As many as 51 incidents of illegal wildlife trade were reported from Karnataka during 2020. Overall, 173 incidents were documented from southern States - Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana - in the year, a new analysis of data has found.
The report, ‘“Wildlife Poaching and Illegal Trade in India: 2020’ by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) - India, which aims at providing a comprehensive overview of illegal wildlife trade in India for 2020, is an assessment of data collected through publicly available online open-source newspaper articles carried out by our Counter Wildlife Trafficking (CWT) team.
“We documented 522 unique reports of wildlife poaching and trade in 2020 from India. We came across the maximum number of events involving ungulates (89 incidents), followed by big cats (82 incidents), pangolins (72 incidents), tortoises and freshwater turtles (61 incidents), elephants (57 incidents), red sandalwood (52 incidents), other reptiles (49 incidents), birds (37 incidents), marine wildlife (35 incidents), other mammals (34 incidents), uncategorized (17 incidents), non-native wildlife (13 incidents), and rhinos (9 incidents),” the report said, adding that the number of documented incidents from media reports suggests that despite the pandemic and the related lockdowns, illegal hunting and trade in wildlife continued across India.
