THREE days after World Wildlife Day, poachers broke into a French zoo not far from Paris, made their way to an enclosure that housed a white rhino called Vince, shot him three times in the head and . The poachers got away despite there being five members of staff living on the premises and .
The attack came even as many countries to protect their wildlife. There have been some successes, but Vince’s case illustrates how ruthlessly wildlife traffickers adapt.
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Now we are beginning to attack the problem from a totally different angle, getting to the source of the crime using data and online tools. Will it work this time?
Poaching can be a vicious crime, and rhino horn is especially lucrative – it fetched around $65,000 per kilogram. Vince’s death was comparatively merciful; often, to obtain the horn, to the face of living rhinos.
In Vietnam, poachers appear to have caused the , and while the charismatic species garner the most outcry, wildlife crime also takes its toll on a vast number of less visible species, including exotic plants. “The only reason these go extinct is because of this kind of trade,” says , a criminologist at Northumbria University, UK.
Governments and conservation groups have spent decades trying to solve the problem, but to little avail. One issue is the transnational nature of the crime, which makes it difficult to keep track of poachers’ cargo for example.
So it is understandable that desperate conservationists have turned to technology to catch poachers in the act. This has led to significant successes. Use of surveillance drones in Kenya has been credited with an . Thermal imaging cameras have helped law enforcement agents . And Nepal has combined several of these kinds of technologies to years.
“The syndicates involved in wildlife crime are bigger than we previously suspected”
But the approach doesn’t work everywhere – only where poachers are prosecuted. “So many times we have submitted evidence,” says Christine Figgener, a marine conservationist at Texas A&M University, “and the poacher is walking free the next day because the government is not willing to try that person.”
, a lawyer who runs WildlifeDirect in Kenya, says that although anti-wildlife-trade laws there have recently become tougher, most African governments have “very weak” legislation – and these countries are the source of a large proportion of trafficked species. Many wildlife authorities are underfunded and easy to bribe. “You can’t just threaten people with going to jail because unless it’s the very junior or middle players, they can bribe their way out of jail,” she says.
International cartels
Another problem is that over the past couple of years, it has become increasingly clear that the crime syndicates involved in wildlife trafficking are bigger and more professionally run than previously suspected. Some are international cartels that see these animals simply as large bags of money, whose trafficking is not logistically different from that of drugs or firearms.
Under this regime, improving the protection of animals in situ can lead to an unintended effect: “all you do is push the price up,” says Peter Knights, executive director of WildAid.
Instead of trying to use a patchy legal system full of loopholes against powerful and entrenched international syndicates, Knights has long advocated a better way: kill the demand for wildlife products – the source of these crimes. It’s an idea that is starting to pick up steam.
There are two ways to stop demand. One is to ban sales. That may seem obvious, but endangered animal parts are not banned everywhere, or bans are inconsistent; when African nations allowed the sale of legal ivory stockpiles, . “You only really make progress when you actually ban sales within a country,” Knights says.
But the process of corralling governments into making consistent laws can be a long one.
In the meantime, there could be a far more effective way: data and online tools are suggesting a whole new approach to tackling the problem.
For example, data collection is giving us evidence that the appetite for wildlife contraband can be dampened with the careful use of social campaigns. One Vietnamese poll suggested that, following a year-long campaign challenging the idea that rhino horn has medicinal properties, demand in the country had .
And more figures can tell us what else works. An analysis following the Chinese government’s decision in 2013 to no longer serve shark fin soup at official banquets revealed that by 2015, . “It’s not necessarily illegal to consume shark’s fin,” says Eric Phu, who has worked on projects to reduce demand for wildlife products, “But because it was considered opulent, that was enough to reduce the desire to be seen consuming it.” The trend shows no indication of reversing: in January, Air China joined 30 other airlines in .
Before you can contain demand for a particular species, however, you need to understand where it is most popular. Progress is happening here too. New data gathering methods employed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has resulted in that reveal surprising destinations for rhino horn (see map).
“The appetite for illegal wildlife can be dampened with the careful use of social campaigns”
One important destination is China, where thanks to increasing law enforcement efforts, illicit wildlife trade is shifting from physical markets to . The week of Vince’s killing, China’s top three internet service providers publicly pledged to crack down. Their measures include apps that raise awareness among web users, and removing advertisements for illegal products.
One problem there is sorting the legal from illegal listings; doing so often requires comparing them against a . Compounding the problem is that illegal ads are scattered through the internet – listings can be unsearchable and enjoy impunity on many social networks – even Facebook, says Jennifer Jacquet, an environmental studies professor at New York University. “My students were finding live tiger cubs for sale, African grey parrots,” she says.
So Jacquet and data scientist Sunandan Chakraborty developed a text analysis tool that uses machine learning to flag suspicious listings, checking them against the endangered species catalogue. Other technological tools are now being tested to track poached contraband directly to the source (see “Turning the hunters into the hunted“).
As this new effort ramps up, a greater awareness of the syndicates responsible for much of the carnage has led to calls to see wildlife crime for what it is: organised crime. “I’m struck by how few enforcers have applied the same financial rigour to wildlife trafficking that they apply to drug trafficking,” says Tom Keatinge at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
“The scale of it makes it clear – you cannot do it on your own,” says Cees van Duijn at Interpol’s Environmental Security Programme. Earlier this month, the agency seized 1300 illicit products. An enforcement win, perhaps, but for the animals in question, it came too late.
“They’re going to wipe out species,” says Kahumbu, and unless we diversify our efforts “we’re going to sit here like idiots saying, ‘Oh, maybe we should have acted a bit faster’.”
Turning the hunters into the hunted
EVERY summer, hundreds of thousands of sea turtles – including many critically endangered species – make their way to the beaches of Nicaragua to lay their eggs. Poachers lie in wait.
Sea turtle eggs can fetch up to $100 each, making them a lucrative target. “Easily 90 per cent of nests or more are poached,” says Kim Williams-Guillén of conservation NGO Paso Pacifico. Not even armed guards can protect them, and as a result some species are nearing extinction.
Red-handed
But when the poachers come collecting this summer, they might get more than they bargained for.
Williams-Guillén and her colleagues have created artificial turtle eggs, 3D printed to look and feel exactly like the real thing. “A turtle egg is kind of squishy – these squish in a very similar way,” she says. But instead of a baby turtle, they contain a GPS tracker, SIM card and battery.
This summer, Paso Pacifico will smuggle 50 to 100 of the devices into real clutches on the beaches of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. When poachers loot them, they will be tracked to their paymasters. Local crime networks are deeply involved in the illegal turtle egg trade, says Williams-Guillén, but the more important information is where the eggs end up.
This would reveal the trade routes and destination markets for trafficked sea turtle eggs. Conservation scientists and law enforcement have urgently sought this over the past two years, as it has emerged that reducing demand is the crucial linchpin to stopping the illegal wildlife trade.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Fighting tooth and nail”
