Assessing imports of live wild animals into Canada and the implications to human health

The global wildlife trade is a multibillion-dollar industry that places pressure on human health and biodiversity and can be harmful to the welfare of the individual animals involved.

Over the past two decades there have been calls for increased research into and surveillance of wildlife trade into Canada, to build capacity, and implement preventative measures to address zoonotic disease risk.

Essential for this is a detailed understanding of the scope and scale of wild animal imports into Canada. To our knowledge, such assessment does not currently exist.

Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.

In this study, we provide a comprehensive analysis of Canada’s declared live wildlife imports.

Data were obtained via Access to Information requests for all records of declared live wildlife imported into Canada recorded by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Canada Border Services Agency.

More than 1.8 million individual live wild animals (excluding domesticated and semi-domesticated birds), from 1,028 documented import records were imported into Canada between 2014 and 2020.

Birds were the most imported taxonomic class (51%), followed by reptiles (28%), amphibians (19%), and mammals (2%). In total 22 taxonomic orders from 79 countries were recorded as imported.

Approximately half of the wild animals (49%) were imported for the pet market.

We discuss how all animals can be carriers of zoonotic diseases and how importing animals from around the world is problematic for disease risk analyses due to the ambiguity in the origin of wildlife species and the wide variety of countries involved.

Additionally, we outline how the purpose of import is relevant to zoonotic disease risks.

We have also identified gaps in data collection which makes an in-depth analysis of the type of wild animals being imported into Canada, and the disease risk they might pose, challenging.

The data gaps and discrepancies found during this study suggest that the Canadian government is not currently able to accurately assess the zoonotic disease risk of live wild animal imports.

We recommend that steps should be taken to improve data collection and coordination between agencies and to ensure that all wild animal importations are subject to appropriate scrutiny at the border.

Read the paper — An analysis of Canada’s declared live wildlife imports and implications for zoonotic disease risk by Michèle Hamers, Angie Elwin, Rosemary-Claire Collard, Chris R. Shepherd, Emma Coulthard, John Norrey, David Megson, and Neil D’Cruze.