“Harry Potter,” threatened the well-being of Asian owls
In the decade after the popularity of the film adaptation of the book about the “boy who lived” (Harry Potter) caught up with Asia, the illegal trade of owls has increased hundreds of times.
Fighters for environmental protection believe that the owl in the film about Harry Potter has provoked the scale of illegal trapping of birds in the wild. The first film was released in 2001 and, according to the study, then a few hundred birds were sold in many markets in Indonesia.
Vincent Nijman and Anna Nekaris from Oxford Brookes University say that in 2016 the number of sold birds increased to 13,000, reports The Telegraph. The owls sell for $10 to $30.
This situation raises serious concerns since all sold birds were stolen from the natural habitats.
This may jeopardize the preservation of some of the less common types.
Nijman and Nekaris favour of the owls added to the list of protected species of birds of Indonesia, because at home wild birds die quickly.
As the newspaper notes, this is not just a problem for Indonesia. Sales growth is marked owls in a number of countries in Asia, where it is also associated with the popularity of books and films about Harry Potter. Although the connection between the books and the increase in the sale of Sov cannot be directly proven, circumstantial evidence points to it.