The welfare impact of the global legal and illegal wildlife trade on billions of wild animals each year.
Wildlife trade creates suffering at every stage of the supply chain: capture methods cause injury and death, transport conditions are often wholly inappropriate for the species involved, holding conditions in transit and at destination are frequently inadequate, and the disruption of social and ecological relationships causes ongoing stress for survivors. This is not primarily a story about rare or endangered species — although that dimension matters — it is a story about billions of individual animals experiencing profound suffering to supply human markets. The welfare case against the wildlife trade, entirely independent of conservation arguments, is overwhelming.