Zoomafia as Organized Animal-Related Crime: A Narrative Criminological Review with an Italian Perspective

Zoomafia is frequently invoked in Italian public, advocacy, and institutional discourse to describe profit-oriented animal-related crime, but the term remains analytically broad and insufficiently connected to criminological theory. This narrative criminological review examines zoomafia as a cautious social-scientific lens for studying organized animal-related crime across heterogeneous illicit markets. Keyword-driven searches in Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and targeted criminological, legal, policy, and institutional sources were complemented by citation tracking and qualitative source selection. Peer-reviewed scholarship forms the analytical core, while legal, institutional, and advocacy materials are used selectively and with explicit evidentiary limits. Findings suggest that organized animal-related crime is best understood through market governance, brokerage, legal-illegal interface management, digital mediation, logistics, facilitation, evidentiary visibility, and variable convergence with other illicit economies, rather than through generic offence labels alone. The Italian perspective is analytically useful because companion-animal trafficking, dog fighting and betting circuits, clandestine horse racing, illicit slaughtering, wildlife trafficking, and online-facilitated trade can be compared within a shared frame that also exposes the limits of rhetorical mafia labelling. The article argues that zoomafia should not be treated as a self-proving mafia label, a new legal category, or a synonym for wildlife trafficking, but as a comparative framework for identifying organizational features, enforcement constraints, and evidentiary thresholds. The evidence base remains stronger on strategic recommendations than on robust comparative evaluation of enforcement effectiveness.