Facebook’s Wildlife Marketplace
People are selling tiger teeth, pangolin scales, shark fins, and bags of dead seahorses on Facebook. Not on hidden forums, not through encrypted networks, but on mainstream social media, with prices, shipping options, and private messages to close the deal. Some sellers advertise live cubs. Others post piles of bones on weighing scales. UK-based buyers can place orders and receive packages through the post. This is being reported as a wildlife crime story. It is not. It is a market story.
Because wildlife trade does not exist in opposition to the law. It exists because the law permits animals to be owned, traded, transported, bred, and killed as commercial property. International agreements like CITES do not ban trade in wild animals. They manage it. They decide which species can be sold, in what quantities, under what paperwork, and under what definition of “sustainable use”. Endangered does not mean off limits. It means regulated as a commodity. Once that framework exists, illegal trade is not an anomaly. It is a side effect.
When animals are legally classified as inventory, markets will always seek more supply, cheaper supply, and faster supply. Paperwork becomes a business obstacle, not a moral boundary. Laundering, mislabelling, route-hopping, and online advertising are not criminal genius. They are normal commercial behaviour in any restricted commodity market.
That is why the same products keep appearing. Tiger bones for medicine and status. Shark fins for prestige food markets. Pangolin scales for myths dressed up as healthcare. Seahorses sold as postnatal tonics despite no evidence of benefit and overwhelming evidence of ecological collapse. These are not random acts of cruelty. They are responses to stable, long-standing demand that regulation has never dismantled, only managed.
Social media did not create that demand. It removed friction.
Platforms insist they prohibit the sale of endangered species and remove content when it is reported. But moderation is reactive and cosmetic. Posts are taken down after circulation, after contact, after payment arrangements are made. Engagement is already monetised. Sellers already found buyers. Platforms profit from reach, not from prevention.
The result is a retail layer added to an existing trade, not a new crime wave. Wildlife markets have simply gone digital.
When enforcement agencies announce global crackdowns, the figures are presented as victories. Tens of thousands of live animals seized. Tonnes of body parts confiscated. More interceptions than the year before. This is framed as progress.
It is not progress. It is scale.
You do not intercept 30,000 live animals in a single operation unless the trade is industrial. You do not seize thousands of shark fins unless sharks are being killed in vast numbers. Seizures show how much is moving, not how much has been stopped.
Officials often explain the trade by pointing to cultural practices, migrant communities, or consumer ignorance. Buyers supposedly do not understand the harm. This framing is politically convenient. It shifts attention away from the legal system that treats animals as tradable goods and towards individuals portrayed as misinformed or culturally backward.
But there is no version of this trade that is harmless.
You cannot supply animal parts, live animals, or medicinal products derived from wildlife without capture, confinement, transport, injury, and death. You cannot build supply chains in wild bodies without treating living beings as units. This is not abuse creeping into an otherwise ethical market. It is the operating logic of the market itself.
Even legal wildlife trade follows the same structure. Animals are bred, killed, shipped, and sold because they are owned. When the same acts occur without permits, they become criminal not because animals were treated as objects, but because the wrong seller moved the wrong objects through the wrong channels.
The animal’s interests never change. Only the paperwork does.
This is why conservation gains are fragile and reversible. Populations recover slightly, trade restrictions are loosened, and commercial use resumes under sustainability branding. Animals are not removed from the exploitation system. They are rotated within it.
The same logic underpins the exotic pet trade, traditional medicine markets, luxury fashion, decorative curios, and tourist attractions. These are not separate ethical problems. They are variations of the same assumption: that animals exist to be used and that the only real question is how much use is acceptable.
As long as that assumption is built into law, trafficking will never be solved by better enforcement alone. Routes will shift. Species will substitute. Prices will rise. Scarcity will increase desirability. Markets adapt faster than regulators because regulators are not trying to dismantle markets, only to manage them.
Responsibility does not sit mainly with online sellers or with individual buyers who believe in medical myths. It sits with governments that license commercial use, with international treaties that regulate exploitation instead of prohibiting it, with industries that normalise animal bodies as products, and with platforms that profit from connecting buyers and sellers while claiming neutrality.
This is not a story about crime slipping through the cracks. It is a story about a property system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
If animals remain legally defined as commodities, they will continue to be traded, whether through licensed channels or illegal ones. Enforcement can intercept shipments, but it cannot fix a market that is structurally dependent on extraction.
Ending wildlife trafficking requires ending the legal status of animals as commercial property. Not tweaking trade rules. Not improving reporting tools. Ending the trade itself.
Until then, the next seizure will be announced, the next platform will host the next seller, and the next species will be pushed closer to disappearance, all while we keep pretending the problem is criminals rather than the system that makes them profitable.