In 2010, graphs that showed wild rhino numbers in South Africa plummeting towards zero began to circulate among conservationists. The animals were being poached at a rate far above replacement level, in a repeat of the crisis that had nearly wiped them out in the 1970s. Similar figures soon appeared for elephant populations in East Africa. In 2016, the Environmental Investigation Agency...
Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade by Rosaleen Duffy. Linking wildlife trafficking to global security helped make states see it as an important problem, but framing it as a security concern made their response much more likely to take the form of militarised anti-poaching operations and other ‘security’ measures rather than actions that attempted to address the structural drivers of the illegal wildlife trade, including economic inequality. Military contractors, of course, have a clear interest in the success of the security paradigm.
