Removing snare traps is critical for conservation — but it’s not a silver bullet

When I began conservation fieldwork in Vietnam in 2012, almost immediately I came face-to-face with the snaring crisis that is devastating wildlife populations in Southeast Asia. I was spending every day in the forests of the Annamite Mountains, working with rangers to monitor biodiversity and set up camera traps. And whenever we saw a snare trap — a homemade wire device that indiscriminately captures any animal that crosses its path — we would remove it. On more days than I can count, I remember getting back to our forest camp late at night, and watching a ranger pull out 100 or 200 snares from his backpack. The more this happened, the more I thought, “How can this go on?”

The truth, of course, is that it can’t continue — not without wiping out wildlife and sending a once-unique and intact forest ecosystem into a death spiral. Decades of intense snare use in Vietnam has been a driving force in emptying the country’s forests of species that once thrived there. To prevent mass extinction, these animals need all the help they can get.  

Over the past decade or so, WWF Vietnam has dedicated significant resources to removing snares in central Vietnam. In a paper recently published in Conservation Letters,  coauthored by colleagues from WWF Vietnam and Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, we sought to find out if this method is working.

Feeding the global illegal wildlife trade

Covering much of Vietnam, Laos and a small part of Cambodia, the Annamite Mountains are home to a variety of rare endemic species, including some only recently discovered such as the Saola (a large antelope-like mammal that has never been seen in person by biologists) and the Annamite Striped Rabbit.

These mountains are also probably the snaring epicenter of the world. A 2020 WWF report estimated that the protected areas of these three countries contained about 12.3 million snares — and that’s a very conservative estimate. 

While in other regions snaring is primarily used to acquire meat for subsistence, in Vietnam it is overwhelmingly practiced to sell to the commercial bushmeat trade. A lot of what hunters kill will go to local restaurants and bushmeat markets, while really rare species and high-value animal parts — such as pangolin scales, which are worth hundreds of dollars per kilogram, or bear products, used for various medicinal and culinary purposes — might end up in major cities like Hanoi or even in China. Basically everything in the forest has a price tag on it, and people are setting snares to vacuum up anything they can find — all to feed a global market in illegal wildlife, which INTERPOL recently characterized as one of the world’s leading criminal activities that is “increasingly linked with armed violence, corruption and other forms of organized crime.”

In Southeast Asia, the most common approach to deal with this urgent threat to wildlife is to send rangers and community members into the forest to remove snares. WWF Vietnam has spent more than a decade implementing intensive snare removal operations in the Saola Nature Reserves — two connected protected areas that are split by a provincial boundary but essentially function as one big forest. Not only are rangers dismantling the snares they find, they’re also recording every snare that they take out, which provides us with a thorough dataset that doesn’t really exist anywhere else. We tried to use these data to answer a simple question: Is snare removal working? And if so, how well?

After examining 11 years of data, we found that snare removal resulted in significant declines of snares in the landscape in the first few years. However, after that initial period, the number of snares remaining in the forest stopped declining, and still remained at a pretty high level. This finding fits with what others have anecdotally observed in other parts of the world: snare removal works, but only to a point.

This level of diminishing returns surprised me — what is happening here? It seems like the intensive snare removal efforts are deterring a certain subset of the poachers, but beyond that you don't see much change. This suggests to me that there's a very motivated, hardcore group of hunters who are not deterred by having their traps removed. This landscape is incredibly rugged and difficult to move around, yet rangers are still pulling out 20,000 snares a year from some pretty small protected areas — and that's a drop in the bucket compared to the number of snares that remain in the forest. That's pretty shocking, and it speaks to how motivated these hunters are by the lucrative nature of this trade, no matter how devastating the consequences will ultimately be for these species, the forests and the people (including themselves) who depend on them.

So what should we conclude from this — can continuing this pace of snare removal save species? Some species, such as the Critically Endangered Saola, are unfortunately so rare that all the snare removal in the world will probably not make a difference for them. However, it could mean the difference between survival and extinction for other species found nowhere else. For example, the Annamite Striped Rabbit, which is listed as Endangered on IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species, still exists in enough numbers that its populations would increase if snaring was brought down to a manageable level. Conversely, in the past there have been examples where ranger patrols were disrupted for a year or two, and the last tigers in a protected area were wiped out. Once snare removal efforts stop, things can get much worse very quickly.

It's clear that snare removal on its own is not enough; it’s just one tool in the toolbox. Another finding of our research was that while it might cost a hunter $2 to set a snare, it costs more than $20 to remove that snare when you factor in staff time, equipment and other needs. This indicates that the most cost-effective way to reduce snare use is to prioritize preventive efforts that will stop snares from being set in the first place. 

Of course, the most effective preventive measures could vary widely from place to place depending on the local context. Deciding which efforts to pursue requires first getting a deep understanding of what drives local behaviors such as setting snares and consuming wild meat, and then considering strategies to change those behaviors. For example, if hunters are motivated by the high prices they can earn from selling what they catch, then trapping is unlikely to decrease until prices are lower and if the opportunity cost — from fines or prosecution — are too high to justify such illegal behavior. 

Working together with communities to make these behaviors less acceptable is key. Re:wild has invested quite a bit in these efforts elsewhere in Vietnam — including using community-based crime prevention approaches to make poaching less accepted within local communities — and it appears that, in some sites, we are starting to “bend the curve” on wildlife recovery. But on-the-ground efforts must go in parallel with national legislative changes to make actual prosecution more viable. For example, currently if you find somebody with a pile of snares in the forest, it's very difficult to do anything about it. Meanwhile, wild meat is still bought and sold very openly in markets, another practice that could be curbed with better legislation and enforcement.

The magnitude of this immense challenge can be overwhelming, but we can’t give up hope. The more we know about which conservation strategies work the best, the quicker we can implement essential actions to safeguard valuable species before it’s too late.