Nature Conservation Efforts That We Can Do From Home Part-1: Deter Illegal Pet Trade

2 min readSep 19, 2020

Nature conservation is a wide field of protecting life forms and natural resources world wide. This includes animals, rare or common and also plants and trees , so that they may take their place in various life cycles. Conservation seeks the sustainable use of nature. I will restrict this writeup to animal conservation from the perspective of human health.

What is the illegal pet trade?

The illegal pet trade is a trade in which animals are stolen from the wild or kept in very bad conditions where zoonotic (disease that can spread from animal to person) diseases can spread and rare animals die because of inexperienced owners and the inability of experienced owners to simulate the habitat they were stolen from . E.g. capuchins, ornamental tarantulas, tokay geckos, lions, and tigers (USA and Mexico .etc). Also animals are smuggled to different countries that they are not native to and populations are falling in the forests by the hour . The number of tigers in the wild is only 3890.

How do people smuggle animals from other countries?

They fake the permits needed for transporting animals, and they smuggle [Ref#2]. These are the different secondary ways that a person or a group involved in doing this can ship animals from one country to another . There are other methods, for example when there is a demand for a particular live product and the government under high demand licenses a particular group of trustworthy people to bring the product into the country and in a very limited amount so that they do not endanger the population living in the wild.

What can we do now?

Stay alert , interfere with any illegal activity with animals and get the wildlife officers involved with proof [Ref#3]. This is one of the many things that you can do [Ref#4]. If the “owner” is family or friend , tell them to keep the animal happy until such time they can rehabilitate it. If they are interfering with a species on the list, tell them to surrender the animal to the authorities by telling them that this is a native species, or a rare species.