Terrestrial Wildlife

Overview

We share our world with an amazing array of animals, including millions of terrestrial species inhabiting the Earth’s forests, grasslands, tundra, and deserts. Each species is a vital strand within the intricate, interconnected web that sustains life on our planet. Many human activities, however, are having devastating effects on wildlife populations. Climate change, unchecked development, unsustainable agricultural practices, and pollution destroy and degrade habitats. Wild animals suffer from cruel and irresponsible hunting, trapping, and poisoning; capture for commercial trade; vehicle strikes; and the introduction of invasive species and novel diseases.

AWI’s Terrestrial Wildlife Program works at local, state, national, and international levels to safeguard terrestrial wildlife from these threats.

AWI promotes humane solutions to human-wildlife conflicts, while opposing management methods that are cruel, unnecessary, and not based on sound science. We work to ban wildlife killing contests, reform the USDA Wildlife Services program, end the use of the nonselective and highly destructive steel-jaw leghold traps and chemical poisons, and promote coexistence with carnivores, bears, beavers, deer, and birds. AWI also encourages research into humane, nonlethal wildlife management through our Christine Stevens Wildlife Award.

Invoking the Endangered Species Act (ESA), we fight to save threatened and endangered species—including red wolves, gray wolves, Hawaiian honeycreepers, elephants, and pygmy three-toed sloths—and to protect their habitats. We work to fend off congressional and administrative attempts to weaken the ESA and seek sufficient funding to fully realize the law’s protective potential.

AWI works to prevent the commercial exploitation of wild animals by monitoring and contesting unsustainable and inhumane trade in wildlife. We seek bans against the keeping of wild animals as pets, and we participate in meetings of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) to help ensure that international trade does not drive species toward extinction.

Although wild animals face extensive threats, there are many actions that each of us can take to protect wildlife.

Terrestrial Wildlife Campaigns

The multi-billion dollar trade in wildlife and wildlife parts and products is a crisis that animal species are facing worldwide. Animals are captured, killed and traded live or in parts for a number of purposes such...

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Trapping and penning involve methods of capturing or confining wild animals—trapping uses devices like leghold, snare, or box traps to restrain animals, while penning confines them in enclosures where they may be chased or attacked—often causing...

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Wildlife killing contests are organized events in which participants kill animals within a certain timeframe for cash, prizes, entertainment, or other inducements. Teams compete in judging categories that often focus on the number of animals killed,...

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Throughout the world, the vast majority of mammalian, avian, and piscine species are exploited, directly or indirectly, by humans. Broadly speaking, human management of terrestrial wildlife can be subdivided into three categories: ungulates including deer, carnivores and omnivores,...

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