5 ways saving wildlife from poachers has turned into all-out warfare
By Evan V. Symon and Asgar Pathan
23 June 2014 (Cracked.com) – Right this second, there are men with AK-47s fighting a guerrilla war over rhino horns and elephant tusks. Everything about poaching in Africa is utterly insane, even if you put aside the fact that the poachers are quickly driving animals to extinction. We talked to Asgar Pathan, a ranger working for Care for the Wild, about his job battling poachers in the Kenyan bush, and we learned that even the most heavy-handed pro-wildlife documentaries barely scratch the surface of how crazy things have gotten …#5. Poaching Is Just as Violent as the Drug Trade
So why is this a life-and-death game played by men with machine guns? Why do people continue to kill elephants for their tusks, even though the penalties for doing so go all the way up to life in prison? Well, like you see in the drug trade, the increased risk drives up the price of the ivory (Mufasa could’ve sold that elephant graveyard and retired a billionaire), and the same goes for rhino horns. And in a poor country like Kenya, that much money coming in through illegal channels leads to a whole lot of violence. When you hear about someone whose job is to stop “poachers,” you might assume it’s some good-hearted animal lover reminding hunters that they’re about to shoot the wrong creature. The reality is something closer to all-out war. In 2013, over 13 tons of ivory were seized in the city of Mombasa alone. That sounds like a lot, but the loss was a drop in the bucket — around 22,000 elephants are killed by poachers a year, producing nearly 3 million tons of illegal ivory. Those 13 captured tons did about as much financial damage to the industry as an overdue library book would to Robert Downey Jr. There are mountains of money to be made — rhino horn is literally worth more than its weight in gold on the black market. Why in the hell are horns and tusks in such huge demand? Are people turning them into gaudy hood ornaments? Well, ivory is always wanted for jewelry and carvings, restrictions notwithstanding, while rhino horn is sold illegally for medicinal uses in Asia, causing both demand and price to skyrocket (but not, as commonly believed, because people there think it’s an aphrodisiac). The risk of prison discourages casual poaching but simultaneously encourages poachers to straight up murder people rather than get caught. So now they go into the bush armed like Ted Nugent on a dinosaur safari. Speaking of which …
#4. You Will Be Ambushed
Poachers carry surprisingly sophisticated weapons, on par with the local military. We’re not talking about dudes running around in soccer jerseys with machetes — they’re decked out like the mercenaries from Predator. So we have to be pretty well-armed ourselves. The Kenyan military lends us not only soldiers, but also drones and helicopters.
But even though we have better resources, the poachers have power in numbers. We always plan where we are going a day in advance, but then again, so do they. And a specific part of their planning involves staging ambushes, which they can easily pull off if we aren’t careful. A few months ago, some of our guys spotted a few poachers while out on patrol. The poachers bolted, and they gave chase. However, our guys didn’t know that they had arrested many of these poachers’ friends over the past year, and that this was all a setup. The rangers were led into a trap, where the poachers’ comrades lying in wait opened fire and killed two of them. As if the poachers themselves weren’t dangerous enough, there are also opportunistic bandits stalking around, waiting to bushwhack us. We carry a lot of expensive weaponry and technology, and occasionally some contraband ivory or rhino horn that we’ve seized. That makes us a big fat target for greedy and/or desperate thieves. And then there are the illegal foresters — yes, even the trees have poachers here. And they’ll totally kill you, too — the day before this interview, we caught six of them making charcoal for their families, and every single one was wielding bows and poisoned arrows (not guns, as those tend to be noisy).
And then there are the booby traps. Those are meant for the animals, of course, but the thing about traps is that they’re remarkably indiscriminate about what triggers them. Anything can get snagged, from non-target animals (such as hyenas), to rangers, even to poachers who forgot where they put the damn things. In our territory alone, there are thousands of snare traps made with anything from telephone wire to the steel belts embedded inside tires, so be glad if the biggest hazard you face on a workday is “slippery bathroom tile.” On any given day, we have to take down around three or four of those snares, some of which are hidden so thoroughly that we occasionally completely miss them. The traps won’t kill a human, but they can certainly slice open your skin or dislocate a bone, which isn’t fun when you 1) now have to be untangled from the thing and 2) are stuck in the middle of the damned jungle. That said, it’s amazing how fast the animals learn to spot the traps — the less-well-hidden ones are almost a waste of time, because the animals are smart enough to avoid them. Some gorillas have even figured out how to dismantle the traps set out for them, which kind of makes me wish we could hire them. [more]
