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In 2019, I attended CITES CoP18 in Geneva, two weeks of watching how decisions are made about which endangered and exotic species can be legally traded. During the mid-conference break, my colleagues and I took the 4-hour drive to Milan, to take a look at what was on sale in...

So how does Australia contribute to the global Exotic Pet Trade (EPT)? The scale of it is surprising, apparently rising and happens in legal and illegal ways. On top of this, it seems a level of naivety has in the past contributed to Australia’s involvement.  As such I will look...

The 2023 BBC investigation, The Monkey Haters, which exposed the torture of baby macaques for the online viewing pleasure of sadistic people worldwide, provides a window on a world which profits from a trade in wild species and its light-touch regulation.

The legal wildlife trade has been called one of...

In the final days of 2023, a tip-off to the South African Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation resulted in a 16-hour raid on Derek Lewitton’s South African ranch. Twenty-six rhino carcasses were located during the raid and it was suggested by officers that there could be more, “From the helicopter...

Surely Australia doesn’t really have any involvement in a trade of wildlife to the rest of the world for purposes of pet ownership, does it? Pet ownership couldn’t really be a significant driver of the biodiversity loss across the globe, could it?

This is my first blog for Nature Needs...

One of the key arguments used for not moving to a reverse-listing (positive-listing, white-listing) regulatory system for the trade in wild species is that CITES already has a mechanism for implementing the precautionary principle - the Non-Detriment Findings (NDFs). In theory, the convention directs signatory counties to only issue export...

Having just returned from Washington DC and meetings with political representatives and advisors from both side of the aisle, what is evident is how little they know about the international commercial legal trade in wild species.

The pattern of the meetings was them bringing up elephants and rhinos, hunting trophies...

Businesses and their investors have had 50 years to prove they could curb their excess with voluntary governance systems. They have decisively failed. Even now, in the face of natural and heath disasters, the success of new iterations of voluntary self-governance is being exaggerated. It is time to call them...

It is time to accept that the current system of protecting species from over-exploitation by commercialising them is not working and hasn’t for some decades.

The problem with regulating the legal trade in wild species and protecting species from extinction through trade is that the underlying basic assumption of the...

A recent article in the Daily Maverick put all the same old pro-trade spin on opening the international trade in rhino horn. While there are plenty of counter arguments, again they have also been discussed for more than a decade, again-and-again.

So, with this response, I will only clear up...

Are 2,000 captive-bred, farmed rhinos of any value from either a commercial or conservation perspective?

John Hume, the owner of the world’s largest private rhino herd, is auctioning off his rhino farm, the starting bid being US$10 million. The question is, what are Hume’s rhinos really worth?

In recent weeks...

The International Institute for Sustainable Development’s (IISD) SDG Knowledge Hub recently invited a number of guest articles about the trade in wild species. John Scanlon (with co-authors) contributed a number of articles to explore the state of CITES 50 years after it was agreed.

Before taking a closer look at...