that is the likely cause of the high mortality rates. But the industry as a whole is often a brutal, terrifying ordeal for the captured animals.

"Traders load the lorises together in small, cramped crates after poaching them from the wild," Rattel said. "This causes them wounds, stress, severe dehydration and can even result in death."

There's a reason why slow loris are such popular pets. They're adorable. Their tiny bodies, human-like hands, and huge brown eyes make them ideal victims for the pet trade. In countries like Indonesia, where the slow loris is endemic, the pet trade was originally focused on local markets only.

But as the primate's popularity spread, so did animal traffickers' reach. The trade has now moved to Facebook, where buyers and sellers negotiate prices out in the open, flouting local laws as authorities struggle to adjust to the realities of policing a virtual marketplace.

"The hunters have gotten more savvy with technology," Hasan, an animal trafficking investigator, told VICE. Hasan asked us to use a pseudonym and keep the name of his organization a secret because he feared retribution from trafficking syndicates for speaking with us. The marketplace may be digital, he said, but the threat of violence is still very real.

The illegal wildlife trade has quadrupled since 2010, growing to an underground marketplace worth an estimated $1 billion USD a year in Indonesia alone. Communities on social media sites like Facebook are driving much of this rise.

"You can see the trend clearly," Hasan said. "In these past few years, the online trade has made it easier for wild animal sellers to freely trade their animals without going through all the trouble of bringing them into the market and risk getting caught by authorities."

Internet penetration in Indonesia has grown rapidly in the last decade. Today, an estimated 43 percent of the population has a smartphone in their pocket. And most of them are using the phone to go on social media. Indonesians are the fourth-largest users of Facebook and some of the most-active Twitter users in the world. This makes social media an ideal, but poorly regulated, marketplace in Indonesia for both legal and illegal goods.

Facebook groups like "Kukang Lovers Jakarta" and "Kukang lover's indonesia Reg.bekasi" allow Indonesian slow loris traffickers to operate in plain view, but still under the radar. Others post the primates on regular online shopping sites. You can scroll through a list of motorbike helmets and used cellphones and randomly come across a critically endangered animal for sale for less than Rp 500,000 ($36 USD).

Taken together, Indonesia's rising internet penetration has offered animal traffickers a marketplace that's harder to shut down than a traditional pasar, and also has far more reach. A study published in the Asian Primates Journal found that Japan has emerged as a major hub for illegal slow loris trafficking.

Microsoft, and several other tech companies, recently partnered with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), TRAFFIC, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) to draft shared guidelines of the online trade of wildlife that hope to regulate the largely grey market.

"By adopting the same policies for wildlife trade online across the industry, a seller is held to the same guidelines on each platform, and can't hop over to another site to exploit weaknesses," said Giavanna Grein, a program officer of wildlife crime at WWF and TRAFFIC.

In July of this year, the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry created a cyber patrol unit aimed at tracking down online traders. "This unit was developed in response to counter the significant increase in online trading of wildlife including slow lorises" said Achmad Prabadi, the deputy director of Forest Security and Crime Prevention.

But there will always be sellers who flout the rules. And catching them has proven to be a time-consuming, and expensive, task. Current efforts require authorities to manually search the internet for the creatures.

Anti-trafficking activists are trying to develop new methods to make the process faster. Jennifer Jacquet and Sunandan Chakraborty, both professors at New York University, created an algorithm that scans the internet for ads offering up endangered animals for sale. But even then, actually finding the animal traffickers is easier said than done.

"The difficulties we have are similar to [those of] a manual search," Jacquet said. "How do you know the item is what the seller says it is? How can the model figure out and adapt to new code words for products? Where should enforcement most focus their efforts?"

And even when a trafficker is found, there's no guarantee that the arrest of any one slow loris seller would have an impact on the wider situation. The majority of those selling slow lorises online in Indonesia are also the primates' caretakers. They own a small number of slow lorises and sell them off one or two at a time. It makes each vendor a tiny part of Asia's massive $10 billion-a-year animal trafficking industry. But together, the slow loris traffickers represent a serious threat to the species.

It will take more than just enforcement to end the problem. Awareness is also a vital part of reducing the demand for the critically endangered species, so that next time a slow loris video breaks the internet, it's out of concern for the creature's well-being, not an "awww, so cute," moment. These animals may be adorable, but they still belong in the wild, not a cage in your home.