Cognition of administrative laws in wildlife crimes in China–Based on cases analysed between 2021–2022

The crime of endangering rare and endangered wild animals has gradually become frequent crimes in China, but the legal cognitive error in such cases has not been resolved. In this crime, the scope of the objects, wild animals, depends on prepositive laws such as “the List of Wild Animals under the State Key Protection Plan”, which leads to the separation between the social meaning of “rare and endangered” and the legal meaning of “under the State Key Protection Plan”. Since the structure of basic facts and normative values has been broken, the perpetrator's understanding of the precondition laws should be regarded as pure legal cognition. Considering the specific cognitive difficulty of administrative laws, the level of this mens rea should be raised to clear awareness. This paper examines judicial and prosecutorial cases in China from 2021 to 2022, aimed at determining whether the lack of illegal perception can serve as a defence and what type of evidence is required to prove it. The empirical findings indicate that the clarity of legal cognition differs significantly between cases of guilt and innocence, and that the most crucial proof relies on the perpetrator's comprehension of the scope of protected wildlife, which is a purely legal matter instead of a social one.