Wildlife Trade & Trafficking

Scale and Context

Wildlife trade — the buying and selling of wild animals and their parts — is both a legal and an illegal industry. Legal wildlife trade, regulated under CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), involves everything from tropical fish for aquariums to zoo animals to medicinal ingredients. Illegal wildlife trafficking is estimated to be worth $7–23 billion annually, making it the world's fourth-largest criminal enterprise after drugs, arms, and human trafficking.

The welfare dimensions of wildlife trade are distinct from its conservation dimensions, though they are deeply linked. An animal trafficked from the wild suffers regardless of whether its species is endangered. The capture, transport, and sale of wild animals involves extreme stress, injury, and death — with mortality rates in some trades estimated at 80% or higher between capture and final destination.

Key Wildlife Trade Categories

The Welfare Costs of Capture and Transit

The journey from wild animal to consumer involves suffering at every stage:

• Capture methods: Live animals are captured using traps, nets, snares, and hunting — methods that cause injury. For primates, adults may be killed to capture infants. For birds, capture nets frequently cause broken wings and other injuries.
• Initial confinement: Wild animals experience extreme stress when first confined. Capture myopathy — muscle damage from extreme stress — can be fatal even after the animal appears uninjured.
• Concealment and smuggling: To evade detection, animals are concealed in conditions of extraordinary cruelty — stuffed into tubes, hidden in luggage, dehydrated, and kept in complete darkness. Pangolins are stuffed into bags and piled on top of each other; parrots are wrapped in paper and packed into cardboard boxes.
• Mortality rates: Estimates for some trades are alarming — for parrots, up to 60% may die before reaching the buyer. For marine tropical fish, 80% may die. These mortality rates mean that the "survivors" represent only a fraction of the animals that suffered to produce them.
• Quarantine and holding: Animals that survive smuggling may be held in inadequate quarantine conditions, exposed to disease from animals of multiple species kept together.

Focus Species

🐼 Pangolins — The World's Most Trafficked Mammal

Pangolins — scaly anteaters found in Africa and Asia — have become the world's most trafficked mammal, with over 1 million trafficked in the past decade. Their scales are used in traditional medicine; their meat is a luxury food in some Asian markets. All eight pangolin species are now CITES-listed. Pangolins have extremely high captivity mortality — most die within weeks of capture due to stress and inability to adapt to captive diets.

🦍 Great Apes

Chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans are trafficked for the exotic pet trade, entertainment, and bushmeat. For every ape that reaches a buyer alive, estimates suggest 5–10 individuals die during capture and transit (adults are often killed to capture infants). Great apes are highly intelligent, form strong family bonds, and suffer profoundly in captivity.

🐻 Bear Bile Farming

An estimated 12,000–20,000 bears — primarily Asiatic black bears and sun bears — are kept on bile farms in China, Vietnam, South Korea, and Laos. Bears are "milked" for bile via surgically implanted catheters or "free-drip" wounds. Conditions are severely restrictive. Bear bile's active compound (ursodeoxycholic acid) is available synthetically, making the farming medically unnecessary.

🦅 Raptors and Falconry

The falconry trade drives demand for wild-caught raptors. Peregrine falcons, saker falcons, and other species are trafficked — particularly from Central Asia to the Middle East. While falconry with captive-bred birds has lower welfare impacts, the wild capture trade persists.

CITES: The International Framework

CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) is the primary international mechanism regulating wildlife trade. Key facts:

Pandemic Risk

Wildlife trade is a significant driver of zoonotic disease emergence — one of the most important public health dimensions of animal welfare policy:

• Most emerging infectious diseases originate in animals. The wildlife trade creates unprecedented opportunities for novel pathogens to jump to humans — mixing species that would never naturally encounter each other under high-stress conditions.
• HIV originated in chimpanzees via bushmeat hunting. SARS emerged from civet cats in wildlife markets. COVID-19 likely emerged at the human-wildlife interface. MERS emerged from camels.
• The Wuhan wet market — where wild animals were sold alive and slaughtered alongside each other — exemplified the conditions that facilitate virus spillover.
• China took steps to restrict wildlife trade following COVID-19, but implementation has been inconsistent, and many exceptions were carved out for traditional medicine purposes.

See our Pandemic Risk & Factory Farming page for the broader context of animal-to-human disease transmission.

What You Can Do

Further Reading

• TRAFFIC — Wildlife trade monitoring network
• CITES — Official convention website with species databases
• World Animal Protection — Wildlife trade campaigns
• Pandemic Risk & Factory Farming — The disease spillover connection
• Wild Animal Suffering — The broader context of wildlife welfare
• Zoo & Aquarium Welfare — Captive wildlife welfare standards