The guidelines only cover animals and parts that are illegally-sourced, which are threatened with extinction or which are protected by national law. Thus the pledged companies won't block backdoor deals between Facebook users for dogs, cats or chickens.

The World Wildlife Fund, The International Fund For Animal Welfare and TRAFFIC collaborated to write the initiative and announced today for World Elephant Day. Although the partner companies don't include a few tech heavy hitters like Facebook and Amazon where some of these illicit peer-to-peer transactions take place, the coalition is in talks with some other possible signatories, a senior TRAFFIC official told Mashable.