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Wildlife Crime: The Problems of Enforcement

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Abstract

Environmental and wildlife crime appear recently to be benefitting from an increasing profile amongst those agencies tasked with their control, as well as receiving growing criminological attention. Despite this, those with responsibilities in this area report that it remains marginalised, receiving limited resources and suffering from a lack of political impetus to push such problems higher up the agenda. This is particularly so for those agencies, such as the police, that may be seen to have many more pressing objectives. This discussion paper considers the problems of relying on an enforcement approach to controlling such offences, taking, as an example, those activities that may be termed ‘wildlife crime’, focusing on the situation in England and Wales. Firstly, the legislative framework that criminalises harm or exploitation of wildlife is presented, alongside the main enforcement methods used. Next, the problems facing an enforcement approach are critically considered, the key issues being: under-resourcing and marginalisation, the large ‘dark-figure’ of wildlife crime, the possibility of corruption, the lack of seriousness with which such crimes are viewed, and the lack of deterrent effect. Finally, responses to the problems of enforcement are presented, categorised as either methods to improve enforcement or, as the author advocates, methods which are alternatives to enforcement (such as adopting a crime prevention approach). The paper concludes with suggestions for future research in this field.

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Notes

  1. The use of the differing terminologies for the study of harm to the environment and animals other than humans by criminologists has not yet been resolved. All the key terms have their weaknesses, but for the purposes of this paper the term eco-criminology will be used, with due recognition of the equivocal nature of such labels

  2. Another contentious term, writers in this field have found a need to distinguish human animals and nonhuman animals, but have not identified a satisfactory nonspeciesist label. Referring to nonhuman or animals other than humans, tends to raise the importance of humans over other animal species (see, e.g., Beirne 1999), thus there is a tendency to fall back on the more common use of ‘animals’ to exclude humans, which will be adopted for the remainder of this paper.

  3. See http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1981/69

  4. See, for example, discussions regarding the recently held St Petersburg Tiger Summit and the Global Tiger Initiative, which includes partner organisations such as the World Bank, the Smithsonian Institute and Save the Tiger Fund (www.globaltigerinitative.org)

  5. See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100413151441/http://crimereduction.homeoffice.gov.uk/toolkits/index.htm

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield, HD1 3DH, UK

    Melanie Wellsmith

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  1. Melanie Wellsmith
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Correspondence to Melanie Wellsmith.

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Melanie is a senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Huddersfield, UK and previously worked as a research fellow with the UCL Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science. Her research interests are in crime and place, situational crime prevention, crime analysis, criminal law and eco-criminology, particularly harms against animals.

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Wellsmith, M. Wildlife Crime: The Problems of Enforcement. Eur J Crim Policy Res 17, 125–148 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-011-9140-4

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