Wildlife Crimes & Their Impact On Earth

From a young age, I found myself to have a natural affinity with nature and its’ wildlife. Growing up in a rural area in south-central Kansas gave me the resources I needed to make this connection and the want to pursue a career as a natural resources officer (game warden). Our natural resources are precious and need to be conserved and managed correctly to ensure that they are still around for future generations to come. However, this is not an easy endeavor and the acts that make conservation the most difficult are wildlife crimes. These can be as simple as shooting an animal out of legal season or could be as serious as there being a big organizational structure that is participating in worldwide illegal wildlife trading of resources such as horns, exotic furs, or live animals. Most wildlife trading is legal but The International Criminal Police Organization puts the estimates of the worth of the illegal wildlife trade worldwide to be around 10 billion dollars.

Stopping this illegal trading is essential to conserving these resources for years to come and preserving something that serves a big part in our well-being. Therefore this paper will further investigate what the full scope of wildlife crime effect on our planet’s ecosystem and economy is, while also portraying some of the methods that the criminal justice system is dealing with this problem over the last couple decades.

The Issue Abroad

Before investigating the potential solutions, it is important to look at how the illegal wildlife trade works and the exact kind of impacts that it’s causing. The general flow of goods harvested in wildlife crimes (poaching in particular) are from undeveloped countries such as those in most of the continent of Africa to developed countries, in particular the United States. So, before the issue is tackled here, the focus must be put on where the main root of the crimes lie.

One popular and particularly sad example is the poaching of tigers that is occurring in India over the past several decades. A population that once numbered over 58,000 individuals two-hundred years ago now numbers less than 1500 individuals as of 2008. The furs of these tigers are just too valuable for some people to pass up. India has increased efforts to protect the tiger and populations have rebounded slightly since the introduction a total ban of shooting of tigers in 1970 and the founding of project tiger in 1973 which fundraises money to put more efforts forth in law enforcement and habitat restoration to protect the remaining tigers. For all of these poachers, I believe the way to find their reasoning for poaching such a beautiful animal is to investigate the rational choice model. It is widely known that if an individual believes the potential rewards of a crime outweigh the potential consequences, they will likely commit that wildlife crime. The combatting of this rationale will be discussed later with the solutions section.

There are countless other places across the where wildlife crimes are committed that not only benefit individuals, but also corrupt governments and rebel fighting groups in poor countries that need the resources to fund new weapons and ammunition. The police forces and court systems in these third world countries can be so corrupt that they just allow these crimes to slide. This may be through a simple lack of funding or through cash incentives to just keep their mouths shut and continue to let the crimes occur. This may seem crooked to us here in the states, but in poor foreign countries social disorganization and social learning theory can explain why it is not frowned upon. In simpler terms, communities have been ravaged by war and poverty, therefore criminal behavior such as wildlife poaching is learned or passed down through generations as means to survive and produce an income for their families. Some of these incomes or incentives can be as lucrative as $60,000 from a single endangered Lear’s Macaw, pieces of ivory selling for upwards of $1,500 in Vietnam, or even wood from trees that can sell for thousands of dollars a cubic meter.

Another extreme example that was thankfully caught before they could be sold, but unfortunately not before they were killed was an instance where thousands of seahorses were poached and headed and Asian market. These animals would’ve brought a market value of about $250,000 dollars. Though illegal logging would be considered an environmental crime opposed to a wildlife crime, it is still a multi-billion-dollar illegal industry worldwide that directly effects the survival rates of exotic wildlife and the habitat they need to hide from potential wildlife crime threats. Illegal loggers cut areas of land equal to the size of a football field every few seconds and in some countries more than 9/10 of the logging taking place is illegal.

The study I found “Justice for Forests Improving Criminal Justice Efforts to Combat Illegal Logging” that was done over illegal logging was very useful and insightful. It explained that often forest rangers alone in most countries don’t have enough of a presence to effectively stop the illegal activity from taking place. Rather, it is a collective effort of the whole criminal justice system to bring these perpetrators forward and deal with the matter decisively. This team should include the rangers on the ground, intel groups (GIS technicians and detectives), prosecutors, and the judge to deliver a rightfully just punishment to discourage future offenses from other individuals. Often times these illegal loggers work in very remote places at the darkest parts of the night. This is to avoid detection and further stresses the importance of technology in today’s criminal justice system to locate potential hotspots for rangers to set up and combat the logging effort.

The study came to a conclusion of what recommendations should be mad to combat these illegal loggers and I think the same concepts could be used for wildlife crimes and any sort of crim for that matter. First, the study lists policy recommendations including enlisting the private sector and improving domestic cooperation. Secondly, the study lists operational recommendations for staff in the collective effort including working together, attack corruption, and specifically targeting the most serious and vulnerable offenders. It is a well known concept that if you cut the head off the snake (trafficker planners and bosses), the snake dies.