Study reveals harsh environmental impact of illegal wildlife hunting

From January 2014 to March 2020, Chinese authorities won convictions in more than 9,000 cases involving illegal wildlife hunting.

The criminals in those cases illegally hunted 673 species, accounting for 21 percent of the total number of terrestrial vertebrate species in China, including 25 percent of the threatened species listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The total number of individual hunted animals exceeded 3 million, according to a recent study.

The study, led by Liang Dan, an associate research scholar at Princeton University in the United States who is a doctoral graduate of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, was conducted by Liang and four other researchers from China and the US, and was published on Oct 23 in Nature magazine.