Just outside Denver in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, a beige warehouse stands on the site of a former chemical weapons facility. The building looks unremarkable, but inside it is the largest, most mind-numbing collection ever assembled of wild animals killed to make furniture, coats, upholstery, handbags, carved figurines, and mounted trophy heads.

It’s called the National Eagle and Wildlife Property Repository, but you could think of it instead as the “international museum of wildlife trafficking”—a grim testament to the business of slaughter for profit.

Within its 16,000-square-foot (1,486 square meters) confines are 1.5 million specimens, mostly products made from some of the world’s most critically endangered mammals and reptiles—tigers, rhinos, sea turtles, crocodiles, elephants. Row upon row of