Abstract: Among the 904 provisions of 23 provincial laws on wildlife protection, the frequency of compulsory words is 1084, which is more than 10 times of the frequency of the encouraging words and the words concerning rights. The lack of reward provisions leads to the imbalance of rights and obligations of the protection subjects. At the same time, the local legislative provisions repeat the contents of the national legislations, they even repeat each other, resulting in the lack of local characteristics and creativity. Before the outbreak of COVID-19, more than a quarter of provincial legislations had no provisions concerning epidemics. The optimization path lies in the necessary review before legislation and the quality and effect evaluation after legislation. The incentive provisions should be increased to no less than 10%. Referring to the “Lacey Act” of the United States, the reward amount for whistleblowers should adopt the mode of deducting a percentage from the law enforcement income plus the minimum amount of guarantee. The innovative provisions in the local legislation, such as listing the catering service departments as the protected functional department, the quarantine before releasing the collected wild animals, the supporting prosecution and the prosecution system of the protection competent departments, and the whistleblower reward system can all be used for reference in the revision of the Wildlife Protection Law.

Key words: COVID-19, Lacey Act, wildlife protection law, legal paternalism