What is to be done about wildlife crime? A structural account of the incapacitation of capable guardianship

Introduction

This article identifies key structural conditions of the policy domain that constrain the optimal enforcement of UK wildlife crimes. Policy and legislative forces are revealed in the article to have a negative causal influence upon responses to the illegal taking of deer from their most abundant habitats in the western parts of the United Kingdom. The structural conditions identified in the article are post-2010 austerity conditions, the inequitable allocation of budgets to rural policing in contrast to urban zones, the anthropocentric orientation of policing and criminal justice structures – specifically the official Police Strategic Requirements, the Crown Prosecution Service, the non-notifiable status of wildlife offences and the acute absence of sentencing guidelines. Finally, the Care Act 2014 will be revealed as a statutory hindrance to guardianship. Those policy-level determinants all serve to deprioritise the status of wildlife crimes, inflict species injustice and perpetuate the ‘victimless crime’ representation, which pervades the discipline. To advance the literature and in an original contribution, the identified generative contexts are presented with the terminology of, and theorised through, a sustained critique of routine activity theory. An approach that enables the dual analysis of systems-level institutions and agential-level enforcement practices. In so doing, the article contributes to the metatheory of crime causation from a philosophy of social science position that brings structure and agency into dialogue (Archer, 1995). The article makes three key contributions: empirical knowledge on deer poaching is renewed with current data; theoretical innovations in wildlife crime studies are advanced throughout and finally, the work contributes to discussions on metatheory in the aetiology of crime control.

This article demonstrates that routine activity theory has critically overlooked the role of macro-level institutional arrangements in explanations of absent guardianship. The problem is particularly acute in research on crimes against wildlife, which is overlooked in criminological literature and deprioritised in criminal justice practice. An example of this de-prioritisation is the absence of sentencing guidelines for wildlife crime prosecutions, producing maddening inconsistencies in sentencing outcomes in court. The argument is advanced using an examination of illegal deer hunting to show that routine activity theory omits the wider conditions of existence from which offending emanates and is responded to. A sympathetic critique of the limitations of routine activity theory (RAT) is developed, followed by the advancement of a novel synthesised version of the theory that accommodates increased layers of the social world. The synthesised theory advanced in the article is argued to be a more adequate platform from which to address complex social problems. The approach is analytically separate from, but shares an affinity with, ethical arguments, such as species justice interpretations of the problem. The critique of RAT and development of the social relations approach facilitates the elaboration of what critical realist authors term a ‘domain-specific ontology’ (Elder-Vass, 2010: 68). An approach which is yet to be established in the literature on what is to be done about wildlife crime.

Scholars have made important advancements in the application of RAT to understand crimes against wildlife in rural regions, but there is a gap in these accounts of the background conditions that derail the ‘capable guardianship’ of frontline enforcement experts (Cohen and Felson, 1979). In a key contribution to the rural wildlife crime field, Eliason (2012) has shown the potentials of RAT in the study of crime in the countryside. However, Eliason’s work fails to provide an account of how the mechanisms operate in a wider context and what causal properties have precipitated the absence. Absences of capable guardianship do not exist in socio-economic vacuums, free from historical preconditions or intervening policy arrangements. Accounts that overlook those structural factors and their capacities for influencing outcomes are preoccupied with situational settings, CCTV and environmental design. Such a truncated ontological framing obscures distal institutional features that give rise to situated activity, such as crime prevention programmes (e.g., Pawson and Tilley, 1997). Those accounts unnecessarily reduce explanations to a superficial level of voluntarist ontology with a singular focus on the agency of guardianship from a rational actor perspective (e.g., Eck, 2003: 101; Sayer, 2000).

Notable criminologists have identified the deficiencies in the failure of RAT to embed explanations in wider causal determinations. As Anthony Bottoms states in a critical contribution to this thesis: ‘unlike collective efficacy theory, RAT has not developed any systematic theorization linking routine activities to macro-social issues’ (Bottoms, 2012: 455). Others have responded to the conceptual gap and provided a framework which is adopted as foundational in this article to embed RAT into a dialogue with broader structural preconditions. Those conditions are the contexts that shape criminogenic and enforcement outcomes as emergent tendencies (Edwards and Levi, 2008). Accordingly, this article applies the Edwards and Levi approach to develop existing understandings of the challenges to wildlife crime enforcement (Goodall, 2020; Nurse, 2015; Wellsmith, 2011). It does so by applying a philosophical realist perspective and social relations theory to bring structural antecedents into the domain of wildlife crime control.

The article uses findings from fieldwork on deer poaching in the rural West Country of England – the habitat where large red stags are most abundant in the British Isles – to theorise the governance deficit in applied wildlife crime control. It also contributes to the problematization of aetiology in criminology, or the so-called ‘aetiological crisis’ from a (first-order) critical realist position (Edwards, 2016). This novel approach frames RAT as an abstract foundational undergird for a causal mechanism, instead of a heuristic utilised by situational crime prevention administrators. The innovative adaptation of RAT + social relations enables an account of why rural place managers are incapacitated that goes beyond immediate situational settings. Accordingly, and following the general principles of critical realist philosophy of social science, outcomes are conceptualised as ‘co-determined tendencies’. Tendencies are constituted by a variety of causal determinants and are externally related to a generative backdrop that, in this case, diminishes the capacities of capable guardianship to prevent crimes against suitable victims, such as wild deer (Bhaskar, 1997 [1975]; Sayer, 2000). The article provides a theorisation of political economic and criminal justice policy initiatives that act as structurally inscribed constraints on experts, arising from conversations with the very experts negotiating those same constraints.

What is to be done about wildlife crime?

Crimes against non-human animals, commonly referred to as ‘wildlife crime’, routinely occur in the underregulated and depopulated rural hinterlands of the United Kingdom (Nurse, 2011). The frequency of the incidence of persecution of common species such as deer, badgers and birds of prey means they can be more appropriately conceptualised as volume crimes against mundane fauna, which, as I have previously argued, is a more precise alternative to the eclectic policy construct terminology of ‘wildlife crime’ (Goodall, 2020). The perpetrators, victims and varied local environments of British rural mundane fauna crime share so little in common with the global illegal wildlife trade in iconic charismatic megafauna that deploying the umbrella category of ‘wildlife crime’, shot through as it is with power relations, sheds little light on the complexities and distinctiveness of the problems of either sphere. The concept or marketing slogan of wildlife crime is therefore too broad to be of any service to social science, but is necessary for policy advances, orthodox legal discourse and NGO strategic communications. ‘Mundane’ not due to the prosaicness of the animal or crime, but due to the necessity of social science to abstract the distinct attributes of a unit of analysis and their generative context from superficially related entities. This abstraction delimits volume mundane fauna crime from conservation crimes against megafauna or exotic species that populate green criminology (South and Brisman, 2018; Zimmerman, 2003). Evidence and theory addressing the problems of enforcement in UK wildlife crime literature on offending of this type are both sparse and dated (Wellsmith, 2011). Literature with an international focus on the illegal global wildlife trade emphasises the world system aspects of offending in areas of absolute deprivation, which is distinct from the UK context (Challender and MacMillan, 2014). This variety of literature and empirical focuses underscores the fragmentation of existing work on poaching prevention and the disparities in the aetiology of offending. Lumping the existing literature together simply because it addresses ‘wildlife crime’ delinked from the geo-historical contexts within which they operate obscures more than it reveals. Critical realists argue that bundling together unrelated or multifactorial concepts into superordinate concepts generates ‘contentless abstractions’ (Goodall, 2021b; Sayer, 2010: 138).

Rural environs invariably provide the proximal settings for offences against British non-human species, as animals are taken from or persecuted in their natural habitat. Due to this natural context, illicit behaviour has been theorised most convincingly not from a capacious ‘wildlife crime’ position, but from an ‘enterprise crime’ perspective (Smith, 2004). This literature indicates that volume crimes against mundane fauna are the result of conspiring specialists in legitimate positions of rural employment or corrupted owners of enterprises who engage in illegal activities to increase revenue from contraband interspersed with licit produce. Framing the problem as one of shadow crimes which operate on the margins of licit/illicit continuums challenges the traditional urban marauder and acquisitive criminal construct (Goodall, 2021a; McElwee et al., 2011; Smith et al., 2013; Somerville et al., 2015). Deviant custodians of the countryside populate these heterodox offender categories and exploit the symbolic capital afforded to stewards of the land. This social category and offending process are significant for a variety of reasons; when animals are pursued and illegally dispatched, the persecution creates unnecessary suffering for sentient beings. Species justice is therefore a notable element of these types of crimes (Nurse and Wyatt, 2021). Rogue operators kill animals without care for dispatch methods and will often leave animals maimed due to misfiring weapons or using traps which cause a prolonged death. Deer are seen with their faces partially shot off and their jaws flapping in disfigurement as they escape illegal shooters or are found emaciated, having perished in wire traps (Goodall, 2023). Due to the largest stags being targeted more frequently as they achieve increased payment per kilo of venison, runts are left to mate and reproduce the next generation of herds. This process contributes to the downward spiral of the overall health of the species in native habitats where they are most abundant. Inbreeding can also occur under circumstances of persistent persecution, as the gene pool shrinks, which further contributes to the decline of the species. In addition to biocentric harms and species injustice, crimes can adversely impact human health if contaminated meats enter underregulated food supply chains (Goodall, 2021a; White, 2008).

Deer are illegally killed at night, which reduces the visibility of the shooter. They are invariably shot from long range with night vision rifle scopes, and little regard is taken of the prior health of animals. Deer are notable reservoirs of bovine Tb, signs of which cannot be verified under the cover of darkness when illegally night shooting. Nor is attention paid to the conditions in which the deer are illicitly dispatched in and dragged through. They can be left in turgid groundwater or other stagnant and unsanitary environments before carcass retrieval. Inexpert butchery and inattentiveness to proper food hygiene and health and safety standards could lead to a public health catastrophe if tainted meats are consumed on mass by customers of the leisure and hospitality industries of the West Country (Goodall and Smith, 2025; Wyatt, 2016). Bovine Tb has entered pet food supply chains from tainted venison, which has led to the deaths of companion animals, and animal byproducts from West Country-based food producers have been illegally supplying London food markets (Food Standards Agency, 2025). As such, there are human and non-human critical hazards worthy of criminological consideration. Further, the topic is significant as it contributes to the expansion of what constitutes the victim in criminology – from human to non-human and from the mega to the mundane (Flynn and Hall, 2017; Goodall, 2023).

It has been shown that owners of farms, estates and food hospitality premises, in conjunction with colluding deviant game keepers, compromised haulage operators or other collaborating land managers, constitute key actors in the poaching of mundane fauna (Goodall, 2021a). These findings corroborate assumptions by the Food Standards Agency’s Food Crime Unit (Food Standards Agency, 2016) and challenge common policy tropes of roaming organised criminal gangs ransacking the rural idyll and the accompanying concept of the urban marauder. As such, they orient awareness to the social properties of the insider offending category operating on licit/illicit continuums intrinsic to enterprise crime theory. In the wider literature, poaching has been theorised using a variety of frameworks, including neutralisation, differential association, and corporate crime (Eliason and Dodder, 1999; Enticott, 2011; Wyatt et al., 2020). A key theory of relevance to this particular form of offending and its preconditions of emergence is RAT.

Routine activity theory

RAT has been advanced beyond the urban-centric and anthropocentric crime prevention interventions of its orthodox and administrative origins to theorise the emergence of crimes against non-human animals in rural settings (Bowden and Pytlarz, 2020; Cohen and Felson, 1979; Eliason, 2012; Eliason and Dodder, 1999). RAT is especially apt for explaining the crimes of the countryside, where population sparsity, lower density of dwellings and barren terrain can all reduce potential informal guardianship, place managers and ‘handlers’ (Eck, 2003; Goodall, 2023). Reductions in deterrent factors incentivise and increase the likelihood of targeting of suitable victims, as the risks diminish in contrast to the plentiful rewards. Those aspects imbue the ‘absence of capable guardianship’ component of the RAT composite with a befitting property that predisposes it towards analysis of rural expanses more so than busy metropolitan settings (Goodall and Smith, 2025). These key factors are the traditional features of the guardianship component of RAT, which focuses on the immediacy of the situational settings from which crime can arise (Felson, 1995).

RAT has been applied and adapted in research on offending against both rare and common animals in rural settings in a variety of locations, including South Africa, Uganda and the USA (Eliason, 2012; Moreto and Lemieux, 2015; Warchol and Harrington, 2016). The theory has been expanded, and the opportunity reduction and situational crime prevention realms it is associated with have been applied to offences against exotic fauna in Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico (Pires, 2015; Pires and Clarke, 2012). RAT is generally applied as a heuristic, a feature it shares with other popular theories such as the square of crime and the guardianship triangle (Eck, 2003; Young, 1997). It is a heuristic device in the sense that it presents a situation, such as an opportunity for crime, and renders it comprehensible in the simplest terms. RAT is a bedrock theory of administrative criminology emblematic of the era of the criminologies of everyday life (Garland, 2001: 127). The period ushered in crime prevention through environmental design at the exclusion of interests in deviant dispositions and the socio-economic determinations that might contribute to their generation. The noncritical approaches now associated with contemporary ‘crime science’ were adopted by government agencies and the apparatus of the private security industry, underpinned by rational choice theory to achieve easy fixes with policies of austere expenditure (Garland, 2001: 113–118). Due to the institutionalisation of RAT within neoliberal governance and Home Office-affiliated crime science, the wider aetiological questions of why crimes occur and the societal contexts they emerge from are avoided. A stance that was typified by Conservative Party Prime Minister John Major, who stated in 1993, ‘We must condemn a little more and understand a little less’. This position tends to be upheld to expedite measurable results and to avoid compromising relations with funders of research who may be associated with programmes of austerity and punitive social policies that can act as antecedents to suffering or disorder (Tombs and Whyte, 2003: 24–30).

Understanding the dynamics of the crime commissioning process, or why offenders are motivated, and victims are targeted, populates the literature of rural-based wildlife crime (Eliason, 2012; Nurse, 2011; Smith, 2004). What remains unexplored is the black box of capable guardianship and the conditions that tend to inhibit it, thus creating the absence and confronting the ‘why’ question. This is a major sphere of the RAT triangle – if the generative contexts that deactivate enforcement are engaged with and those social or policy conditions challenged and rearranged, unwanted processes can be disrupted. The macro elements of RAT tend to be avoided due to the rational actor model it adheres to, which directs the theory to a myopic focus on situational environments and crude calculations of utility maximisation (Pawson and Tilley, 1997). This focus flattens the deeper, distal aspects of the theory and culminates in the bracketing of wider societal forces from explanations. It is these macro-side omissions and the withholding of background factors that were earlier identified as unsatisfactory by Bottoms (2012) and responded to by Edwards and Levi (2008). While there is a dynamic and detailed literature of applications and advancements in RAT (e.g. Eck, 2003; Felson, 1995), the intervention elaborated in this article appropriates the framework not as an administrative heuristic to predict and prevent illicit activity, but as an abstraction for enforcement capabilities. This more malleable reading facilitates a philosophical problematization of RAT as a ‘causal mechanism’ (Elder-Vass, 2010). Informed by this framing of the problem, the following account develops and contributes to the existing ‘wildlife crime’ literature that identifies the challenges in the provision of optimum enforcement, the general policing of rural mundane fauna crimes and the delivery of species justice to non-human animals (Flynn and Hall, 2017; Goodall, 2023; Nurse, 2015; Wellsmith, 2011). The following section augments the approach now discussed with a metatheory of how structure interacts with agency to produce the outcome of constrained enforcement and incapable guardianship.

Bringing the macro back in: The structural account

The path towards a causal account attentive to the question of why guardianship is absent, rather than a heuristic assuming it is, entails bringing the macro back into analysis. This approach deepens the ontological boundaries of the phenomenon and enables a structural account of the problem. The path towards this account, while maintaining adherence to the basic principles of RAT, has been formulated by Edwards and Levi of the Cardiff School in what they term ‘the social relations’ approach (Edwards and Levi, 2008). This mode of analysis adopts a critical realist metatheory of causal emergence that reconciles dynamic interchanges between structure and agency (Archer, 1995). The authors specifically adopt RAT for understanding and explaining the organisation of serious crime not as a heuristic but as a causal mechanism, while identifying the necessity to open up the framework to make explanations more ontologically penetrating, multifaceted and process-oriented. While Cohen and Felson draw upon macro-scale societal and economic transformations (Eck, 2003: 83–86), they fail to provide what Elder-Vass (2010: 68) refers to as a regional or ‘domain-specific ontology’ for their causal analysis of historical development–societal transformation by Cohen and Felson’s reading jolts into being akin to a burst water main. The discussion of privatised utilities, shareholder interests eclipsing public health necessity and mismanagement of resources to maintain the water supply are left to the speculation of the reader.

Following the directive by Anthony Bottoms, the conditions of existence that enable or constrain the dynamo of historical social change are inadequately accounted for by Cohen and Felson (1979) and continue to be overlooked by those representing the tradition. Bottoms argues that, ‘unlike collective efficacy theory, RAT has not developed any systematic theorization linking routine activities to macro-social issues’ (Bottoms, 2012: 455). Edwards and Levi have responded to the need for systematic theorisation with their social relations framework, which has been applied in literature that reconceptualises ‘wildlife crime’ (Goodall, 2020, 2021a, 2021b). This approach can inform and broaden the scope of existing literature on the problem of wildlife crime enforcement (Eliason and Dodder, 1999; Nurse, 2015; Wellsmith, 2011). The authors of the social relations approach argue that adopting the novel synthesis account ‘informs more strategic considerations of the social preconditions for serious crimes’ (Edwards and Levi, 2008: 368). Acknowledging the causative capacities of contextual settings when integrated with the RAT triangle, the authors state, ‘[f]raming-in a concern with context entails recognition of the explicitly political economic and cultural structures that underlie (or undermine) the crime triangle’ (Edwards and Levi, 2008: 378). Edwards highlights the impacts of ‘social structural trends’ on offending processes in which ‘the consequences of substantial sovereign debts for public expenditure on law enforcement and other preventive efforts frustrate guardianship’ (Edwards, 2016: 994). This approach therefore goes beyond other superficially realist crime prevention frameworks, such as Pawson and Tilley (1997), who, like Eck and others, focus on the pavement rather than policy. Thus rendering deeper social forces absent from their evaluative method.

By adopting the social relations framework, we are more able to understand the enforcement vacuum that precipitates poaching of deer, as it is the ‘specific context’ that is undermining crime prevention programmes. This approach goes beyond applying RAT as a rudimentary heuristic to demonstrate an outcome in its simplest logic or beyond ‘realist evaluation’ that measures the frequency of observable empirical regularities. It also supersedes over-simplified rational actor motives and preoccupation with situational environments of traditional RAT. This approach adopts an epistemology that perceives the relations between the three RAT components not as a pedagogic device but as a ‘mechanism’ with real causal properties (Edwards, 2016; Sayer, 2000). The combination of the RAT entities forms a structure composed of three key components of a suitable victim, motivated offender and (an absence of) capable guardians that are necessarily related in space and time. From this integral internal relationship, an outcome emerges as a ‘tendency’ that is irreducible to any of the three parts in singular aggregate form. The emergent entity manifests as a ‘tendency’, which in this case is an offending process – the killing of deer or its prevention. The causal relationship is not a unilinear law-like process of measurable variables in constant conjunctions offered by neo-positivist analysis (e.g. Pawson and Tilley, 1997). Rather, it is a tendency that is complex and ‘multiply determined’ by a host of secondary, contingent conditions that are externally related to the internal RAT structure, which expedite or frustrate the necessary relationship (Edwards, 2016; Elder-Vass, 2010). Tendencies of offending processes, it is argued, are more amenable to intervention and disruption than rigid law-like manifestations.

From this perspective, an absence of guardianship is shaped by ‘contingent entities’ that are externally influencing outcomes. Such conditions do not readily avail themselves at first glance but provide the underlying generative context of the causal mechanism. To expose them requires in-depth, long-term investigations and intensive research strategies from the ethnographer’s tool kit. The forces of policy and political economy discussed in the following section are the contexts that debilitate guardianship. It is also important to define our specific framing of ‘generative context’ and structural conditions. Following the leading critical realist Andrew Sayer, it is argued ‘that by ‘conditions’, we simply mean other objects, these having their own causal powers and liabilities’ (Sayer, 2000: 73). The author illustrates this position by noting that ‘Whether a causal power or liability [such as the RAT triad] is actually activated or suffered on any occasion depends on conditions whose presence and configuration are contingent’ (Sayer, 2010: 73). As such from this perspective: ‘the outcomes of the activation of mechanisms (e.g. crime prevention programmes) always depends on specific contexts’ (Sayer, 2000: 23).

From this perspective, the same configurations of generative mechanisms can produce different outcomes, in other settings, or the same outcome can emerge from different combinations of mechanisms, and so are ‘contingent’ and tendencies, rather than dogmatic laws (Edwards and Levi, 2008: 365–568; Sayer, 2000: 23–24). Contingent conditions can also produce unforeseen or unintended consequences, such as those that are discussed in the findings section and those that I have previously interrogated (Goodall, 2021b). The impact of the Care Act 2014 on wildlife crime enforcement is an unintended consequence of other structures relating to the care of vulnerable humans, and consequently, an unforeseen outcome. By adopting the integrated RAT social relations perspective, we can respond to the charge from Bottoms and bring the macro back into critical questions of causality in criminology and produce robust structural accounts, from a post-positivist perspective, that challenge the ‘aetiological crisis’. We are also offered a potential route to travel further with a holistic analysis of the problem than existing research on rural crimes against wildlife has yet achieved (Eliason, 2012).

Methodology

Research for this article was conducted as part of a larger body of work on deer poaching and the related illicit venison trade located in the West Country of the United Kingdom. References are made to the associated research outputs throughout this publication. To ascertain the views of experts and understand what factors constrained their ability to function as ‘capable guardians’, 36 semi-structured interviews were conducted with experts on rural, wildlife and meat production crime control. The research was qualitative, incorporating long conversations with experts, followed by documentary analysis of the policies exposed by the experts as disruptive to their work objectives. Ethical approval was received from a Russel Group university. Experts were interviewed for this research from a wide range of enforcement agencies and statutory bodies, and some were interviewed multiple times. Please see Appendix 1 for a comprehensive interview table. All experts had years of experience; the least number of years in the job was eight, the most over 30, hence respectfully referring to them as senior experts.

Relevant data was obtained via open-ended questions that are presented in the findings section – questions such as ‘what makes your job more difficult, what conditions are frustrating your work, what would make your work easier, is austerity a factor in accomplishing your tasks’ were asked to all respondents. It was through this pointed, but free-flowing line of questioning that unexpected answers were given in relation to the conditions discussed later that have unintended consequences for the policing of wildlife crimes. The approach to sampling respondents was that of ‘Probe Sampling’, which can be interpreted as seeking a more defined and uniform sample of higher quality respondents over boundless quantity, in ontologically uniform social settings (Collins and Evans, 2017). Experienced experts, all working in the enforcement and regulation of serious wildlife offences, were deemed quality respondents.

In line with the commitment to discovering the causative social conditions that enable or constrain mechanisms, and ones that are not immediately obvious or readily observable, my research strategy was based around an ‘intensive strategy’ (Dannermark, 2019: 150; Edwards and Levi, 2008: 375). An intensive strategy is contrasted much as the qualitative/quantitative research models generally are, but the distinction is not synonymous. Sayer (2010: 163) suggests, ‘In intensive research the primary questions concern how some causal process works out in a particular case or limited number of cases. Extensive research, which is more common, is concerned with discovering some of the common properties and general patterns’. Edwards and Levi (2008: 368) contend that extensive models describe formal relations of similarity, which are not defining of an entity and therefore not causally generative to its existence. While intensive models direct focus towards ‘substantial relations of connection, both necessary and contingent, involving causal actors’. This strategy is therefore a necessary component of social relations, RAT synthesis explication, and for moving beyond the positivistic research strategies of the realist evaluation method and the rational choice mode of understanding (Edwards and Levi, 2008: 365–368). The intensive research strategy was adopted because extensive research on empirical patterns of multiple sets of data has little import on the causes relevant to this particular case, hence the need for intensive research into substantive relations of connection rather than extensive research into formal relations of similarity and difference.

Findings and discussion

This section reveals the structural antecedents that act as constraints on the causal mechanism of the RAT relational composite. Specifically, it exposes and theorises the contingent conditions that deactivate the powers of the capable guardianship aspect in the policing of crimes against wildlife in rural regions. Conditions that exist at the analytical level of systems, structures and institutions and advance a response to Anthony Bottoms’ intervention calling for a ‘systematic linking’ of RAT with macro-level social policies. The deactivation of guards is argued to simultaneously activate motivated offenders, whose offending is enabled by the absence of a law enforcement deterrent factor. These structural forces go beyond orthodox RAT as they are conditions that predate the action they are precipitating and are aspects integral to other processes, unintended to impact our topic of interest. The conditions that co-determine the stifling of prevention mechanisms are referred to broadly as structures of political economy and criminal justice policy conditions. The findings discussed below were identified by multiple experts during interviews, thus rendering them relevant to our interests. These findings cohere with and update the existing literature of wildlife crime enforcement, which notes the problems of ‘under-resourcing and marginalisation’, ‘crime not taken seriously (or not even viewed as criminal)’ and the ‘overall lack of deterrent effect’ (Wellsmith, 2011: 134).

Metropolitan bias: Rural/urban budgetary disparities

Beyond the background political economic conditions generated by austerity, rural regions experience higher levels of retrenchment than their urban counterparts. Supporting evidence suggests there is a form of metropolitan bias at play in funding allocations. Data from the Local Government Finances briefing report shows that per capita spending has dropped in rural areas from over £300 per head pre-2015 to just over £100 in 2022. Meanwhile, contemporaneous spending in ‘Metropolitan Districts’ is far higher, averaging £350 and over £300 in London Boroughs (Brien, 2023). The common trope of the rural idyll (Mingay, 1989), which maintains that rural regions experience far less crime, is challenged by the present research. Moreover, initial funding for policing is greatly reduced in less populated rural areas due to decreased housing density and the consequent diminished council tax revenue eligible to be allocated to the precept. The issue of dwelling sparsity impacting tax revenue is compounded by the inputs of the tourism trade, emblematic of the region. When the population swells during peak season months, tourists put enforcement officers of all types under more pressure. As seasonal leisure and hospitality premises open for the boom period, there is a greater strain on all types of state infrastructure, from highways to hospitals and policing. Policing is put under further strain by anti-social behaviour and disorder generated by the nighttime economy in popular seaside tourist resorts during peak seasons. As such, the underlying fiscal formulas are out of sync with the enforcement capacities required in the region constituted by two coastlines, tourist towns, university cities and rural expanse.

The central government funding imbalance, which in concrete terms defunds capable rural guardianship, has been identified as problematic by the Police and Crime Commissioner for Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. The commissioner noted that the regional force receives £106 of central funding per head of population in Devon and Cornwall, which, according to her, is £4 below the national average. This amount itself is a shortfall of £7 million a year when considered against other urban regions (Reines, 2017). Analysis of the Provisional Local Government Finance Settlement conducted by the Rural Services Network 2024 notes that: ‘urban authorities receive 41% more in government funded spending power per capita compared to rural areas…despite receiving significantly less government funded spending power, rural residents continue to pay 20% more in Council Tax per head than their urban counterparts, exacerbating financial inequities’.

The inequitable funding formulas and underlying economic conditions reduce capacities for capable guardianship in rural regions. According to Shaun Sawyer, the Devon and Cornwall Chief Constable between 2013 and 2022, the region’s workforce has reduced ‘from 6,200 posts in 2010 to around 3900 by 2019/2020’ (Sawyer, 2015). Of that Devon and Cornwall Constabulary workforce, 2914 remain as sworn officers, and 46 were cut from 2016 to 2017. In a bid to survive the funding cuts, ‘forces are selling off more of their assets to try and raise some funds for capital investment and increasingly drawing on their reserves’ (Pratt, 2019). Devon and Cornwall Police closed and sold off 10 police stations between 2013 and 2017 to property developers (Reines, 2017). While no official data exists on police station closures, rural criminology literature has catalogued the closure of rural stations in parallel with the general decline of rural policing in Britain (Smith and Somerville, 2013).

The following data was obtained by a Freedom of Information Request made to Devon and Cornwall Police for this research:

‘Devon & Cornwall Police have made £60.9m cuts from 2009 to 2017/18. A further £9.6m budget savings are planned between 2018/19 and 2021/22.

Since 01/01/08, 409 Police Staff have left the Force as a result of redundancy and 181 Police Officers have left the Force following the implementation of Regulation A19’.

As a result of cuts, Sergeant Cooper of Devon and Cornwall stated to local media that ‘he knew of occasions when there had been no-one available to attend incidents anywhere in Cornwall’ and went on to state to local councillors: “I know full well, there have been incidents I am aware of where the box is empty and there’s no one available this side of Plymouth (ie in Cornwall)” Goodwin, 2017). That stark statement is backed up by this officer stationed in the region who emphasises the extent of the problem he is faced with:

‘I’m the beat manager for [South West location], covering 250sq miles, so I deal with 13 parishes, and I’m on my own in the police station, there’s nobody else in the police station. My next nearest officer, WCO-wise is in [South West location, over one hours drive away] and he’s the youth prevention officer. So his hands are full as well, being the only one on this side of the county’.

(Wildlife Crime Officer).

Matters of austere public expenditure cuts and their allocation to rural councils were noted by the following two specialists as impacting frontline wildlife crime prevention:

‘People want to do things and want to protect it [the local deer] and want to look after it and prevent all this. But the money to do it is the last thing that there is available.

That’s why all the people are poaching, and more people now are poaching, because they all know that very fact. And people like [EH officer] who want to be on it, policing its end user and traceability, are fighting a losing battle, because they’ve not got the resources either. And everybody knows it’.

(British Deer Society DSC Level One Accessor).

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‘This is where the problems are, you’ve got Devon and Somerset and the, I think 14 districts, all on tight budgets. All don’t want big court costs and then you’ve got illegal slaughter going on, or poaching, and you can imagine the costs if it goes to court, it can run forever, which is also the problem, because police have to prosecute, whereas enforcement agencies are under the council and the council say, oh we can’t spend too much money’.

(Trading Standards Senior Investigator).

Precipitous cuts to public expenditures within local policing in the rural West Country have resulted in alternative emergency services filling the vacuum left by shortages in police officers (Wallis, 2019). Devon and Cornwall Police have:

‘Trained firefighters as special constables in an attempt to boost officer numbers in rural areas. Seven Devon and Somerset firefighters have taken on the community responder roles after two months training with Devon and Cornwall Police. They can now arrest suspects, but must prioritise fighting fires when needed’ (BBC Devon, 2019).

The move has been criticised by The Police Federation as ‘an attempt to paper over the cracks caused by cuts in funding’ (BBC Devon, 2019).

‘Victimless’ crime de-prioritisation: Incapacitating wildlife crime experts

‘The situation when it comes to coping with the challenge of public funding cuts is that you have to prioritise. Now wildlife crime, and I’m sure you’ve heard this from other officers, always takes second fiddle to all the other crime’.

(Wildlife Crime Police Officer).

The macro-political economy context of austerity, compounded by urban/rural funding inequity, precipitates an absence of guardianship in combination with a further set of policy imperatives. Crimes against common wildlife species in the United Kingdom are generally regarded as ‘victimless’ crimes, due to the elimination of a human victim to give voice to injustice. The absence of a discernible anthropocentric victim demotes offending to a low-level status and effectively writes crimes against wildlife out of policy and legislation. The result of this anthropocentric perspective of justice is that rural wildlife crimes can be subordinated to other operational objectives and deprioritised by managers in local policy-making roles, juggling competing complex issues with measurable outcomes. Once austerity budgets, coupled with reduced rural per person policing budgetary allocation trickles down to rural constabularies, managers must allocate the now streamlined resources to identifiable priorities. The problem of a culture of wildlife crime de-prioritisation and its marginalisation from local policy priorities was emphasised by expert practitioners.

‘With OP Nero [anti poaching and illegal meats operation in the region], nobody wanted to take it on, the police bosses were like ‘oh no’, they didn’t really want to get involved. [officer] did obviously, the officers that get it are fine, but higher above they’re going ‘this isn’t a priority’. Our boss was like ‘well this isn’t really for us’, which is true really, it is more police and Environmental Health and all these agencies going, we don’t really want it because we’ve got a lack of resources and then you get to the point when no one wants to take it on’.

(Senior Trading Standards Investigator).

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(Deer welfare expert and livestock vet).

The de-prioritisation of ‘victimless’ non-human criminality on the rural frontier is in part an outcome structured by specific institutional arrangements. Such arrangements override species justice in favour of anthropocentric outcomes. Those policies will now be individually discussed.

Crimes against wildlife as ‘non-notifiable offences’

A fundamental impediment to best practice wildlife crime enforcement in the UK context is that crimes are officially ‘non-notifiable’ offences. Offences, therefore, go unrecorded and do not contribute towards official crime statistics, which generates a variety of significant challenges. The omission of a major and frequent type of crime from being recorded in official Home Office data enables policy makers at the national level to deprioritise rural regions, which can be justified with (unreliable) data to have lower crime rates than their urban counterparts and therefore require fewer resources. At the regional level, rural constabulary managers can allocate scarce resources away from wildlife crimes, due to their official non-existence according to the data. Preventing deer poaching at the local level is disincentivised due to this policy and co-determines an absence of capable guardians. Official crime rates in the region do not decrease if poachers are thwarted and crimes prevented; therefore, time-consuming and resource-intensive hard work goes uncredited. Neither do official crime rates increase if offences go ignored and left unattended.

Therefore, police managers and responding officers are disincentivised to tackle this type of criminality because they are neither rewarded nor reprimanded for whichever course of action they pursue. However, local crime rates can skyrocket if officers are directing efforts towards complex anti-poaching initiatives instead of tackling shoplifting or mobile phone theft, which are notifiable offences. In crude financial terms, the deer could be worth £1000 to a restaurant menu, while a shoplifter could be stealing an onion, but the former is subordinated to the latter in enforcement contexts to ensure official crime rates do not rise. Due to this deleterious policy context, no official UK wildlife crime statistics exist, which further exacerbates the de-prioritisation of this type of offending. The issue of non-notifiable offences is so critical that it featured heavily in the recommendations made by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Wildlife and Forest Crime Analytic Toolkit Report for the UK (UNODC, 2021: 12, 14, 23). The report was highly critical of this issue and recommended that crimes be made notifiable to strengthen enforcement and prosecution powers. The current government policy of registering offences as non-notifiable is deactivating the capable guardian’s causal power. The de-prioritisation of non-notifiable wildlife crimes in the context of budget cuts was articulated by respondents:

‘I think what it’s come down to is that people [police staff] are so busy, they are so exhausted and tired, they haven’t got time. And when you’ve got something which is seen as ‘why am I dealing with this [wildlife crime], it’s not important’ you just drop it and don’t get involved. So, when you start cutting money, these are the knock-on effects on policing’.

(Wildlife Crime Police and National Wildlife Crime Unit).

The subordination of mundane fauna crimes to other, more sensationalist signal crimes like drug offences can lead to an organisational culture of stigmatisation of the role of responding to offences. Conditions that can create yet further barriers to enforcement, as these experts from the National Wildlife Crime Unit highlight:

‘The other issue with wildlife crime is, it’s viewed in the job, unless you’ve got an interest in it, you always get the impression, or you always get it from other officers, ‘oh it’s the woolly lamb brigade’, or something like that . . .

They don’t see the bigger picture that we deal with in relation to the organised crime side of matters and the connections between criminality in people who are involved in wildlife crime and other criminality’.

(National Wildlife Crime Unit, Special Investigator).

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‘The stuff I’ve been doing in my own time, generally, I wouldn’t say ‘willingly’ [laughs], is because if I don’t do it, it won’t get done and it’s my personal interest, the crimes I want to investigate and the crimes I want to see… There’s a massive gap locally, nationally, locally more than anything, in this type of work’.

(Wildlife Crime Police Officer).

Absence of sentencing guidelines in wildlife offending court proceedings

The non-notifiable status of wildlife offending, identified as detrimental to effective, capable guardianship by the UN report, is compounded by yet further structural constraints. An additional factor inhibiting the delivery of justice and creation of a deterrent is the absence of official sentencing guidelines in relation to wildlife offences (UNODC, 2021: 15). This legislative procedural omission multiply determines the outcome of guardianship vacuums in causative interaction with the other structural factors being discussed. The 2025 Wildlife Crime report by the Wildlife and Countryside Link, overseen by the Head of the UK National Wildlife Crime Unit and Chair of the INTERPOL Wildlife Crime Working Group, urges the government to not only make crimes notifiable, but to create court sentencing guidelines for offending (WCL, 2025: 4). The respected Bat Conservation Trust Wildlife Crime Project Officer has emphasised to me, in multiple presentations to students studying this topic and in ongoing conversations over a 7-year period, that a major challenge to achieving what we might refer to as wildlife justice in criminal law, is that the Sentencing Council excludes wildlife crime prosecutions from official sentencing guidelines. This glaring oversight further perpetuates the ‘victimless crime’ status of non-human animals and forces the project officer to regularly impart informal and ad hoc advice to bemused magistrates in wildlife crime court proceedings. Urban-based magistrates may have no idea about the complexities of the Night Poaching Act 1828, or the Badgers Act 1991, or the Hunting Act 2004. Issues that are accelerated by the 1828 Act refencing hard labour and transportation as potential punishments for game poaching, when in fact a cursory £250 might be issued by an official without specialist knowledge.

The previously cited UN Wildlife and Forest Crime Toolkit Report states this in relation to the problem of sentencing guidelines:

‘[T]he absence of any sentencing guidelines across the entire country means that sentencing practice does not appear to present any sort of deterrent. Generally speaking, most sentencing was greeted with disappointment by the stakeholders interviewed during this assessment’. (UNODC, 2021: 15).

This structural constraint produces massive inconsistency in the passing of sentences, as well as a lack of transparency for all individuals implicated in cases and creates an unnecessary complexity in juridical proceedings. The wildlife crime project officer recalls magistrates handing housing developers in the South Yorkshire village of Wortley financial penalties of £1800 for destroying bat roosts during renovations. In stark contrast, on other occasions, fines of £600,000 have been passed to housing construction firms for destroying breeding roosts (BBC, London, 2020). Such inconsistency can result in reduced sentences being implemented by officials ignorant of or unsympathetic to wildlife criminal justice procedures. Outcomes left to the whims of over-worked, ill-informed or disinterested magistrates can create the pernicious knock-on effects of diminishing the general deterrent effect of sentencing and enabling perpetrators to avoid commensurate justice in cases of wildlife crime offending.

The Bat Conservation Trust Wildlife Crime Project Officer states, in evidence for this research:

Finally, it should be noted that wildlife crimes are always adjudicated in Magistrates’ Courts rather than the Crown Court, due to their status as a summary offence rather than the more serious classification of an indictable offence. Wildlife offending is therefore lumped in with less serious crimes such as low-level motoring offences and Television Licence payment evasion.

The Care Act 2014

Responses to wildlife crimes are often complex and collaborative processes constituted by multi-agency enforcement configurations. Such responses entail a differentiated range of enforcement delivered at distinct stages of the crime script (Goodall, 2021a). A variety of NGOs, such as the RSPB, RSPCA, League Against Cruel Sports and The Bat Conservation Trust, play vital roles in the investigation and prosecution of crimes. Statutory agencies such as Trading Standards, Environmental Health and the Food Standards Agency hold regulatory enforcement powers in relation to animal welfare and food processing legislation of relevance to illegal taking of deer and illicit venison production. Agents from those offices visit farms, monitor licenced game hunters, review Approved Game Handling Establishments (venison processing plants) and regulate meat-selling premises, such as butcher’s shops and restaurants. In addition to having their powers and resources eroded by post-2010 austerity regimes, the enforcement capacities of Trading Standards officers are officially limited by policy. Trading Standards officers must adhere to the Care Act 2014, which entails an anthropocentric duty of care to protect human victims from harm, as reported by this senior-level expert.

‘We have a duty to protect under the Care Act. There’s so much work we do and then there’s me saying, ‘we’ve got poaching!’ and they say, ‘that’s Environmental Health’ or ‘police’, and then obviously if Environmental Health say, ‘oh we haven’t really got the resources to deal with this’, because they’re so small, because they’ve only got 5 officers and it’s going to tie up our team for 2 years, we can’t do anything else’.

(Senior Trading Standards Investigator and National Crime Agency expert).

Sections 42(1) and 42(2) of the Care Act 2014 codify into the statutory obligations of frontline public sector workers a duty of care to vulnerable individuals. The Trading Standards Officer interviewed in this research was one of the most valuable core respondents whose insights were vital, generous and startling. They were also a National Crime Agency Financial Investigations Agent and an animal welfare specialist with many years of experience on farms and in the meat supply chain regulation. The incapacitation of their expertise and limitations placed on them in their field of expertise due to the Care Act is structurally inscribed by policy and highly problematic for wildlife crime enforcement delivery. The Act stipulates that their skills must be redirected elsewhere, to other regulatory duties. This policy-level condition highlights that enforcement is not just randomly absent or being steered at the ontological situational level via streetlights or target hardening. The social relations approach emphasises the structural impediments and draws attention to the unintended consequences of political institutions, policy making and the enactment of legislation.

This section has sought to provide empirical evidence from fieldwork and secondary policy-centric data to ground the theorisation being advanced. It has been shown that capable guardianship is rendered absent due to structural constraints borne out of a policy climate that exists beyond immediate settings and the rationality of agents. It is the structurally inscribed enforcement deficits that orient explanations away from the situated practices of agents and towards unanticipated outcomes in policy arenas, political economy and organisational cultures that co-determine absences.

Conclusion

Routine Activty Theory and its application in wildlife crime control literature has focused on situational settings to the detriment of a holistic awareness of the institutional landscape from which social activity emerges. Existing literature on UK enforcement is largely from an empiricist perspective, which fails to engage with discussions of ontology, epistemology and causality. This article has sought to confront the question not as a descriptive account or policy review, but as an aetiological question from a post-positivist perspective. An explanation of why guards are absent has been developed via an engagement with metatheoretical literature and formalised into paving the way towards a ‘domain-specific ontology’. In so doing, political, economic and criminal justice system-level policy conditions have been identified as significant impediments to optimal enforcement. From a critical realist perspective, those conditions were theorised as external constraints on the capable guardianship component of the routine activity causal mechanism. In so doing, this article has revealed structural conditions yet to be interrogated in the literature that have produced unintended consequences impacting the field of study.

It was maintained that RAT is a suitable pedagogic heuristic for discussing wildlife crimes in rural regions, notably due to the sparsity of guardians in less densely populated rural expanses. Yet as identified by key scholars, a thorough appreciation of the limitations of the traditional theory to elucidate the role of macro forces in accounts of crime control is absent from the literature (Bottoms, 2012). In response, this article has developed a systematic approach to explain the social contexts that frustrate or accelerate fundamental parts of the theory. RAT was conceptualised not as a heuristic device but as a causal mechanism, from a social relations synthesis position, advanced by the Cardiff School (Edwards and Levi, 2008). Via the application of a critical realist epistemology, the enforcement deficit afflicting regions and non-human victims has been explained in ways that oppose situational-centric accounts associated with neo-positivism and rational choice theory. Rather, absences are generated in part by contingent conditions – antecedents inscribed into political, economic and criminal justice policy contexts that adversely impact optimum capable guardianship. It is those social conditions that create crime governance vacuums in the interaction between structure and agency, and which can be articulated by this domain-specific ontology of wildlife crime control.

The article has advanced a novel theoretical synthesis into new areas of empirical research and has extended the applicability of the theory into less well-understood areas of serious crime. The work has theorised institutional arrangements that are beyond enforcement, beyond rationality and beyond the situational, and has brought the macro back into considerations of what is to be done about wildlife crime. The article contributes new knowledge on the conditions that adversely impact the activities of crime preventers in properly managing offending against wildlife on the rural frontier and paths towards their rearrangement.