Once Smuggled Animals Are Rescued, Law Enforcement Officers Call Her

As coordinator of the Wildlife Confiscations Network, Mandy Fischer helps match trafficked animals—from alligators to jaguars to baby monkeys—with sanctuaries and care facilities

James M. Gaines

October 9, 2025

When a smuggler stuffed a monkey in a duffel bag and threw it out their car window at the Texas-Mexico border, law enforcement called Mandy Fischer. When a baby jaguar turned up in a dog crate, law enforcement called Fischer. And when a man attempted to stuff 60 lizards and snakes under his clothes near San Ysidro in San Diego, they called Fischer once again. In each case, they had the same question: Now that we’ve saved these animals, what do we do with them?

Fischer is the coordinator for a pilot program known as the Wildlife Confiscations Network. If law enforcement officers find themselves handling wild animals rescued from smugglers, she connects them to vetted zoos and animal care facilities.

In the past, officers largely had to figure out how to care for confiscated exotic creatures on their own, occasionally keeping the animals in their offices or coming up with more ad hoc solutions, says Sara Walker, senior advisor on wildlife trafficking at the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). In one case, a law enforcement officer found a bunch of baby alligators late on a Friday night and couldn’t get anyone else to take them. The reptiles ended up briefly residing in the officer’s bathtub at home.

Law enforcement staff would often care for the rescued animals on their own time; buy them food or medicine out of their own budgets; and sift through their own networks of contacts to find an animal rescue group, zoo or other institution that they could persuade to step in. It wasn’t always ideal, says Walker, but they did it because the alternative, if nobody could take care of the animal, was euthanasia. “And nobody wants to see a perfectly healthy animal euthanized,” she says.

Starting in 2023, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the AZA reached an agreement to set up a single, knowledgeable point of contact whom law enforcement in Southern California could turn to when faced with whatever monkey, jaguar or bundle of lizards the job threw at them. And Fischer, who works out of the AZA’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, would be that go-to person.

Even with a jurisdiction limited to Southern California, Fischer’s job was always going to be busy. In 2022 alone, FWS agents or partners reportedly investigated more than 10,000 cases of wildlife trafficking across the country—an average of nearly 30 per day. And that may only be a fraction of the real size of the trade. “We know we’re not close to getting everything,” says Jennifer Sevin, a conservation biologist and wildlife trafficking expert at the University of Richmond who is not affiliated with the Wildlife Confiscations Network. “The U.S. is a pretty big hub for a lot of things moving in, out or around the world.”

Globally, wildlife trafficking is estimated to be a $20 billion per year industry, one that has resisted decades of mitigation efforts by international governments and that Interpol warns has become a major activity for organized crime groups.

Fischer estimates that, on her end, her phone will ring with law enforcement looking for help with a live animal about once or twice a week.

Then, she gets cracking, reaching out to her network of contacts to figure out what kind of care the animal may need, who might be able to take it and how to get it to its new home. Along the way, she’s communicating back to law enforcement officers, who have the final say on placement. Each case is unique. Some are straightforward; some aren’t.

And, like a first responder, she needs to be ready for a call at any moment. In August 2023, for instance, just after Fischer had completed the process of vetting her initial list of zoos and institutions that could take in animals, she took a trip with her family to Ecuador.

“We were on the Galápagos Islands, and it was the middle of the night, and I get a phone call from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,” says Fischer. “They had seized a duffel bag filled with spider monkey babies.”

Finding a home for any animal can be a challenge, but baby monkeys were going to be especially difficult. Because monkeys share so many potential diseases with humans, like tuberculosis and herpes, non-human primates that come into the U.S. normally need to go through a 31-day quarantine. But these were babies, which meant they needed around-the-clock care—and they needed it immediately. To top it all off, there wasn’t just one, but multiple of them.

Fischer, contact list at the ready, quickly found the babies a temporary placement at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, which had staff and facilities to do both the quarantine and the baby care. “They were immediately able to jump into action, call that agent back and start communicating,” says Fischer. The park staff even made the six-hour round-trip drive to pick up and triage the babies. “They were rock stars.”

At the same time, Fischer rallied the AZA’s resident spider monkey expert and species coordinator, and they began the search for a permanent home, eventually finding one at the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois, where the animals live now.

With 20 years of experience as a zookeeper under her belt, Fischer has worked with confiscated animals before. One day in 2019, for instance, while she was a curator at the Brandywine Zoo in Delaware, Fischer answered a ringing telephone and found a panicky police officer on the other end, looking at a three-foot American alligator in a suspected drug trafficker’s kitchen. Fischer says she’ll never forget the relief in the officer’s voice when she said the zoo could send someone to pick it up. (The alligator ended up as one of the zoo’s ambassador animals, going on trips to teach schoolchildren.)

Fischer has also spent time facilitating wildlife rescues after oil spills as well as serving as the state coordinator for Delaware’s animal response during natural disasters, setting up emergency shelters and vet clinics in places like high school gyms.

Nowadays, when she’s not fielding emergency calls from law enforcement, Fischer spends her time vetting new zoos and aquariums to add to her list of partners, as well as other facilities like sanctuaries, universities or animal rehab centers. Even if an institution can’t take in an animal, its help could still prove valuable when time is tight: “Maybe they have a really great transport van,” says Fischer.

She also follows up with and offers support to zoos and sanctuaries that have taken in rescued animals. Previously, some of these institutions agreed to take what they believed to be a temporary new inhabitant, only to never hear from the officers again. In the meantime, they didn’t know what they were allowed to do with the animals, which—as criminal evidence—frequently came with strict chain of custody requirements. Could they be moved to a new home? Could they be mixed in with other members of their species? It often wasn’t clear if the zoo or sanctuary could publicly speak about the case and explain to visitors where the animals had come from.

All this made many institutions reluctant to help out, even if they had the room. “We had a lot of gun-shy facilities that had been burned before,” says Walker. Now, Fischer helps coordinate those ongoing relationships, giving the zoos and sanctuaries regular updates about how the cases are going, when law enforcement might need the animals back and what it’s safe to discuss publicly.

Since the Wildlife Confiscations Network program started in 2023, it has directly handled about 140 cases for the FWS alone, representing about 4,800 animals. Including the support given to other agencies would push that number well over 5,000, Fischer estimates.

“It’s obviously something that’s continuing to be needed, because they’re getting inundated,” says Sevin.

The pilot program started in Southern California because of how busy the region is and how often law enforcement had already been looking to the San Diego Zoo for support. But as Fischer’s contact information has gotten out there, law enforcement groups from other parts of the country, like Texas and New York, are increasingly calling her as well. Technically, those callers are out of her jurisdiction, so it’s Fischer’s decision on whether to help—but she says she often does. “I have a real hard time saying no,” she jokes.

The AZA is now hoping it can drum up support for taking the pilot program nationwide. In May, Republican Representative Andrew Garbarino and Democratic Representative Mike Quigley introduced a bill that would set up such a program and secure funding to bring on more coordinators like Fischer.

The goal is to have enough coordinators that each can cover a particular area, such as one for each of the eight FWS regions. But Fischer says that even just another two coordinators would be a big help. If they could take some of the workload by dealing with new and ongoing cases, it would give Fischer more time to focus on the administrative part of growing the network, like vetting more facilities and maintaining databases.

Sevin cautions that they should proceed with any expansion carefully, since each potential new coordinator’s knowledge of the area they’re assigned will be critical to both vetting local facilities and working with local law enforcement. But she feels what the program is doing is important from a practical standpoint—as well as a moral one.

A lot of these animals are being taken from the wild, she says, which is already “an injustice to them.” But the fact that many, even if they’re found and confiscated, may end up having to be euthanized because nobody can find a home for them feels like a double whammy, says Sevin.

Fischer echoes this sentiment. “If we can’t get these animals back where they’re supposed to be,” she says, “being able to place them where they can be as wild as possible is incredibly important to me.”