Hunting and Wildlife Trade
- Pet Trade Photo
- Endangered animals, like this tamarin, are taken from their forest homes and kept as pets or sold as bush meat in Ecuador.
- Julie Larsen Maher ©WCS
Wildlife trade is a critical global challenge—feeding an international appetite for exotic goods including ivory, pelts, traditional medicines, and wild meats. As the human footprint expands, so does the trade: The more access we gain into wild places, the more we exploit their resources. As WCS works to stem the unsustainable harvest of wild animals, our challenge is twofold. We must balance the subsistence and economic needs of local people with the control of a vast threat, which has driven many species to the brink of extinction, endangered ecosystems, and created new dangers to human health, spreading monkey pox, SARS, avian flu, and other deadly diseases.
WCS Projects
WCS’s Wildlife Crimes Unit helps intercept the trade in illegal tiger parts on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. The island’s populations of tigers and other endangered species are under siege by poachers who sell the animals into complex trade chains. These chains often terminate in illegal markets in China and other parts of East Asia.
To help Cameroon stem the dangerous trade in bushmeat from forests to lucrative urban markets, WCS partners with the country’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry and the CAMRAIL national train network—in the past, a common means of transporting large volumes of wildlife.
WCS works with the CIB logging company to reduce the pressures on gorillas, elephants, and other endangered wildlife in four timber concessions and to control the trade in bushmeat. This collaborative project is called PROGEPP: the Project for Ecosystem Management in the Nouabalé-Ndoki Periphery Area.
From the Newsroom
WCS finds Vietnam’s commercial wildlife farms are hurting, not helping wildlife. A new report says the farms are a detriment to conservation efforts and enforcement.
During an aerial survey to assess levels of poaching in Chad’s wet season, WCS conservationist Mike Fay found that elephants who went in search of forage outside Zakouma National Park paid the exit fee with their lives.