Time to halt the trade and traffic of wildlife.

It’s World Environment Day 2016, and the focus is on wildlife trade.  Coupled with habitat loss and destruction, the wildlife trade is stripping what habitat is left of all kinds of species.  This insideous crime is pushing species to the edge and needs a Global commitment to halt it. Everything from invertebrates through to birds, frogs, reptiles and mammals are being taken from the wild and distributed around the world for relatively small amouts of money to the people doing the catching.  At the heart of the trade are criminal gangs moving species around with corruption obvously involved to let them get away with it.

The sad issue here is that the trade is driven by demand.  There would be no point of increasing supply if no one wanted it. The pressure, therefore, not only needs to be on enforcement to halt the crimes in the first place, but to change the attitudes of those who will buy the products.

Illegal wildlife trading threatens the survival of many species while posing detrimental environmental risks. On World Environment Day this year on 5 June, the United Nations is urging everyone to "Go Wild for Life" by opening our eyes to species under threat and making a difference by showing zero-tolerance for the illegal wildlife trade. In honor of this campaign, we're shedding light on parrot trafficking in Brazil and investigating how DNA sequence analysis can be a powerful conservation tool in the future.

Image: Blue-and-yellow Macaw in flight by Luc Viatour. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.