Legal and illegal wildlife trade causes enormous welfare harm to individual animals, with CITES enforcement and demand reduction campaigns the primary regulatory and behavioral interventions.
Wildlife trade welfare involves both the acute suffering during capture and transport, and the chronic welfare compromise of animals that survive to reach buyers. Transport conditions for wildlife often involve extraordinary crowding, denial of food and water, extreme temperature fluctuations, and darkness - conditions that cause severe stress and high mortality even for species with significant stress tolerance. Animals that arrive alive frequently bear injuries from capture and transport, are severely dehydrated, and are placed in environments that cannot meet their specialized requirements by buyers who rarely have the knowledge or resources to care for them appropriately. The welfare harm is enormous in scale and affects species whose individual suffering has historically been disregarded.