In 2019, Malawi registered a massive win in the fight against the illegal wildlife trade. Intelligence-driven operations culminated in the arrest of more than a dozen members of the Chinese-led…
Wildlife conservation activists have welcomed an update to China’s list of officially sanctioned medicines, which drops 13 traditional formulas containing pangolin parts. The move offers the world’s most trafficked mammal…
In Brazil’s Yanomami Indigenous Territory and across other parts of the Amazon Basin, illegal gold mining has metastasized into a transnational criminal enterprise. What starts with illegal deforestation and mercury poisoning ends…
In February 2025, rangers at Okapi Wildlife Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in partnership with the Okapi Conservation Project, successfully brought an okapi to Epulu, site of the…
KATHMANDU — Recently, one morning in Kathmandu, senior lawyer Padam Bahadur Shrestha reclined in his cluttered second-floor office in a neighborhood near Nepal government’s administrative headquarters Singha Durbar. On one…
BANGKOK — Many long-tailed macaques imported into the United States from Southeast Asia were likely poached from the wild and then sold as captive-bred to medical research institutions, a recent report…
Every year, during the Northern Hemisphere spring and autumn, the skies over Lebanon are dotted with millions of birds on their epic migrations. From soaring Egyptian vultures (Neophron percnopterus) to…
ROKAN HULU/PADANG/CENTRAL ACEH, Indonesia — In separate incidents in early March, officials across three Indonesian provinces rescued a critically endangered Sumatran tiger with its leg amputated, arrested six people for…
The New Arab and The Shift co-published a set of edited versions of this investigation. As the sun hung low over the Nile, casting golden ripples across the water, we…
Fewer than 150 Malayan tigers remain in their home range of Peninsular Malaysia. Poaching to supply an illegal trade in their body parts is a major threat to the survival…
Latin America, a biodiversity hotspot home to 40% of the world’s species, is witnessing an alarming decline in its wildlife. Illegal wildlife trafficking to wealthier parts of the world, such…
Deadly drownings of animals in water canals for irrigation and other purposes have been observed in various countries. The dry and semiarid regions of the planet are even more vulnerable…
ANTANANARIVO — Authorities in Madagascar have arrested 19 people on suspicion of trafficking tortoises, part of intensifying efforts in the country to crack down on the illegal wildlife trade. The…
Authorities in Indonesia have made yet another major seizure of smuggled songbirds, highlighting the persistent pressure from a trade with deep cultural roots in the country. The shipment of 6,860…
MOROGORO, Tanzania — Often dismissed as pests, rats have long been misunderstood. But the African giant pouched rat (Cricetomys ansorgei), the world’s longest, is challenging that perception. With its intelligence…
Big cats, birds, primates and pangolins were among the nearly 20,000 threatened or protected animals rescued in a recent global operation against wildlife and forestry traffickers. Led by Interpol and…
From the glacial fjords of Chilean Patagonia to the beaches and mountains of Baja California, Hispanic America, representing Spanish-speaking countries in South and Central America and the Caribbean, is a…
KATHMANDU — In the 1970s, Nepal’s government faced major challenges conserving the fertile flood plains of the country’s south. The region is the natural habitat of the iconic greater one-horned…
KATHMANDU, Nepal — Wildlife crime continues to plague Nepal, even as the law enforcement strives at the forefront. The country functions both as a source and transit hub for wildlife…
The Bangladeshi government’s forest department recently added surveillance drones to their arsenal of conservation tools. Wildlife inspectors started using this technology to prepare a dragnet around a poaching hotspot with…
Wildlife trafficking remains a pressing threat to the survival of countless species, with sharks, pangolins, rhinos, birds, big cats and others among the hardest hit. Mongabay’s extensive reporting aligns with…
Pangolins have the dubious distinction of being the most trafficked mammals in the world. Yet as often as they wind up in wildlife seizures, authorities and conservationists have no universal…
Cockfighting has been illegal in Costa Rica for more than a century, but this violent tradition persists underground across the country. To make the birds deadlier, their owners often tie…
Taman Negara, Peninsular Malaysia's premier national park, is celebrated for its extraordinary biodiversity centered around a 130-million-year-old tropical rainforest that’s believed to be the world’s oldest. Within it, a remarkable…
Bangladesh, a signatory nation of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), has failed to control illegal bird trade and has recently been…
LOLIONDO, Tanzania — Whistleblowers speaking to Mongabay have reported instances of poaching over decades in Tanzania linked to a luxury hunting firm catering to the United Arab Emirates’ elites and…
PADANG, Indonesia — One of an estimated 400 of the world’s remaining Sumatran tigers was found dead on July 25 after becoming trapped in a wire snare set in Agam…
In May, authorities in southern Thailand arrested six people for illegally transporting 48 lemurs and more than 1,200 critically endangered tortoises, all of which had reportedly been obtained from the…
After being locally extinct for a century in Belém, the host city of next year’s COP30 climate summit, it’s being reintroduced by conservationists who have so far released 50 individuals into the wild since 2018.
A new report has found wildlife smugglers employ sophisticated methods to traffic species from the Brazilian rainforest, including widespread fraud and corruption.
Indonesian prosecutors are seeking a five-year jail sentence for a poacher who confessed to participating in killing seven Javan rhinos from 2019-2023, essentially wiping out at least 10% the species’…
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center’s Ocean Reporting Network, where Philip Jacobson is a fellow. Four years of investigating jaguar parts trafficking rings in Latin America led Andrea…
