Traffic: Why It's Time to Get Serious About the Bloody Illegal Wildlife Trade

Traffic: Why It’s Time to Get Serious About the Bloody Illegal Wildlife Trade
by: Bryan Walsh

Hunted animals are used as various resources throughout the world. Some use body parts to create medicines and others simply cook and eat the animals. Poaching is hunting animals illegally and beginning to become a huge issue. There are animals being hunted to extinction because humans believe that they “need” these resources. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) is working very hard to save these endangered species. They work very hard to protect different species of animals. They encourage various lawmakers to change how much can be hunted to lower the amount of animals being hunted. Between 1973 and 2012, the CITES affected the population of the white rhino in Africa from 2,000 to 19,000. Some things that can change poaching as a whole is lawmakers creating stricter laws and investigating these laws also. I think that it is very sad to see animals almost wiped out as a whole because of humans’ greediness. Sometimes we don’t realize that just because they can’t protect themselves from us doesn’t mean we can just kill them and take what they had.

http://science.time.com/2013/03/05/traffic-why-its-time-to-get-serious-about-the-bloody-illegal-wildlife-trade/