This slim volume on wildlife crime is written not by a biologist or activist but, more unusually, by a criminologist. Easy to read, the book is based on the author's and others’ field research over 14 years, mainly in southern and eastern Africa. Designed as an introduction to the illegal wildlife trade, it primarily focuses on wildlife crime in the regions of Africa with which the author is most familiar, occasionally touching on aspects of wildlife crimes in Asia, Europe and the USA.
Chapter 1 describes the illegal wildlife trade, some of the key species traded, and the structure of the markets. Although illuminating, here, and at other points in the book, the author conflates subsistence hunting with criminally-organized international wildlife trafficking. Even though the former might be illegal in many cases, it is very different in almost all ways to the latter, including ethical ones and how it should be addressed.
Chapter 2 looks at national and international efforts to tackle the trade, including national laws, international treaties, and the role of NGOs. Chapter 3 examines who the offenders are, covering poachers, traffickers and consumers. The picture it paints is laudably broad but in doing so, it glosses over some of the complexities, maybe inevitable in a short volume, but does make for a somewhat simplistic impression. Again, the chapter conflates issues, in this case trophy hunting with commercial trade. Very appropriately, it focuses significant attention on the role of corruption, although it would have been helpful to recognize that the picture is not uniform across Africa, with Botswana being the obvious outlier. Chapter 4 explores the reasons that wildlife crime occurs, including applying criminological theory and its relatively new field of green criminology. It describes the history of colonial and post-colonial governments restricting local communities’ access to lands, and recognizes the positive and essential nature of more recent community-based efforts. Chapter 5 focuses on the consumers of illegally traded wildlife, and Chapter 6 on the government agencies in Africa and the USA charged with protecting wildlife. Given that the USA is not, compared with many countries, a major source of trafficked wildlife, it is unclear why so much emphasis is given to describing their wildlife protection systems, unless perhaps as an example of what is working relatively effectively?
Finally, Chapter 7 looks at a range of current efforts to protect wildlife in Africa, including community-based conservation programmes and the application of modern techniques and technologies. Notable absences from the discussion are Namibia, which is arguably the best example in Africa of community-based conservation involving trophy hunting, and also the wildlife enforcement tool SMART (http://smartconservationtools.org/) which has now been adopted by more than 380 sites in 46 countries globally, including across much of eastern and southern Africa.
The book covers much ground, but suffers throughout from a lack of accuracy on details (e.g. CITES enforcement mechanisms, species taxonomies) and, more importantly, from relying extensively on grey literature, much of it more than 15 years old, when the whole picture is changing so rapidly, rather than on the extensive recent peer-reviewed literature. Given this, it is not clear who the intended audience is: the book is in some ways too technical for the general public, but it is not current or accurate enough for the academic or practitioner. The strength that the author brings to the subject is his criminological background alluding, for example, to the application of modern urban policing to wildlife conservation. For his next volume, it would be extremely helpful to students and practitioners of wildlife conservation alike if this perspective could be explored further.
