Rakuten under fire for marketing whale meat and ivory
Japanese e-commerce Rakuten has come under fire from conservationists after it emerged that the firm is the world’s top online marketer of whale meat and ivory – banned products in most countries.
‘Blood E-Commerce’, published by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and Humane Society International (HIS), singled out the Japanese giant for its facilitation of the controversial trade, calculating that it hosts over 28,000 adverts for elephant ivory and 1,200 for various whale products.
Urging Rakuten to stop trading in these endangered animal parts Kitty Block, vice-president of HIS, said: “We call on Rakuten subsidiaries in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Austria and elsewhere to urgently press Rakuten headquarters in Japan to ban all ads offering ivory and whale products.”
EIA's president, Allan Thornton added: “Rakuten's ads are effectively as deadly as giving bullets to elephant poachers and harpoons to whalers. It must act immediately to ban all ads selling elephant and whale products, or its global brand will be irrevocably tainted with the ongoing mass slaughter of these species."