Philippine customs officials were astonished when they opened nicely gift-wrapped boxes of cookies and oatmeal flown in from Poland and found hundreds of live tarantulas.
Bureau of Customs personnel seized the 757 tarantulas at a post exchange centre near Manila’s international airport on Monday and later arrested a Filipino man who tried to claim the long-legged and venomous spiders, which were declared as “collection items”.
Despite threats of hefty fines and imprisonment, a startling array of wildlife have been seized by customs inspectors by the hundreds in Manila since last year, including geckos, iguanas, chameleons and a popular reptile called bearded dragons.
