Preface

Eight years to the day, I was sitting in an office in the Department of Politics and International Relations on the campus of The Australian National University finishing the first edition of this book. I had the pleasure of being a visiting research fellow for Professor Lorraine Elliott’s Transnational Environmental Crime project. For the second edition, I am sat on my couch, back in the Northeast of England wondering if the next stage of the easing of lockdown restrictions will prove to be too soon. In the intervening time between these two moments, I have continued to be immersed in the world of wildlife trafficking. I have attended two of the global conferences on the illegal wildlife trade (the London 2014 and 2018 conferences), been the rapporteur for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth and US State Department event on Wildlife Trafficking as a Security Issue at Wilton Park in 2015, conducted years of research on wildlife trade and trafficking between Mexico and the EU with Dr Inez Arroyo-Quiroz, spoken at and attended dozens of events including a UK House of Lords event to launch the Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime spearheaded by the former CITES Secretary General John Scanlon, contributed to numerous reports, written dozens of articles and book chapters, and been awarded a leadership fellowship to research CITES (where I attended a Conference of the Parties and wrote a book about CITES implementation and compliance) all whilst being accompanied by my dog, Gobi, who we brought home not long after returning to England from Australia in 2013. I have supported curbing, ending wildlife trafficking because I believe that non-humans can be victims of crime (in addition to all the other ways the crime is significant). I have never doubted that non-humans feel emotions, including pain, but also joy. Spending each day with my furry, lively, willful dog-friend has reinforced to me how true this is and certainly not just dogs, but the diversity of non-humans. But more than deserving to be recognised as victims, non-humans need to be recognised as members of multispecies societies. Being a member of a society means having your interests included in the deliberations about the functioning of communities. For me, representing the interests of non-humans in our political processes is how we must go about repairing our relationship to nature and the environment; to stop the next pandemic; to stop the downward spiral of the biodiversity crisis and climate change. As we work towards this goal of representing the non-human, the range of stakeholders in the criminal justice, conservation, governmental, academic, and private sectors must continue to try to collaborate to better understand wildlife trafficking and to improve prevention, detection, disruption, prosecution, and so forth of this green crime. This second book is the ongoing compilation of the years of research I have conducted, the thousands of articles and media reports that I have read and the thousands of conversations that I have had with police, governmental and intergovernmental officials, NGO staff, and academics since 2005. The intention for the first edition was and for this second edition remains to provide a wide overview of wildlife trafficking and its significance, complexity, and diversity; to continue to move forward the conceptualisation and understanding of victims and offenders; to further the knowledge of how prevention strategies and policy interventions should be approached; and to advocate for more political will and, now, for more voices to be heard—including the wildlife—in order to end this urgent threat to many of the species of the globe.