BETWEEN 2018 and 2020, users of Facebook groups in Brazil shared more than 2,000 records of wildlife poaching, amounting to 4,658 dead animals: everything from pacas and armadillos to capybaras and various species of birds.

That was the finding from a study carried out by a group of researchers led by Brazilian biologist Hani R. El Bizri from the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and the Mamirauá Institute for Sustainable Development. They collected and analyzed data from the five most relevant Brazilian Facebook poaching groups, both open and private, to understand how the activity impacts biodiversity.

By identifying the patterns of illegal hunting in Brazil, it was possible to map the municipalities and biomes in which poaching took place; estimate the number of poachers involved and the number of animals killed; identify the species affected; and count the amount of meat in tons, in order to know how much biomass was removed from the habitats.

The survey showed that illegal hunting took place in all of the country’s biomes and in 14% of Brazilian municipalities, spread across all states. There were an estimated 1,400 poachers involved and a total of 29 metric tons of wild meat obtained from the activity. A total of 157 species were killed, from small amphibians to large mammals. Of these, 19 were threatened species, such as tapirs, peccaries, jacutinga birds and coandu-mirim dwarf porcupines, a species only described by science in 2013.

Hunting for sport

According to El Bizri, most of the killing was done with firearms, often equipped with accessories such as sights, indicating the poachers tended to be relatively well-off.

“What I call ‘sporting’ or ‘leisure’ hunting, as it’s also called in science, is not done out of necessity, it’s not done out of conflict,” he said. “It’s when the person is happy to be doing it, because they really want to, to feel the emotion of doing it.

“We use various indications, various pieces of evidence, to say that it was ‘sport’ hunting,” El Bizri added. “Most of the municipalities we found have a larger population, less poverty, a higher [human development index], so this means that they are possibly wealthier regions, not rural, isolated or small municipalities.”

The Amazon, the most biodiverse biome in the country, was the source of most of the poached animals. In the Atlantic Forest and Caatinga dry forest, both highly degraded biomes, poachers tended to target fewer large mammals and reptiles, and more small birds, often caught in larger quantities as a way of compensating for the size of the animal.

“The most worrying thing is that even in an affected area like the Caatinga, an area that has already been heavily deforested and destroyed, there is still hunting,” El Bizri said. “There’s no more hunting of large animals, because they’ve disappeared from there, they’ve become extinct. But there’s still hunting of small animals, so there’s no limit. It’s hunting all the way down the chain, losing animals and making it increasingly difficult for more species, including smaller ones, to survive.”

The negative impacts of hunting on Brazil’s fauna are compounded by other human pressures on the environment, said biologist and Fauna Network researcher André Pinassi Antunes, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“I think Brazil has always had this kind of hunting,” he said. “It was cultural. Imagine how many men didn’t get together in the 1960s to go to the Pantanal to do this kind of thing. It’s always been for fun, but I think what we’re seeing today is the loss of several intact areas, very large, intense deforestation, fewer and fewer natural areas, and more people. So today the impact of hunting is different. One thing leads to another and then we lose control.”

No fear of reprisal

The study highlights the impunity for environmental crimes and the easy dissemination of content related to illegal practices on social media networks in Brazil.

“We can get a better view of how much social media is being used to disseminate this type of information, and information that is being shared without any fear — so much so that we joined open groups that had no restrictions to participate,” said co-author Marcela Álvares Oliveira, a professor in the postgraduate program at the Federal University of Rondônia. “Activities that are illegal are becoming much easier to share, distribute and, at the same time, foster through social networks. And without any fear of reprisal.

“Both the scientific and social results are important for us to think about what guidelines our country should take in the face of [illegal] hunting,” Oliveira said. What is the limit to the freedom of expression we can have on social media, especially when it comes to publicizing crimes, which happens with total freedom and without any cost to the criminal?”

This online display of poached animals reveals another characteristic of the practice, the “trophy” part of trophy hunting, in which the kill is seen as an achievement in and of itself, researchers say.

“I’m totally in favor of subsistence hunting by Indigenous peoples and traditional communities,” Antunes said. “I’ve been working directly with them for over 15 years. It’s totally justifiable, because it’s part of their cosmology and of fundamental nutritional importance. I’ve never seen a manifestation of disrespect from these peoples. Now, [if] you kill for fun, post a photo … the difference is an abyss.”

According to Oliveira, environmental law enforcers need to address the fact that wildlife crimes have an increasingly online aspect, for which specialized agents must be deployed.

“We have a law in Brazil that’s very clear in relation to crimes against fauna,” she said. “Facebook is American. The law in the United States is very different from our law in this regard, which makes it easier for these social networks to set up in different locations, without respecting the laws of those countries. The social network makes people feel safe, it gives them a freedom of expression that goes beyond the parameters of ethics. They use the argument that the group isn’t based in Brazil, it’s based in the United States.”

Oliveira also pointed to education as one of the priority actions to combat environmental crimes. “We’re focused on the student getting into college, getting a good score in the exams. We’re not concerned with educating citizens, teaching them why this is a crime,” she said.

El Bizri said there’s no simple solution to the problem. Instead, he said, it will take a combination of cultural changes, highlighting the risk of diseases transmitted from wild animals, and better gun control. But the first and most significant step, El Bizri said, is to effectively regulate the content of social media networks.

“Creating opportunities for these communities instigates, makes these people persist in that activity, in that crime,” he said. “They are people who are there reinforcing the identity of the sport hunter, who can hunt and is unpunished, who has no problems.

“Somehow, by blocking these connections, we might also be able to limit the activity from happening,” he went on. “If the photo is a trophy, then it is no longer a trophy. This doesn’t just apply to Facebook, there are several others, perhaps even more problematic, because they’re the ones where things aren’t so open.”

In 2022, Brazilian environmental regulator IBAMA fined Meta, parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, 10 million reais (about $1.9 million at the time), for publishing 2,227 ads for the illegal sale of wild animals on its platforms. The company denies having received the fine notification.