The illegal wildlife trade is worth an estimated 20 billion dollars annually and causes immense suffering to the billions of animals captured, transported, and sold under cruel conditions.
The illegal wildlife trade causes suffering at every stage. Wild capture involves trapping methods that cause injury and death; temporary holding conditions are typically crowded, unsanitary, and stressful; transport involves confinement in spaces too small for natural movement, often without food and water; and sale involves further handling and stress. For every live animal that reaches the consumer, many die in transit. The scale of this suffering — billions of individual animals across all vertebrate groups and many invertebrates — makes wildlife trade enforcement one of the most important areas of animal welfare intervention globally.