Wildlife crime - poaching, illegal trade, and habitat destruction - causes severe welfare harm to millions of individual animals annually while driving species toward extinction.
Wildlife crime causes direct welfare harm to individual animals through capture stress, transport in cruel conditions, and often painful killing methods. Animals in illegal trade experience high mortality during capture and transport - for some species, 80%+ of captured individuals die before reaching the consumer. At the population level, wildlife crime drives species toward extinction, representing welfare harm at an even larger scale. Consumer choices that avoid wildlife products and reporting of suspected wildlife crime are meaningful welfare actions.