Inspired by a series of articles in a UK newspaper written by Sir Julian Huxley about the destruction of habitat and wildlife in East Africa, businessman Victor Stolan pointed out the urgent need for an international organization to raise funds for conservation. The idea was then shared with Max Nicholson, Director General of British government agency Nature Conservancy, who enthusiastically took up the challenge.

Nicholson was motivated in part by the financial difficulties facing the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and felt that a new fundraising initiative might help IUCN and other conservation groups carry out their mission. He drafted a plan in April 1961 that served as a basis for WWF’s founding, which was then endorsed by the executive board of IUCN in a document known as the Morges Manifesto.

Nicholson and approximately two dozen other individuals –including Sir Peter Scott, a member of IUCN’s executive board who had signed the Morges Manifesto and later became WWF’s first vice president – hammered out the details of the new organization in a series of meetings over the following months. This included choosing the name World Wildlife Fund and adopting the now-famous panda logo.

The first three “national appeals” (now called national organizations) were also established in 1961 in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the United States. Since then, WWF-US has grown to include over 1 million supporters and has helped lead conservation projects in Alaska, the Northern Great Plains, and around the world.

Elephants are also losing their habitats and ancient migratory routes due to expanding human settlements into their habitat, agricultural development, and the construction of infrastructure such as roads, canals, and fences that fragment their habitat. As a result, human-elephant conflict is rising as more and more elephants come into close contact with humans. This often leads to elephants destroying crops and property, as well as occasional human casualties. These negative interactions can result in the retaliatory killing of elephants.

In 1989, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)—a global agreement among governments to regulate or ban international trade in species under threat—banned the international commercial trade in elephant ivory. Poaching rates dropped following the action, but began to surge again around 2010, due to renewed consumer interest in purchasing elephant ivory, largely in Asia. After campaigns by WWF and other conservation groups, governments in problematic ivory markets like Hong Kong, Thailand, the US and the UK were pushed to take action to clamp down on illegal and unregulated domestic trade that was fueling the poaching.

The real game changer is China—by far the largest market for elephant ivory—which banned domestic trade of elephant ivory as of January 1, 2018. Since then, Chinese consumer desire for elephant ivory has dropped and wholesale prices of elephant ivory, even on the black market, have declined. WWF has been working since to reduce consumer demand for elephant ivory and ensure the ban is effectively enforced.

Human-elephant conflict leads not only to negative interactions and loss of income, property, and lives, but also reduces community tolerance for conserving elephants. Addressing complex issues like human-wildlife conflict requires approaches that not only reduce the immediate impacts of negative interactions but also addresses the drivers and root causes of the conflict. WWF works with various stakeholders—particularly wildlife managers and communities—to incorporate tools and technologies, such as electric fencing, deterrents, and other tools, to prevent potentially harmful encounters. We also engage in efforts to educate communities that lead to behavior change that will minimize negative impacts. We help community response teams to respond to instances of human-elephant conflict and work with communities to develop alternative livelihood opportunities to help minimize economic impacts from crop loss. To reduce human-wildlife conflict in the long term, WWF works with governments and other stakeholders to address the root causes of human-elephant conflict, such as habitat loss and fragmentation and unplanned development.

Community and government rangers and game guards help protect endangered species like elephants and WWF helps train and equip them. In the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), the world's largest terrestrial conservation landscape, which harbors more than half of Africa's elephants, WWF aims to secure a future for these animals and other wildlife by supporting the work of the KAZA Secretariat and the five KAZA partner countries (Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe) and their local communities through better protection, increasing the knowledge of their seasonal movements, and promoting community-based conservation initiatives, in collaboration with the private sector. WWF trains rangers in elephant monitoring and antipoaching techniques and works with communities to manage and reduce conflict with elephants.

At the borders of Cambodia and Vietnam, WWF works with park staff to patrol protected areas and assess elephant distribution and numbers. In this transboundary landscape, WWF works to protect and enable movement of the elephant population, of which the population on the Vietnam side is significant and the largest remaining wild elephant population in the country.

WWF works with TRAFFIC, the international wildlife trade monitoring network, to reduce the major threat that illegal and illicit domestic ivory markets pose to wild elephants. TRAFFIC also manages a global record of ivory seizures, called the Elephant Trade Information System (ETIS), that helps to identify routes and countries of particular importance in illegal trade.

To help wildlife inspectors, law enforcement, and researchers distinguish between different types of ivory and help identify illegally trafficked ivory products, WWF published the Identification Guide for Ivory and Ivory Substitutes, at the request of, and funded by, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), in partnership with TRAFFIC and ivory identification experts from the USFWS Forensic Laboratory. It serves as an objective, scientific resource for identifying the most commonly found ivories and artificial substitutes in trade.

China's elephant ivory ban is a historic milestone in the ongoing effort to save an iconic species. But with China’s markets closed, markets elsewhere remain open and continue to attract consumers. And as more and more Chinese travel internationally—nearly 200 million Chinese tourists travel abroad each year—incidents of elephant ivory smuggling are on the rise. WWF is working directly with these countries to support the closing of their elephant ivory markets and leverage international policy and diplomacy channels. A big focus for WWF is also changing consumer behavior to reduce elephant ivory purchasing and create a new norm that elephant ivory is not socially acceptable. We are working with leading online retailers, social media platforms, tourism companies, and creative agencies. Strong partnerships are already in place with the travel and e-commerce sectors, with commitments to avoid promoting, handling, or selling elephant ivory. WWF is also working with a leading market research firm to conduct annual surveys of consumers to better understand consumer attitudes and desire for elephant ivory so that we can change social norms around ivory and reduce demand. Through this research, we are able to identify demographics of elephant ivory purchasers and consumers, understand their underlying motivations, and develop effective strategies to influence them.

WWF works with elephant range state governments, local people, and non-governmental partners to secure a future for this keystone species by thinking beyond protected areas. Although significant elephant populations are now confined to well-protected areas, less than 20% of African elephant habitat is under formal protection. In Asia, on average, 70% of the wild elephant population lives outside protected areas. We advocate for large conservation landscapes like KAZA, which is located in southern Africa and is the largest terrestrial transboundary conservation area in the world. Home to around 225,000 elephants, we work to maintain this space to provide elephants freedom to roam. 

Tigers have lost an estimated 95% of their historical range. Their habitat has been destroyed, degraded, and fragmented by human activities. The clearing of forests for agriculture and timber, as well as the building of road networks and other development activities, pose serious threats to tiger habitats. Tigers need wide swaths of habitat for their survival since they have large home ranges and are very territorial. Fewer tigers can survive in small, scattered islands of habitat, which leads to a higher risk of inbreeding and makes tigers more vulnerable to poaching as they venture beyond protected areas to establish their territories. This underscores the need to ensure habitat connectivity between the protected areas where tigers live.

People and tigers increasingly compete for space. As forests shrink and prey becomes scarce, tigers are forced to leave protected areas in search of food and to establish territories. This takes them into human-dominated areas that lie between habitat fragments, where they can hunt domestic livestock that many local communities depend on for their livelihood. In retaliation, tigers are sometimes killed or captured. “Conflict” tigers can end up for sale in black markets. Local community dependence on forests for fuel wood, food, and timber heightens the risk of tiger attacks on people.

One of the world’s largest, and most uniquely-adapted, tiger populations are found in the Sundarbans—a large mangrove forest area shared by India and Bangladesh on the coast of the Indian Ocean. It is also the only coastal mangrove tiger habitat in the world. These mangrove forests harbor a variety of species, including tigers, and protect coastal regions from storm surges and wind damage. However, rising sea levels caused by climate change threaten to wipe out these forests and the last remaining habitat of this tiger population. According to a WWF study, without mitigation efforts, projected sea-level rise—about a foot by 2070—could destroy nearly the entire Sundarbans tiger habitat.

Current estimates indicate that there are more than 8,000 tigers being held in more than 200 centers in East and Southeast Asia, with roughly three-quarters of these tigers located in China. The current scale of commercial captive breeding efforts within these farms is a significant obstacle to the recovery and protection of wild tiger populations because they perpetuate the demand for tiger products, serve as a cover for illegal trade and undermine enforcement efforts. WWF is engaging with governments in countries with active tiger farms, and advocates ending breeding and phasing out the farms. WWF also advocates for improved regulation of the captive tiger population in the US. It is estimated that approximately 5,000 tigers reside in the US, and we must ensure that these animals are not exploited by, or contributing to, the illegal trade in tigers and their parts.

WWF works to enforce zero tolerance for tiger poaching across Asia. We help build the capacity of government enforcement units in each landscape and install the best new technologies to assist local agencies by achieving conservation results. We help improve the effectiveness of wildlife rangers by training personnel from enforcement agencies on tools such as SMART (Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool). We also work to ensure that communities have a stake in conservation, as they are typically the best stewards and managers of their natural resources.

Tigers need secure areas to thrive, and our work to protect and connect their fragile habitat is based on rigorous scientific analysis. WWF has chosen places to focus its resources based on the best available science and where tigers have the best chance of recovery and long-term persistence. The locations encompass tiger corridors that link tiger sites within landscapes. Our work includes building local capacity to manage protected areas, coordinating with partners to manage core tiger areas and corridors, and addressing human-wildlife conflict and the impacts of infrastructure development in tiger landscapes. To ensure effective conservation management of tiger sites, the Conservation Assured Tiger Standards (CA|TS) provide a minimum set of standards to encourage the long-term success of tiger conservation and best practices in these areas. Nine of the 13 tiger range countries are currently implementing CA|TS or in discussions on registering, and two sites have achieved CA|TS approval by meeting all the required standards.

Monitoring tigers and their prey is essential to achieving our goal of doubling wild tiger populations. By employing camera traps, tracking technologies and DNA collected from scat (droppings), we analyze the progress of tiger populations in order to adapt our strategies and make conservation decisions based on strong science and field experience.

WWF works with governments across the 13 tiger range countries with wild tiger populations to build and maintain momentum around the conservation of tigers, which is an asset that can enhance their development agendas. By linking tiger conservation with forest preservation and carbon sequestration efforts, tiger range nations and their partners can demonstrate their commitment to promoting a healthy environmental and economic future.

Trade in tiger parts and products is a major threat to wild tiger survival. Together with TRAFFIC, the global wildlife trade monitoring network, we implement strategies to help governments stop wildlife criminal networks, shut down black markets and change consumer behavior. We conduct investigations to document the tiger trade, catalyze action against it and help train enforcement agencies. We continue to build strategies to reduce demand for tiger parts and products and shut down tiger “farms”.

Animal protection entered the American colonial record in December 1641, when the Massachusetts General Court enacted its comprehensive legal code, the "Body of Liberties." Sections 92–93 prohibited "any Tirranny or Crueltie towards any bruite Creature which are usuallie kept for man's use" and mandated periodic rest and refreshment for any "Cattel" being driven or led.(1) Puritan animal advocates believed that cruel dominion was a consequence of Adam and Eve's fall from the Garden of Eden; kindly stewardship, however, reflected their reformist ideals, thus illuminating a long historical relationship between religion, reform, and animal protection.

Transnational Protestant revivalism and social reform in the early nineteenth century fueled the expansion of animal protectionism. In Great Britain, evangelicals and abolitionists spearheaded the earliest animal protection laws (1822) and organized societies (1824), which became a blueprint for dozens of new anticruelty laws in America. Social reformers and ministers became attentive to the status of animals during the Second Great Awakening (1790–1840). Embracing a new theology of free moral agency and human perfectibility, American ministers such as Charles Grandison Finney included animal mercy in their exegeses on upright Christian conduct. New transportation networks and communications technologies broadcast animal protection to far-flung audiences through classroom readers, Sunday school pamphlets, and fiction.

Antebellum abolitionists and temperance activists treated animal welfare as a barometer for human morality. Antislavery newspapers and novels, most famously Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), stressed the incidence of animal abuse among slaveholders and animal kindness among abolitionists. Many future animal welfare leaders possessed abolitionist ties, such as George Thorndike Angell, founder and president of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA). Temperance advocates likewise believed that inebriates were cruel to their families and their horses. The Bands of Hope, a children's group, stressed animal kindness as a moral complement to sobriety.

Antebellum activism and cultural thought created a foundation for a new social movement after the Civil War. The abolition of slavery and the horror of battle—documented in thousands of wartime photographs of dead soldiers and horses—brought suffering and human rights to a national audience, therefore catalyzing a national movement. Animal protectionists believed that creaturely kindness was a marker of advanced civilization, which could rectify a fractured nation and world. The penultimate moment for a new movement arrived on April 10, 1866, when the New York Legislature incorporated a groundbreaking state animal protection society vested with policing powers to prosecute abuse. Henry Bergh, a shipping heir, drafted the articles of incorporation of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) with the help of his influential allies, including historian George Bancroft and state senator Ezra Cornell. Days later, they spearheaded a powerful new state anticruelty law, which they amended in 1867 to prohibit additional forms of cruelty, including blood sports and abandonment. Bergh and his officers policed the streets wearing uniforms and badges to enforce the law.

By the 1870s SPCAs and anticruelty laws modeled after Bergh's work in New York existed in most states. In the Gilded Age, activists directed their attention to the plight of domestic laboring animals in an urban, muscle-powered world—especially horses. Historians Clay McShane, Joel Tarr, and Ann Greene demonstrate the centrality of urban horses in building modern industrial America. Further, they treat horses as historical agents rather than passive conduits for a history of human ideas about animals.(2) As the nation's primary urban movers of machines, food, and people, horses suffered abusive drivers and overloaded haulage conditions with visible regularity. Animal protectionists also addressed the bleak system of livestock railroad transport from western rangelands to urban stockyards and slaughterhouses, culminating with the nation's first federal animal welfare legislation in 1873, which mandated food, water, and rest stops every twenty-eight hours. They raided animal fights; they tried to end vivisection in laboratories and classrooms; and they routinely shot decrepit workhorses as a merciful end to suffering.

Animals were legally defined as property, but Bergh's watershed legislation recognized cruelty as an offense to the animal itself—irrespective of ownership.(3) Historian Susan Pearson argues that these laws helped transform American liberalism—from a classical conception of rights in the negative—to augur the rise of the modern "interventionist" liberal state. Pearson contends that this positive conception of rights drew animal protectionists into child protection in the 1870s. Bergh's chief counsel, Elbridge Gerry, founded the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1874 after he secured the arrest and conviction of an abusive foster mother for felonious assault. Animal protectionists across the nation subsequently instituted amalgamated "humane societies," which safeguarded animals and children under a singular protective fold, positing that helpless "beasts and babes" had a right to protection because they could suffer. Viewed within an existing system of subordinate relations, the right to protection did not confer an automatic right to equality. Nonetheless, humane activists established a historical precedent for future generations of animal rights activists because they placed animals on a legal continuum with vulnerable human beings.

The majority of animal protectionists were affluent, nativeborn Euro-American Protestants. Men typically led SPCAs and patrolled the streets as officers, while women generally worked behind the scenes using moral suasion—raising funds, writing appeals, and coordinating educational activities. Keeping with prevailing ideologies of respectable white womanhood, Caroline Earle White secured a state charter for the founding of the Pennsylvania SPCA in 1867 but refused to seek election as the organization's first president. She also founded the American Anti-vivisection Association in 1883 but delayed passage of its incorporation until she and her female colleagues could find a man willing to serve as president.(4)

Some women, however, readily assumed leadership positions when they founded their own organizations. In 1869 White co-created the Women's Branch of the Pennsylvania SPCA and served as its first president. In 1890 Women's Branch leader Mary Frances Lovell became national superintendent of the Department of Mercy, an animal welfare wing in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. The Women's Branch pioneered municipal stray canine reform. In an era before vaccines and sterilization, local dogcatchers staged massive summertime roundups in which strays were shot or violently thrown into crowded wagons and killed at the pound. The Women's Branch instituted new humane capture methods, and they transformed Philadelphia's municipal pound into a humane "shelter," where dogs received regular care. Euthanasia, when necessary, occurred in a separate room using gas, out of view from other dogs. Historian Bernard Unti observes that women sheltering leaders typically sought no powers of arrest in their state charters because their work with strays did not confront animal abusers directly.(5) Owing to pressure from members, mainstream SPCAs eventually incorporated stray management, sheltering, and adoption into their already stretched budgets.

With its affluent, urban, native-born Protestant base, the animal protection movement faced charges of exclusion and elitism—especially because teamsters and other targets of prosecution were often immigrants and people of color whose economic survival depended on animal muscle. In a pluralistic society, many humane activists viewed their own classed and culturally contingent ideals of kindness as universal when denouncing animal practices different than their own, such as kosher slaughter. They believed that animal kindness was a manifestation of higher civilization at home and in the overseas empire after the Spanish-American War. Interactions with animals, consequently, were often a flashpoint for conflict. Filipinos, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans flatly rejected U.S. anticockfighting laws as an oppressive colonial intrusion into indigenous leisure practices.(6)

Nonetheless, the animal protection movement was not a wholesale project of policing. Animal advocates preferred prevention over prosecution. Children's pedagogy became an institutionalized arm of the movement in 1889 when George Angell founded the American Humane Education Society (AHES) as the centerpiece of his holistic "gospel of kindness." In the South, several African American ministers, educators, and temperance activists served as AHES field secretaries. They staged meetings in black schools and churches to preach a conservative message of animal mercy, self-help, and racial uplift. They traveled widely by car, which represented a potentially dangerous show of black upward mobility in the rural Jim Crow South, especially when their lectures discussed exploitative practices such as debt peonage and sharecropping. The Massachusetts SPCA openly denounced human rights abuses, as well as American militarism overseas. Yet the organization embraced moral expansionism when sponsoring American missionaries, who integrated humane education curricula into their evangelical activities across the world.

With the growth of motor power during the 1910s, fewer laboring animals populated American cities. SPCAs staged nostalgic workhorse parades as a tribute to equine service and to raise funds for new comfortable retirement farms. In 1916 the American Humane Association founded the American Red Star Animal Relief to aid American warhorses, mules, and donkeys during World War I. The organization's fundraising pleas reminded donors that equines performed invaluable labor in impenetrable terrain despite the ascendancy of motorization. After the armistice, global horse markets collapsed and American warhorses were auctioned off in Europe because trans-Atlantic transport was cost prohibitive in an age of impending obsolescence. While equines remained an important source of agricultural labor, the expanding dominance of motorization changed the scope and direction of American animal protectionism.

Animal advocates increasingly viewed animal performances, long a staple of popular entertainment, as unethical. In 1918 the Massachusetts SPCA founded the Jack London Club in memory of the late author, who condemned animal entertainments. People joined by walking out of an animal show and sending a postcard to the Massachusetts SPCA with the details. While the organization had no immediate legislative impact, it represented a harbinger of activism to come in a motorized world.

During the twentieth century, slaughterhouse reform and antivivisectionism remained important activist sites. Yet pets, especially dogs and cats, escalated as subjects of protection. Historian Katherine Grier contends that the growth of a consumer culture of pet keeping, alongside the development of sulfonamides, parasite control, and antibiotics in the 1930s and 1940s, enabled people and their pets to live longer, healthier lives together in closer proximity.(7) Attitudes towards cats, perhaps, changed the most. In the nineteenth century, some animal protectionists maligned the cat as a semiwild killer of cherished songbirds. Medical advances and new consumer products, such as cat litter in 1947, brought cats indoors. By the mid-twentieth century, dogs, cats, and sheltering dominated animal protectionism.

The coalition of movements dedicated to moral uplift that had given animal protection its interconnected human and animal agenda eventually fractured, portending an almost singular focus on animals. The professionalization of social work during the Progressive Era cleaved the earlier union of child and animal protectionists into separate fields. The repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933 dissolved the temperance movement—a longstanding stalwart ally. Gradual secularization also transformed animal protection. Earlier generations of activists forged alliances with religious leaders, but mid-century humane periodicals focused on celebrity animal lovers in media and politics. While the movement's mainline Protestant founders believed in biblical stewardship, their descendants embraced Darwinism.

Energized by the social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s, animal protection evolved into two distinct but overlapping movements. Animal welfare groups, such as the ASPCA, remained focused on sheltering, adoption, and the prevention of suffering. In 1975 utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer published Animal Liberation, which was immediately hailed as a "bible" for an emergent animal rights movement. Singer argued that sentient creatures have a right to "equal consideration" because they can suffer and considered "speciesism" to be a form of discrimination akin to racism and sexism.(8) This claim, however, was rejected by many civil rights groups, who argued that it trivialized their social justice struggles. Singer, like most animal rights writers, supported veganism in an age when factory-like Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations have replaced pasture farming. Yet some activists, such as philosopher Tom Regan, concluded that Animal Liberation's utilitarian call to minimize suffering was ultimately too conservative or "welfarist." In 1983 Regan applied deontology—a branch of philosophy that explores moral duty—to animals. His book, The Case for Animal Rights, contended that animals possess intrinsic moral rights as individual "subjects of a life" with complex feelings and experiences that extend beyond their ability to suffer.(9)

Paradoxically, vivisection has unwittingly validated the newest frontier in animal protection in the twenty-first century: legal personhood. In 2000 legal scholar Steven Wise used recent research in neuroscience and genetics in his book, Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals, to argue that great apes, cetaceans, elephants, and African gray parrots possess the legal right to "bodily liberty," owing to their superior cognitive abilities.(10) Wise founded the Nonhuman Rights Project in 2007 to take the principles of legal personhood to court. Armed with the writ of habeas corpus in state courts, Wise and his associates contend that captivity constitutes unlawful imprisonment. Suing on behalf of captive chimpanzees since 2013, Wise's team have served as proxies for their plaintiffs to achieve legal standing in court, a strategy based on centuries of human precedent involving children, slaves, prisoners, and mentally incapacitated plaintiffs. While Wise and his colleagues have yet to prevail in court, they have received a hearing, a critical first step in a long appeals process.(11)

The claims of the Nonhuman Rights Project for legal standing rest upon the inseparable histories of human rights and animal protection. Embedded in the history of religion, social reform, and war, early generations of American humane advocates argued that animal kindness was a form of human sanctification. They believed that the status of animals was a conduit for human moral uplift. Yet with the rise of biological explanations for animal-human kinship, animal rights advocates have used the status of vulnerable people to argue that animals, as moral "subjects of a life," possess the right to legal personhood. Ultimately, this shared history is simultaneously liberatory, conflictual, and entangled.

本条例所称陆生野生动物，是指依法受保护的珍贵、濒危、有益的和有重要经济、科学研究价值的陆生野生动物 （以下简称野生动物）；所称野生动物产品，是指陆生野生动物的任何部分及其衍生物。

 

水生野生动物，是指珍贵、濒危的水生野生动物；所称水生野生动物产品，是指珍贵、濒危的水生野生动物的任何部分及其衍生物。