Wildlife’s Most Wanted
hoW the WilDlife foRenSiCS laB SolveS a ConvolUteD CaSe
By laurel a. neme, Ph.D.
Bonnie Yates, chief morphologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) Forensics Laboratory, slit open a plastic evidence bag
and pulled out what appeared to be a stiff, gnarly
gray stone. While it might have been a rock or chunk
of vulcanized rubber, the odds were against it given
the circumstances of the case.
Laurel A. Neme,
Ph.D., is author of
Animal Investigators:
How the World’s First
Wildlife Forensics
Lab is Solving
Crimes and Saving
Endangered Species.
She is also host of a
weekly radio show,
“The WildLife.”
Credit: Jena Johnston
The item was one of nearly 5,000 parts that FWS
agents seized in an investigation of Pa Lor, an elderly Hmong woman from Laos who sold animal parts
for traditional medicine out of a shop she shared
with her daughter at the International Marketplace
in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The case began on October 23, 2005, when Lor
landed at the Minneapolis/ St. Paul International
Airport after a 24-hour flight from Laos. Lugging
five large bags overflowing with bundles of roots and
twigs, Lor shuffled through the line to clear customs.
Noticing undeclared plants, Customs and Border
Patrol agents sent her to “secondary” and called in
FWS wildlife inspector Linda Benson. There are 114
a gruesome collection of animal parts—including a dismembered pangolin (genus Manis), the
limbs of a red-shanked douc langur (Pygathrix nemaeus), and assorted skins and furs—lies on
display at the f WS forensics laboratory in ashland, oregon. this haul forms only a fraction
of the nearly 5,000 wildlife parts confiscated at the Minneapolis/St. Paul international airport
from the luggage of Pa lor, a hmong woman from laos. the discovery in 2005 launched an
extensive investigation that concluded just last year when a U.S. District Court judge convicted
lor of conspiracy to import wildlife into the U.S. and sentenced her to two years probation.
Credit: laurel a. neme
such inspectors stationed in ports of entry around
the country and tasked with clearing the $2.8 billion
in legal wildlife shipments that enter the United
States each year, as well as with detecting illegal
wildlife products smuggled into the country.
Benson helped dig through Lor’s luggage and unearthed a grotesque assortment of animal skins,
carcasses, limbs, and other parts. While Lor’s failure
to declare the items was a violation, the violation
would be far more serious if the animals were protected and hence illegal to import. That determination,
however, would require knowing exactly what species
were involved and the laws surrounding each one.
In all, Benson discovered 1,388 animal pieces and
parts. Some she recognized immediately, such as a
10-inch-long, 14-pound Asian elephant tooth and
two monstrous one-inch thick “nose cookies” sliced
from the tip of an Asian elephant’s trunk. In-depth
analysis would later help identify unfamiliar parts,
such as the severed hands and feet of red-shanked
douc langurs (Pygathrix nemaeus) and dried hides
from the slow loris (Nycticebus coucang).
Given the volume and variety of the smuggled wildlife,
Benson figured this was more than a one-off mistake.
She called in FWS Special Agent Sheila O’Connor,
who launched an investigation that involved two
covert “buys” that resulted in the seizure of 3,500
additional items. To determine whether the smuggled
items came from protected species, O’Connor sent
the items to the FWS forensics lab, the only lab in the
world dedicated to solving wildlife crime.
House of Clues
Established in 1989, the FWS Forensics Laboratory is a state-of-the-art facility housed in a
40,000-square-foot building on the edge of Southern Oregon University’s campus in Ashland, Oregon.
To date, its scientists have dealt with approximately
12,000 cases and analyzed almost 100,000 pieces of
evidence. The lab’s more than 30 forensic scientists
help wildlife officers determine if a law has been
violated by identifying the species of animal parts
and products, verifying an animal’s cause of death,
