The public overwhelmingly supports wildlife conservation, but nearly half of people surveyed in the United States have no awareness about illegal wildlife trafficking, according to a 2018 poll by the Association of Zoos & Aquariums’ Wildlife Trafficking Alliance.  An overwhelming majority of people in the U.S. say that they oppose wildlife trafficking (74%), but most are unaware that their purchases may be contributing to the problem.

As animals disappear from the wild, the opportunity to view them decreases—creating a domino effect that is rippling across the travel and tourism industry.  A new study has shown that elephant poaching alone is costing a whopping $25 million per year in lost tourism revenues.  For the animals, this is a matter of life and death.  But for many who depend on tourist revenues, it’s a matter of livelihood as well. 

A recent United Nations report reveals that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction due to human activities, including poaching; and that we are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.” Although the loss of African wildlife garners the most attention, wildlife traffickers are decimating important wildlife populations around the world. Endangered species are being poached in Latin America, the Caribbean, South America, Asia, and the United States. And once the products are smuggled out of the home country, they enter an industrial-scale illegal trade that spans the globe. Wildlife experts have confirmed that if we don’t act quickly, trafficking will wipe out many endangered species in our lifetime.

Roughly 5,800 species of animals are protected by CITES against over-exploitation through international trade.  They include some whole groups, such as primates, cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises), sea turtles, parrots, corals, cacti and orchids. But in some cases, only a subspecies or geographically separate population of a species (for example the population of just one country) is listed.  

Wildlife trafficking is an international crisis, with an unprecedented increase in illegal wildlife trade throughout the world in the past thirty years. Populations of endangered species have plummeted, yet the illegal trade shows no indication of slowing down. An unprecedented global demand for exotic wildlife products has triggered an industrial-scale killing spree of endangered animals on land and sea.  Wildlife trafficking, which depends on the killing of hundreds of thousands of animals, is a multi-billion-dollar criminal industry. Money from the illegal wildlife trade has been linked to organized criminal gangs and corrupt governments—all at the expense of wild animals, the environment, and our national security.