By Sara Amundson and Kitty Block

The United States is one of the world’s largest destinations for illegal wildlife products. Each year, traffickers smuggle in millions of dollars’ worth of items from poached animals, including shark fins, pangolin scales, ivory trinkets, animal trophies, and live animals like monkeys, parrots and snakes for the pet trade and entertainment.

By Sara Amundson and Kitty Block

The trade in live wild animals and their body parts threatens the survival of so many wildlife species, and it poses serious global security and public health risks. In a one-two punch targeting this international crisis, members of Congress have introduced bills that would bolster our nation’s ability to fight poaching and trafficking, and support U.S efforts to engage diplomatically with other nations to end the sales of live and fresh wildlife for human consumption.

By Sara Amundson and Kitty Block

With a proposal to permit the killing of brown bears over bait in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has “gone rogue.” The USFWS and its parent agency, the Department of the Interior, are way over on the dark side when it comes to the killing of charismatic wildlife by America’s trophy hunters.

By Sara Amundson and Kitty Block

Our National Marine Fisheries Service, slow to take action, really shouldn’t need a prompt about the fierce urgency of now when it comes to protecting the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. Still, a new reminder has come with the tragic sighting last week of a four-year old male badly injured and entangled in fishing lines about two and a half miles off the coast of Sea Bright, New Jersey. 

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