Justice & Law Quote by Peter Knights

Calling the illegal wildlife trade a "multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise" is a deliberate reframing move: Peter Knights isn’t asking you to picture poachers in the brush, he’s asking you to picture an industry with supply chains, money laundering, and professionalized violence. The intent is strategic escalation. If the problem is framed as niche conservation, it can be safely delegated to charities and park rangers. If it’s framed as organized crime, it becomes the business of finance ministries, customs agencies, and national security councils.

The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. "Fuels corruption" foregrounds the lubricant that makes trafficking durable: bribes at borders, bought permits, compromised courts. It implies that even well-designed laws fail when enforcement can be purchased, which is why the next clause lands: "undermines the rule of law". Knights is pointing to a structural threat, not a moral one. Wildlife trafficking becomes a stress test for the state: can institutions enforce rules when the incentives to break them are high and the risk is low?

"Threatens global security" is the most expansive claim, and that’s the point. It invites a coalition beyond environmentalists by linking illicit wildlife flows to the same networks that move drugs, weapons, and people, and to the instability that follows when armed groups and corrupt officials profit. Subtext: compassion for animals isn’t enough to win; power responds to risk. This line is built to travel in policy memos, not just protests, converting outrage into jurisdiction.