JAKARTA, INDONESIA — The monkey, shackled to an iron stake, paced a narrow strip of dirt filled with its own excrement. As people laughed and pointed, the creature bared its teeth and lunged at the end of its line.
"He gets angry," said one trader at the teeming animal market here. "Like a little person."
Irma Hermawati gets angry too. The 31-year-old Javanese native is an investigator for the nonprofit group ProFauna, which lobbies on behalf of what she believes is Indonesia's most precious resource: its indigenous wildlife.
She spends her days plotting sting operations against well-organized poaching rings that extend across Indonesia. Wearing a traditional veil over her face, she also ventures undercover into Jakarta's riotous animal markets.
Hermawati is hunting the animal hunters.
Poaching has joined rampant logging and jungle deforestation as one of this developing nation's most pressing environmental problems. Indonesia has 230 animals on its endangered species list, and virtually every one of them can be bought here in the capital.
"It's alarming to see that Indonesia's list of protected species is getting longer, not shorter," she said. "People want medicine and exotic pets. If an animal is protected and therefore expensive, they think it gives them status to own it."
Each year, hundreds of thousands of animals are trapped and carted from the forest to supply an underground market that activists say reaps between $10 million and $20 million annually.
Although laws prohibit such poaching and sales, enforcement is weak and in many places nonexistent.
The hunted animals include Sumatran tigers, orangutans, cockatoos, monkeys, bats, parrots, turtles, even baby elephants, activists say. Poachers often employ crude trapping techniques that leave animals with wounds and infections that go untreated.
Cramped in crates, many animals die on the long, secretive journey to market. Some are given tranquilizers or drugs before being smuggled out of the country, where they fetch 10 times their local value.
"The problem is real and bigger than anyone realized," said Aschta Boestani, an Indonesia expert for the Wildlife Enforcement Network of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations.
In addition to the many creatures displayed and sold legally at markets in Jakarta and elsewhere, many vendors keep a secret list of species for customers willing to pay $1,500 for the pelt of a Sumatran tiger or $150 for a Javan gibbon.
