Gfyuki

I heard the illegal poaching being uttered so many times in a TV show, about animals, that my ear of a non-native speaker, made me questioning the validity of the term.

I have made some Ngram research here and looked up _poaching on Wikipedia, but that results haven't given me a satisfactory answer. As a result, I'm still puzzled.

According to Wikipedia, poaching is defined as:

the illegal hunting or capturing of wild animals.

Hence my question: can there be a legal and an illegal poaching?

Please let me know your thoughts on this.

PS: I am familiar with the word poaching since I first watched the movie Robin Hood, starring Kevin Costner, Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Morgan Freeman, etc., almost two decades ago.

Poaching is always illegal, so the adjective "illegal" is redundant. There is a (rare) word to describe this kind of redundancy: "Pleonastic". It means using more words than needed.

Many style guides recommend reducing redundancy in your writing: You should say "tuna" not "tuna fish". You should not say "the two twins" (since twins implies two) you do not need to say "new innovations" (since innovations are always new).

But pleonastic expressions are not ungrammatical, and some are very common and natural, especially in speech or less formal writing. Sometimes a writer will use a redundant word to emphasise a point.

There are three types of hunting: Legal trophy hunting, illegal poaching and subsistence hunting for food.

The author wants to emphasise and contrast trophy hunting, which is legal, with poaching, which is illegal.

The very definition of poaching contains the word "illegal", so it is a bit repetitive to say illegal poaching.

the illegal practice of trespassing on another's property to hunt or steal game without the landowner's permission.

Such repetitive constructions are used to add emphasis, but are not technically needed.

The definition of poaching as illegal is correct, but it doesn't take any account of the huge range of activities which are referred to as "poaching".

At one extreme is the extermination of animal species such as elephant and rhino for their ivory and horns (used in traditional medicine). At the other is the widespread practice (for example in the rural parts of the UK) of harvesting a bit of surplus wildlife (for example wild rabbits) for food. Both are technically illegal, but the rabbits are still doing fine after more than 1000 years of low level poaching, and if poachers didn't kill a few of them they would be killed by other means, as agricultural pests, in any case. So long as the rabbit-poachers don't cause any trouble (by damaging crops, noise disturbance at night, setting traps which catch or kill other animals, or whatever) nobody is going to make much effort to criminalize them, though of course organizations like PETA may take a different view of the matter.

Ngrams show that the use of "illegal poaching" is tiny compared with just "poaching", though the use of "illegal poaching" has grown rapidly in recent times.