Inside the covert world of wildlife trafficking revealed by a leading criminologist

Allison Skidmore started as an anti-poaching ranger in South Africa's Kruger National Park and later enrolled in a PhD program in environmental studies in 2016. During her doctoral work she went undercover in Russia's Far East, embedding herself in remote hunting villages to trace Amur tiger poaching rings and uncover links to corruption and money laundering. Her fieldwork has extended to Malaysia and the Horn of Africa, where she examined how traffickers exploit weak transit points to move wildlife.

Skidmore discussed the mechanics of the illegal trade in an interview, highlighting the role of organized crime and financial networks. After completing her Russian research in 2020, she published several scholarly articles on the subject. She now heads the conservation group Leave Them Wild and serves as a visiting professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.