14 DAY TRIAL // Recent news from China says that officials in Macau have confiscated roughly 75 pounds (34 kilograms) of ivory that two traffickers were trying to transport from Macau to Hong Kong.
What's interesting is that these two South African smugglers attempted to fool customs officials by hiding the ivory inside chocolate bars.
According to The Inquisitr, the traffickers arrived at the airport carrying their personal luggage and 15 boxes of chocolates.
Officials weighed both the luggage and the boxes, and realized that the latter packed a tad more pounds than your average boxes of chocolate bars do.
This led them to the conclusion that something other than run-off-the-mill filling had to be hidden inside the bars.
The same source informs us that, after confiscating the chocolate bars, the customs officials put them in warm water.
As was to be expected, the chocolate did not take long to melt, and the officials found themselves looking at 583 pieces of ivory.
“We tried to use pointed objects to break it. We failed because it was very hard,” Mak Wun Yin of Customs Service told the press.
“We tried several other methods and at last we soaked it in hot water. After soaking in water, it was easier for us to peel off the outer brown layer and discover that it was actually something white and hard,” he further detailed.
Given the quality and the quantity of this ivory, authorities estimate that its market value revolves somewhere around $76,000 (€57,316).
“Luckily, officials detected the ‘chocolate’ ivory before the traffickers turned a profit,” Crawford Allan, the current director of TRAFFIC North America commented on this incident.
“Unfortunately, these incidents are not isolated, and trade in illegal wildlife continues to be a major global problem,” he went on to say.
The World Wildlife Fund warns that, according to several reports, nearly 30,000 elephants are killed and stripped of their tusks on a yearly basis.
Unless poaching is soon put an end to, the species risks going extinct, the organization stresses.