Last year, the European Union’s re-formed MEPs for Wildlife group opened an event on closing trade loopholes with a blunt acknowledgment that the EU remains one of the world’s largest markets and transit hubs for wildlife. That assessment followed a 2025 report from the wildlife non-profit TRAFFIC, which found that more than 600,000 live animal specimens were seized across the eurozone, including at least 574 species listed under CITES, the global wildlife trade convention.
The bloc has taken steps to address trafficking, but enforcement remains difficult: only around 10% of reported cases result in a conviction or penalty. To address the shortfall, groups such as the Netherlands-based Animal Advocacy and Protection (AAP) have petitioned the European Parliament to introduce an EU-wide “Positive List” for animals kept and traded as pets — a list that would identify species suitable for keeping as pets and automatically restrict all others.
The proposal has earned backing from a number of MEPs, and reflects a genuine effort to curb the illegal wildlife trade into the bloc. But it also exposes a more basic problem: the difficulty of ensuring proper due diligence on animal imports in the first place.
Part of that difficulty is structural. Even under formal compliance regimes, the international system governing wildlife movement is fragmented across jurisdictions, and shipments that appear adequately documented on paper do not always provide reliable assurance about an animal’s true origin. Wild animals can pass through several countries before reaching their final destination, each with its own rules on ownership, capture, breeding, export, import, animal health, welfare and documentation. The gap between conservation intent and the scrutiny needed to verify an animal’s provenance is one that traffickers have learned to exploit. Paperwork alone is rarely sufficient proof of a wild animal’s origin.
One case worth causing ripples from outside the bloc is Vantara, a large wild animal rescue and rehabilitation centre in Jamnagar, India, which has begun overhauling how it verifies the animals it takes in.
Vantara has reportedly halted all new intake of wild animals from abroad while it builds out a stricter internal review process. Applications to bring in threatened species will now go through a dedicated acquisition committee tasked with weighing the scientific, conservation and legal justification for each case before it proceeds. The overhaul follows a review of the sanctuary’s facilities and procedures by a former senior CITES official, and has resulted in a newly formed team dedicated specifically to origin and compliance checks — work that will itself be checked periodically by the same outside expert.
For EU policymakers, the more useful takeaway may not be Vantara’s example specifically, but what it points to about the underlying problem. Even a well-resourced operation with dedicated veterinary and legal capacity has apparently found it necessary to pause acquisitions altogether in order to rebuild its verification processes from the ground up. That suggests the difficulty in confirming an animal’s true origin is not primarily a matter of an organisation’s size, funding or intentions, but of the fragmented international paper trail itself, one that a single actor, however diligent, cannot fix on its own.
That has direct implications for the debate over instruments like the Positive List. A list that simply restricts which species may be traded does not, by itself, resolve the question of how the origin of a permitted species is verified once it is in the supply chain. If a well-funded rescue operation with strong incentives to get this right still needs external experts and a pause in operations to strengthen its own checks, the case for EU-level coordination on traceability — shared standards, cross-border data-sharing, and independent verification mechanisms rather than paperwork alone — becomes harder to dismiss as either bureaucratic or unnecessary.
