224 J Maher and T Wyatt In referring to wildlife as ‘animals’ we specifically mean ‘non-human animals’ in this context, because clearly humans are also animals Our discussion is informed by data taken from the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) online trade database and also by data collected for the European Union EFFACE project1 (Sollund and Maher 2015) The chapter begins with an overview of the prevalence of legal and illegal wildlife trade providing an insight into the regions of the world involved This is followed by details of the abuse that is endured by the wildlife in either case We then explore the motivations for engaging in the wildlife trade, using two criminological theories to help explain offenders’ behaviour in the illegal trade This is followed by an evaluation of current responses to the illegal wildlife trade, with a particular focus on the official UK response Prevalence Due to the scale and global and complicated nature of the legal and illegal trade, accurate data is scarce and estimates are often relied upon Some information is available in the form of which species of animals are protected and in which capacity by CITES As of October 2013 there are 5,592 species listed in the CITES appendices—630 in Appendix I, 4,827 in Appendix II, and 135 in Appendix III (CITES 2015) The animals traded are amphibians, birds, fish, invertebrates, mammals and reptiles The legal trade in CITES species is worth billions of dollars annually and includes millions of individual animals It is important to note that the CITES database only records trade in protected species; many more species fall outside the CITES remit and are thus traded legally without regulation or measurement (Thereby, these estimates not include the billions of additional dollars generated from non-regulated animal trade, such as from non-protected fish species) The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) (n.d.) estimates a yearly total of USD 160 billion As indicated above, a portion of this trade is live animals and plants These fill the demand by zoos, circuses and laboratories as well as for private collections, gardens, The EFFACE project contained four case study locations—UK, Norway, Brazil, Columbia—where qualitative data was collected by means of 28 semi-structured expert interviews (UK: 11, Norway: 12 and five offenders) and five observations (UK: 4, Norway 1) and documentary analysis on 46 customs confiscation reports Professor Ragnhild Sollund, co-researcher on the EFFACE project, compiled the data from Norway and South America