The harm and crime committed by humans does not only affect humans. Victimisation is not isolated to people, but instead encompasses the planet and other beings. Yet apart from fairly recent green criminological scholarship employing an expanded criminological gaze beyond the human, the discipline of criminology has largely confined itself to human victims, ignoring the humancaused suffering and plight of the billions of other individuals with whom we share the Earth. This book tries to take a further step in rectifying criminology's blindness to the non-human world and in advancing scholarly discourse on social harm (Hillyard and Tombs, 2007). In order take this step, we propose a ‘wildlife criminology’. From the outset, we make clear that in choosing the term ‘wildlife criminology’ our intention is not to create a new and distinct subfield of criminology. To do so would suggest that we do not consider green criminology to be adequate or sustainable as an academic endeavour – something that neither of us believes. The goal is to create a complementary project that expands the existing green and critical criminological scholarship even further beyond that of the human.

As the book's chapters will demonstrate, criminology's current and future engagement with wildlife issues needs to develop by considering wider notions of crime and harm involving non-human animals and plants, and this argument is developed in respect of both mainstream and green criminology. Criminological discourse has somewhat engaged with issues around wildlife trafficking and non-human animal abuse (Wellsmith, 2011; Nurse, 2013; Wyatt, 2013a; Beirne, 2018; Sollund, 2019) and at the time of writing this book wildlife trafficking is a hot topic, attracting both scholarly attention and some grant funding. However, we contend that a limited notion of wildlife crime currently exists and is perpetuated in criminological and political discourse. Wildlife crime is frequently reduced to discussion of trafficking in non-human animals and wildlife derivatives with wider conceptions, implications and the importance of wildlife crime often neglected.

As the first foray into wildlife criminology, this book explores how criminology deals with crimes against and involving nonhuman animals, and examines the failure of criminology and justice systems to deal with non-human animals as victims of crime and wider social harm.