Carmine offers Clark the opportunity to make a lot of money just for running small errands. The first is to pick up a Komodo dragon from JFK Airport and transport it to a specific address.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freshman_(1990_film)

American, European, Arabs do routinely buy these exotic animals to keep them as pets.

But most of these are used for traditional Chinese medicine.

Komodo dragons would seem to be very poor choices as pets. Fast, aggressive, not very affectionate, and their bites can cause major septic problems: http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,133163,00.h...

I dont think rich people want to cuddle a komodo, they just want it to impress their other rich friends.

Seems like a series of really dumb choices leading up to that incident.

I can't find any reports of Komodo dragons being used in Chinese medicine.

I can find news reports from 2017 of discoveries that compounds found in Komodo blood could have medical applications as an antibiotic, but I can find no mentions of it having started to be used in Chinese medicine.

Can you point to any evidence for this?

Why is this relevant?

I think it could be reworded like this:

"Does anyone know if they are catching the criminals that steal the animals, and where they are being exported to?"

Unfortunately, this would likely devolving into arguments similar to the plastic pollution in the ocean. When we know it's all the same countries doing the crimes, it looks like some kind of racism or stereotyping.

So either we ignore who the culprits are or we can be mature and civily discuss why these same country's culture seem to thrive on certain consistent destructive behaviors.

> the plastic pollution in the ocean

I read in the press that the Philippines is one of the primary producers of plastic pollutants that doom the oceans.

Example: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47608949

It's an amazing claim that that modest sized country was the source of much of the global problems given that plastic bags and six-pack rings etc are routinely used across the globe.

Maybe it's true. Perhaps Filipinos are vastly more likely to discard plastic bags than most of the rest of the world. But how were these assessments and rankings really made?

Because it’s an important detail to the story. Where is the demand coming from?

Sorry, the tone seemed accusatory in your original post. As if the US and Europe were somehow morally above poaching, but I understand that is not the intention.

It's a reasonable accusation though, assuming the number of poaching that come from us and europe is comparably low.

I would've assumed the US and Europe may be a large part of the demand for poached animals.