Poaching in the United States: Illegal Activities and Impacts

This essay analyzes the illegal hunting practices, or poaching, prevalent in the United States. It highlights the reasons behind poaching, which often involves the exploitation of animals for their body parts, such as the black bear and ram sheep. The essay emphasizes the illegal nature of poaching and discusses its impact on wildlife, examining the motivations of offenders and the need for conservation efforts. The essay references specific examples, such as the poaching of black bears for their gallbladders and the high value of ram sheep horns in the black market, to illustrate the scope and consequences of these activities. The essay concludes by reiterating the illegality of poaching and the urgent need to stop it.

Running Head: POACHING IN THE UNITED STATES
Poaching in the United States
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Author Note

1POACHING IN THE UNITED STATES
Poaching is the illegal hunting and capturing of wild animals and poaching is usually
associated with the land use rights. Poaching has been mad illegal by the governments of
different countries. It is considered an offence against the rights of the animals. Poaching does
not fall under the hunting privileges. This essay will try to find out the reason why poaching is
considered illegal and the motivation with which the offenders operate.
Poaching is not only prevalent in the continents of Asia and Africa but America is also
one of the countries where poaching is quite widely prevalent. The poaching of the American
Black Bear is very common in the States. The motivations behind hunting these bears are usually
hunted for its hide, paws, gallbladder and bile (Van Gemert et al., 2014). These are sought after
because of the use of these body parts in the eastern medicine. However, the poaching activities
are not limited to the black bear; the horns of the ram sheep are also sold. The prices of these
horns are more than $20,000 in the black market (Van Gemert et al., 2014). This animal is
mostly found in the area between San Jacinto Mountains and the U.S. Mexico border. They a
have on the endangered list of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services since the year 1998 (Van
Gemert et al., 2014). The Humane Society of the United States have made an effort to catch
these poachers by impaling fake animals as the poachers see those they will not realize it and
they might try to attack them and hence get caught (www.youtube.com, 2012).
This essay concludes that poaching is illegal and poaching should uregtnly be stopped in
the U.S. Poaching is illegal because the animals are murdered because some of their body parts
are valued.

2POACHING IN THE UNITED STATES
Reference
Van Gemert, J. C., Verschoor, C. R., Mettes, P., Epema, K., Koh, L. P., & Wich, S. (2014,
September). Nature conservation drones for automatic localization and counting of
animals. In European Conference on Computer Vision (pp. 255-270). Springer, Cham.
www.youtube.com. (2012). Wildlife Decoys Helps Catch Poachers. YouTube.