OUR WORK

We collaborate with state governments to monitor the illegal wildlife trade and provide them with hands-on training and support to combat poaching and the illegal wildlife trade.

We conduct Wildlife Law Enforcement Workshops for enforcement agencies. More than 4000 forest and police officers have received training in more than 63 workshops which have been held in 16 states across India. We have also given specialist presentations to the National Police Academy, the Indian Institute of Criminology, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), Customs and Excise, the Wildlife Institute of India, tiger reserve authorities, and enforcement training centres.

Our Wildlife Crime Database has details of over 15,300 wildlife cases and is continuously updated with inputs from our countrywide network of investigators. This information plays a critical role in the development of new strategies to protect Indian wildlife.

We were the first organisation to expose the workings of the shahtoosh trade and its links with the trade in tiger parts. We uncovered this trade in the mid-1990s, while investigating the smuggling of tiger bones, and produced a path-breaking report on the subject in 1997 - “Fashioned for Extinction: An Expose of the Shahtoosh Trade”.

Over the years, we have assisted in the arrests of over 375 wildlife criminals and seizures of massive amounts of illegal wildlife products, particularly tiger parts.

Our Legal Programme currently supports the prosecution of over 151 wildlife court cases in 13 Indian states. These include poaching and trade cases that involve tiger and other endangered species. We also file petitions on important wildlife conservation issues, including encroachments in protected areas.

We support Conservation Projects for species as varied as the tiger, otter and sea turtle in the States of Assam, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand and West Bengal.

We have now broadened the scope of our activities to deal with other critical issues such as human-animal conflict involving tigers, leopards and elephants. We also support research projects on issues as diverse as tiger census techniques, the ecological impact of forest resource extraction, and the plight of the snow leopard.

We constantly liaise with policy makers and international conservation agencies, particularly on issues concerning poaching and the illegal wildlife trade. WPSI has also been in the forefront of media campaigns to highlight the importance of wildlife protection.

In 2005 and 2006, WPSI and the UK- based Environmental Protection Agency (EIA) carried out a joint investigation into the tiger and leopard skin trade in the Tibet Autonomous Region and other provinces in China. Our findings revealed a hitherto unknown scale of trade in Asian big cat skins that were being traded and worn as status symbols in Tibet. Our investigations were compiled in a report – “Skinning the Cat: Crime and Politics of the Big Cat Skin Trade”, published in 2006. The results of the investigation and condemnation of the trade by the Dalai Lama have since sparked a massive movement by Tibetans to end the use of wild animal skins