Illegal Wildlife Trade Tied to Drugs, Arms, and Human Trafficking

Illegal Wildlife Trade Tied to Drugs, Arms, and Human Trafficking

By Rachel Nuwer edited by Andrea Thompson

In 2021 investigators in South Africa received a tip that a Vietnamese organized crime ring was operating out of a local farm. When they raided the property, they found more than 800 pounds of lion “cake”—a traditional medicine product made by boiling lion bones to remove the gelatin from joints. The investigators also found 13 gallons of opium that the suspects had been adding to their lion cake.

Illegal wildlife trade is a multibillion-dollar industry carried out by organized criminal gangs with operations spanning continents. Now new research in the Journal of Economic Criminology confirms that those same gangs are also frequently involved in other forms of criminal activity, including trafficking in drugs, arms, people, stolen vehicles, mined resources, counterfeit goods and human body parts.

“We’re seeing criminal networks around the world being more adaptable and interconnected and almost commodity agnostic,” says study lead author Michelle Anagnostou, a University of Oxford researcher of illegal wildlife trade. This points to the need for “a comprehensive organized crime approach to trafficking activities as a whole, with less focus on the commodity being trafficked,” she says.

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Experts in wildlife crime have long suspected a link with other kinds of criminality, but the new findings provide robust evidence that confirms that connection and elucidates the many forms it takes. Anagnostou carried out 112 interviews with sources in South Africa, Hong Kong and Canada who deal directly with crime, including wildlife officers, national and local police officers, customs agents, intelligence analysts, and experts in organized crime, money laundering and drugs.

The findings revealed criminal overlap that took a multitude of forms. In some cases, cartels that specialized in drugs, gold, diamonds or human trafficking opportunistically added wildlife goods such as rhino horn, rare succulents or bear gallbladders to their dealings; in other cases, wildlife specialists expanded to drugs, stolen goods or sex trafficking. Wildlife at times was used to barter for drugs, too—for example, abalone was traded for methamphetamine and sturgeon exchanged for heroin. Anagnostou also heard of drug traffickers who protected their stash with illegal pet lions or tigers and people who used illegal arms to poach animals. Additionally, criminal bosses sometimes exploited people through forced labor to extract illegal goods from the field, including rhino horn, elk, ginseng, sea cumbers and harp seal oil.

These interconnections show that “the previous long-standing approach of countering each type of organized crime separately is no longer sufficient,” Anagnostou says. “By working separately and not working with each other across units, the bigger picture is missed. Bridging this requires sharing intelligence, data, joint task forces, international cooperation that is not limited to certain illegal commodities, [and] even more coordinated legal strategies.”

“It took years of persistent lobbying, backed up by evidence, to persuade the mandated authorities that illegal wildlife trade was actually being perpetrated by organized criminal networks,” says Mary Rice, executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency. Generating “acceptance and acknowledgment” that wildlife crime also frequently converges with other forms of organized crime is the next step in that conversation, she says, and something that the new study could help with.

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