From tiger farms to eel smuggling, Czechia’s legal wildlife market is enabling a thriving underground trade.

In July 2018, Czech police raided what appeared to be an ordinary private property near Prague. Inside, investigators found that illegally bred tigers were being slaughtered for their body parts, which were then processed into products destined for Asian markets. The news shocked both the public and authorities, not only for the gruesome facts, but because it revealed an entire underground industry centered on the exploitation of protected wildlife.

“We are a breeding powerhouse – we have one of the highest numbers of exotic animal breeders in Europe,” says Lucie Hemrova, deputy head of the Czech animal protection group Svoboda Zvirat. She believes that this concentration of experienced breeders, collectors, and exotic animal traders leads to a situation where legal and illegal practices can easily overlap.

The 2018 tiger case kicked the government into action: within two years it approved an “action plan” to combat the illegal trade in endangered wildlife, and followed up with a second plan in 2025.

Even so, the country remains active in wildlife trafficking, with an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 people engaged in keeping or trading species listed in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

Why Czechia?

The country’s role as an important hub for the breeding, importing, and shipping of exotic animals – and its corresponding influence on the wildlife trade – is not accidental. 

Pavla Rihova, a zoologist and expert on the trade in endangered species at Charles University’s Institute for Environmental Studies, explains that the country has had a tradition of animal breeding since the communist era. 

“Travel was not allowed, so people focused on hobbies that they could pursue at home. People liked to keep domestic animals, but also exotic animals,” she says. “Currently, Czechia probably has the highest, or one of the highest, numbers of exotic animal breeders in Europe.”

This pool of highly skilled animal breeders mainly does business on the right side of the law, although as Rihova notes, the popularity of keeping exotic parrots and reptiles, as well as collecting rare plants such as cacti, has the side effect of making it easier for illegal specimens to be absorbed into legal markets, especially in a system where enforcement capacity is limited. 

Another important factor is the presence of one of Europe’s largest Vietnamese communities, Rihova believes, saying Vietnamese merchants “sell practically everything” at the sprawling SAPA market complex on the outskirts of Prague. Czech customs officers regularly check this and other Vietnamese markets for fake luxury products and other illegal goods.

“It is very difficult to control this market because it is a closed area under the complete control of Vietnamese operators,” Rihova says.

This issue is also noted in the 2025 government action plan, which flags the Vietnamese involvement in the business of tiger parts, rhino horns, and ivory, mainly for customers in Asia.

That elevated concentration of exotic animal breeders – one of the highest in Europe – has placed the Czech Republic at the center of a dense illegal market. High-value products such as ivory, rhino horn, and tiger parts pass through the country, while rare birds and reptiles are imported for breeding and collecting.

Exports of protected species spiked from around 16,000 animals in 2016 to almost 55,000 in 2020, Czech news outlet Aktualne.cz reported in 2022, most of them exotic birds. According to CITES trade data, the Czech Republic ranks fourth globally among exporters of rare, protected birds, especially small parrot species.

There are also some legal loopholes that don’t help, which illegal traders know how to exploit in their favor. For example, according to Zdenek Novak of the Forensic Science Center at Charles University, an animal or animal parts can be “donated” to another person without a financial transaction on paper.

Since transfers like these can be done without proper documentation, inspections usually occur only when animals or animal parts are advertised or reported, so specimens kept privately often go unnoticed. This creates a system where illegal or undocumented animals can remain in circulation unless they surface through online listings or tips to authorities. 

“The chances of someone coming to your house to check is absolutely minimal, unless someone snitched on you,” Novak adds.

When checks are made, the results can be eye-opening. Late in 2024, as part of a 138-nation global crackdown led by Interpol, Czech authorities rescued eight tiger cubs, aged between two months and two years, from a suspected illegal breeding facility.

Earlier this year, trading protected monkeys and lemurs without a license brought a 76-year-old Czech man a suspended sentence and a fine of roughly 6,000 euros. Detectives found endangered golden-headed lion tamarins, Goeldi’s marmosets, Indian star tortoises, and a stuffed leopard’s head in his house, iDnes reported.

When Legal Breeding Becomes a Cover

One of the most persistent challenges in tackling wildlife trafficking is the way illegal trade hides behind legal breeding and ownership. According to Novak, one trick is to steal bird eggs and chicks from the wild, then transport them to breeders who already raise the same species. The stolen birds are then reported to authorities as newly hatched offspring from their existing birds. 

As a result, wild-caught animals like exotic parrots can be absorbed into legal breeding within an operation that involves coordinated networks, including collectors, couriers, and breeders. 

Eels, too, are smuggled on a large scale from Europe, mainly to Asia where they are a great delicacy. This business, worth several billion euros annually, is the main factor behind the longterm, massive decline in their numbers, Czech Radio reported in 2019.

Eel smugglers have even been active in Czechia, Novak says, calling this “strange, because we never thought that something like this would happen here. Malaysian couriers were caught exporting them in their hand luggage. Those carry-on bags were actually full of plastic bags containing water and those little eels in them. They were inflated with pure oxygen to survive the journey.”

The lack of specialized personnel trained to investigate environmental crime is one reason Czechia has become a hub for this activity, Hemrova of Svoboda Zvirat says. The specialized inspection units mentioned in the government action plans “have not yet been implemented,” she adds.

“So, overall, the effectiveness of prosecuting wildlife crime in our country remains low.”

The Costs of Wildlife Crime

The consequences of wildlife trafficking extend far beyond the maltreatment and slaughter of individual animals. According to the 2024 World Wildlife Crime Report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, wildlife crime has widespread effects on the environment, the economy, and society at large. Ecosystems are damaged, causing agricultural production and incomes to fall; jobs are lost in tourism and fishing; and the illegal trade undermines governance by encouraging corruption and illegal financial flows.

Evidence of these crimes is notoriously hard to gather, the UN office admits, concluding bleakly that its assessment of available evidence “gives no confidence that wildlife trafficking overall is being substantially reduced.”

The costs of wildlife trafficking are also measured in the treatment of the animals themselves. The 2018 tiger case is the perfect example of how serious are the concerns for animal welfare. One motivation for breeding tigers is the production of broth or tiger glue from the animal’s bones, as Zdenek Novak explains: “It has more value than a live tiger.” 

Tigers are kept in captivity, fattened, and killed specifically for this purpose. “It is well known that, unlike in Asia, European livestock farms generally use far fewer antibiotics due to strict veterinary regulations. This fact increases the quality and attractiveness of animals from the EU in the eyes of Asian customers. They see broth made here as of ‘organic’ quality, so it also has a higher price,” Novak says.

Countering Wildlife Trafficking

The two Czech government action plans, originally drawn up in reaction to the tiger farm case, are intended to address systemic weaknesses in investigating and punishing wildlife crime. Both plans identify wildlife trafficking as a form of organized crime and aim to strengthen the state’s ability to detect, investigate, and prosecute the illegal trade in exotic species.

Hemrova says that the plans identify problems with personnel capacity and organizational structure, including the lack of specialized staff and units dedicated to investigating wildlife crime. The 2025 plan also underscores the issue of inconsistent court rulings and light sentences for offenders.

“It’s just a tragedy that the penalties are so low. It’s always on the prosecutor’s ability to capture the judge’s attention and convince him of the seriousness of the problem. Then adequate punishment can be imposed,” Novak says.

The numbers show that the trade in endangered species keeps expanding by the year, some of the possible causes being high demand, legal gray zones, and limited enforcement. 

“Wildlife crime is simply not a priority, even though there is obviously a lot of money involved,” Novak says. “But there has been improvement. The people I know who are involved in this issue are trying to push it forward so that even the criminal justice system is starting to see it as a priority, which until recently was not really the case.”

He also says that compared to other countries, Czechia is slowly making some changes in animal protection, though there is still room for improvement. Numerous organizations care for abused animals and push for stronger laws, while public activism creates pressure on politicians. This civic engagement helped bring about major legal changes, including setting a deadline of 2027 for ending cage farming of hens, banning the breeding of large carnivores in private facilities from 2022, and banning fur farms from 2019, Novak says.

Despite this, the number of detected cases of animal smuggling in the Czech Republic is “relatively low compared to other EU countries,” Hemrova says.

She believes that this may reflect the gaps in enforcing existing laws and regulations, restricting the authorities’ ability to uncover complex trafficking networks operating within the legal market.

Taken together, a strong breeding culture, central location, dense network of legal trade, and limited enforcement capacity have made Czechia a unique convergence point, where legal and illegal wildlife markets overlap. As Rihova notes, while Czech wildlife legislation is aligned with European standards, the small number of dedicated investigators and the low priority given to such crime has weakened the impact.

She adds that complex cases are increasingly left without sustained attention, making it even harder to disrupt organized trafficking networks. 

“Only a few people deal with wildlife enforcement issues. Although they are working very hard and we have seen some successes, unfortunately it is not enough. The situation continues to deteriorate. Experienced people are leaving enforcement bodies, and there is no desire or willingness to deal with serious cases because it is demanding and time-consuming.”

Andreea Soare is an editorial intern at Transitions. She is studying for an Erasmus Mundus master’s in journalism at Charles University.