At a list price of $799.99, they’d been advertised online as El Dorado Men’s Brass Indian Elephant Exotic Boots. That is, boots purportedly made from an endangered Asian elephant.
After four years as a reporter for Wildlife Watch, an investigative project funded by the National Geographic Society, I knew there was a market for just about any exotic species, from leeches to rare succulents. I’d become difficult to shock. But selling Asian (or “Indian”) elephant boots? That sounded unprecedented—and potentially unlawful under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), according to John Scanlon. From 2010 to 2018 Scanlon was secretary-general of CITES, which regulates the global wildlife trade. Asian and
