Madagascar's ploughshare tortoise is one of the rarest tortoises on Earth, and it is being pushed closer to extinction by poachers who capture it illegally for the exotic pet trade. It is not alone. According to a new Comment published in the journal Nature, eight international wildlife experts warn that legal loopholes are allowing millions of reptiles and amphibians to be imported into North America and Europe every year. Most of these animals are pulled straight from the wild rather than bred in captivity, including well over half of the reptiles and roughly 40 percent of the amphibians entering the trade.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) currently protects only a small fraction of these animals, covering roughly one in ten reptile species and less than one in twenty amphibian species. That leaves the rest legal to trade until a population has already collapsed. Small size makes many of these animals easy to smuggle, and illegally captured animals are often impossible to tell apart from legally traded ones once they reach a pet store shelf.

The consequences reach far beyond the animals themselves. The pet trade has already introduced the salamander chytrid fungus, which wiped out native fire salamander populations in western Europe, and released invasive Burmese pythons into the United States, where they have been linked to sharp declines in bobcats, raccoons, and opossums.

The experts are calling for stronger protections that stop the sale of animals taken illegally from their countries of origin, even when a species is not yet listed under CITES, along with greater international cooperation to fight wildlife trafficking ahead of UN talks this October.

Species should not be legal to sell simply because a loophole exists. Sign the petition to demand stronger protections for reptiles and amphibians before more species are pushed to the brink.