ABSTRACT
Despite growing environmental awareness and the efforts of a variety of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to influence the wildlife protection policy agenda, wildlife laws remain outside the remit of mainstream criminal justice, and their enforcement is often a fringe area of policing whose public policy and enforcement response significantly relies on NGOs. This chapter considers wildlife crime in respect of poaching and retaliatory killings of animals, and it critically evaluates different perspectives on wildlife crime and its law enforcement and policy imperatives. The chapter argues that in wildlife crime prevention, NGOs are essential, and that wildlife crime ought to be integrated into mainstream crime policy linked to other forms of offending and criminal justice policy, rather than be largely seen as a purely environmental issue and a ‘fringe’ area of policing. A practitioner’s perspective from an officer of the RSPCA in the United Kingdom calls for a greater understanding of the links between rural and wildlife crime and its connections to other criminality.
