Fighting Wildlife Crime

In order to commit a wildlife crime, you have to break a law.

So let's quickly run through where these laws come from.

So there's big international laws, and the most significant is CITES, which is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

And that sets out an international agreement, just over 50 years old now, about which species are of particular interest and which ones you are not allowed to trade.

So that's the big international picture.

famously you know ivory is the one we always used to hear about with that but a lot of these trades in endangered species will be covered by that

so they add more species as time goes on i think so it's it's it's adapting so i think at the moment they've got more than 40 000 species on their list that are protected so the trade on them is regulated in some way under that law

And here in the UK, we have quite a basket of legislation covering wildlife crime, but probably the most significant is the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981.

Then we've got the Protection of Badgers Act, and there's the Deer Act and various things.

And when it comes to what's covered under those acts, I looked on the government website at what were their priorities, and it mentioned badgers, bats, poaching of deer and hair-coursing.

what they call raptor persecution, which is often harming birds of prey, and then, interestingly, cybercrime.

Got a mention already.

So clearly this whole technological issue is very much coming up the rails.

I feel it's very easy to talk about these big picture things, but let's get to some specifics.

I'm interested from each of you in an example of a type of crime you've seen that just shows us the range of what comes underneath this umbrella of wildlife crime.

Sure, yeah.

A good example is the use of bears in bear bile farms in Vietnam.

The extraction of bear bile from their gallbladders involves inserting a catheter through the abdominal wall and then extracting the bile out, and it's used as traditional medicine.

It was made illegal in 2005 to extract or to sell the bile, but it's still legal to have these bears in facilities.

Awful conditions, tiny cramped five metre squared cages.

You've got the long term health concerns that are involved with the open wounds that can be associated there, the chronic stress.

But the problem is twofold, really.

One, you've got bears, they're really rugged, resilient animals.

They can live 10 years, even with having their bowel tapped.

But you've also got the issue that because it's still illegal to have them in the farms...

In order to commit a wildlife crime, you have to break a law.

So let's quickly run through where these laws come from.

So there's big international laws, and the most significant is CITES, which is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

And that sets out an international agreement, just over 50 years old now, about which species are of particular interest and which ones you are not allowed to trade.

So that's the big international picture.

famously you know ivory is the one we always used to hear about with that but a lot of these trades in endangered species will be covered by that

so they add more species as time goes on i think so it's it's it's adapting so i think at the moment they've got more than 40 000 species on their list that are protected so the trade on them is regulated in some way under that law

And here in the UK, we have quite a basket of legislation covering wildlife crime, but probably the most significant is the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981.

Then we've got the Protection of Badgers Act, and there's the Deer Act and various things.

And when it comes to what's covered under those acts, I looked on the government website at what were their priorities, and it mentioned badgers, bats, poaching of deer and hair-coursing.

what they call raptor persecution, which is often harming birds of prey, and then, interestingly, cybercrime.

Got a mention already.

So clearly this whole technological issue is very much coming up the rails.

I feel it's very easy to talk about these big picture things, but let's get to some specifics.

I'm interested from each of you in an example of a type of crime you've seen that just shows us the range of what comes underneath this umbrella of wildlife crime.

Sure, yeah.

A good example is the use of bears in bear bile farms in Vietnam.

The extraction of bear bile from their gallbladders involves inserting a catheter through the abdominal wall and then extracting the bile out, and it's used as traditional medicine.

It was made illegal in 2005 to extract or to sell the bile, but it's still legal to have these bears in facilities.

Awful conditions, tiny cramped five metre squared cages.

You've got the long term health concerns that are involved with the open wounds that can be associated there, the chronic stress.

But the problem is twofold, really.

One, you've got bears, they're really rugged, resilient animals.

They can live 10 years, even with having their bowel tapped.

But you've also got the issue that because it's still illegal to have them in the farms...