Vaults & Velvet Chains

From rainforests to private zoos, the billion-dollar wildlife trade is thriving in shadows, characterized by crime and corporate ambitions—threatening biodiversity and blurring the line between rescue and exploitation

- DIPANKAR DEY

The World Wildlife Crime Report (2024) reveals that the global scope and overall scale of wildlife trafficking remain substantial. Seizures document illegal trade in 162 countries and territories during 2015-2021, affecting around 4,000 plant and animal species, approximately 3,250 of them listed in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Appendices.

As a crude depiction of scale, these seizures involved 13 million items reported by number and over 16,000 tons reported by weight during these seven years. This illegal trade flows into a wide range of end-use sectors, including food, medicine, live animal and plant keeping, and "luxury" goods.

Actual wildlife trafficking levels are, of course, far greater than the recorded seizures. The report also flags that wildlife crime is interconnected with the activities of large and powerful organized crime groups operating in some of the most fragile and diverse ecosystems—from the Amazon to the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia.

Addressing wildlife trafficking in these circumstances requires a broader strategy to address organized crime as a whole. In an alarming development, a Kolkata-based NGO, Swazon, moved the High Court on July 1, 2025, alleging that 321 animals had gone "missing" from the Alipore Zoological Garden in Kolkata—one of India's oldest zoos.

The NGO claimed that according to the Annual Inventory of Animals in Zoos' report, compiled every year by the Central Zoo Authority (CZA), the animals had gone missing between the last day of fiscal 2023-24 and the first day of fiscal 2024-25. Earlier, in a similar incident, a notice issued in July 2019 by the Islamabad Metropolitan Corporation (IMC) said there were a total of 917 animals and birds of different species missing from Islamabad zoo.