A Comprehensive & Passionate US Article on Elephant Poaching

[Mel]

It can be as hard to track the protectors, engaged in on-the-ground operations, as it is to get a fix on the enemy. At this very moment, plans are in motion to get the fiends from Sudan who butchered the 89 elephants in Chad. Ministers from eight central nations met in Cameroon after the massacre and declared that they would gather a thousand-man expeditionary force and send it east. The mission is part of a new Extreme Emergency Anti-Poaching Plan, PEXULAB, which sounds promising -- more "air support, field vehicles, satellite phones, the establishment of a joint military command" -- until you see the funds available for the effort, all of $2.5 million to cover Central Africa. From the Central African Republic, meanwhile, an America academic named Louisa Lombard noted some gunfire there in a Times op-ed: "In remote parklands, far from public scrutiny, park rangers and militias led by foreign mercenaries, safari guides and French soldiers on a cooperation mission for the government have been fighting a dirty war on behalf of the elephants." We can only hope that's going well, and it's not hard to guess one of their objectives. Somewhere in the same vicinity is the Lord's Resistance Army of Joseph Kony, who, as of April, carries a bounty of up to $5 million under America's War Crimes Rewards Program. Which suggests a general approach for the arrest of all poachers: Put a price on their heads and see how they like it.

Some places, however, remain almost entirely undefended, such as the vast Niassa reserve where northern Mozambique meets Tanzania at the Rovuma River. There, reports the Voice of America, "all the poachers have to do is cross over in canoes to get to the elephants, which they attack with high-caliber weapons." Mozambique has enlisted help from the Wildlife Conservation Society, but poachers still kill four or five elephants a day, with special attention lately to the matriarchs so that the others are left leaderless. "Rangers try to stop the poachers, though it is a lopsided battle. There are only 40 rangers to patrol the park ... and the rangers are armed with rifles that date back to World War II." Some are caught, but even then, explains VOA, the fines are light and to this day "Mozambique's penal code dates back to Portuguese colonial times, and does not recognize poaching as a crime."

The whole effort across the continent, as you try piece it together, can seem a blur of rag-tag ranger patrols, improvised fighting units, multinational efforts, NGO initiatives, and UN appendages. And however admirable each might be, one has the feeling that even in combination they look more formidable on paper than they do on the ground. Somewhere in the effort too is our own U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages a fund set aside for elephants that, in 2011, was given $1.7 million to spread around for law-enforcement and aerial surveillance efforts. It feels awkward to call any federal program "underfunded," with a national debt in excess of $16 trillion, but that would be a candidate. And the extra $100,000 pledged last year by the state department, for "a global system of regional wildlife enforcement networks," doesn't have the ring of a game-changer either.

Spend nothing at all or spend all that is needed, drawing on guidance from our U.S. Africa Command to equip national and local anti-poaching forces and turn events toward victory. So many of the military and intelligence capabilities our country has developed or refined in recent years to deal with terrorists are the same that would track and stop poachers, who in trans-Saharan Africa are terrorists, bringing misery and death to people as well as to wildlife. American forces have the technological architecture and operational knowledge to put these killers to rout. Sharing that technology and manpower, within a coordinated strategy that only America can lead, would give African states a decisive upper hand.

Second only to presidential action, and any military assistance that the United States can offer, if anything can help here it is fast action by American philanthropies, providing the means of protection while keeping bureaucracy at a minimum. An example is the Google Foundation, which last year awarded $5 million to the World Wildlife Fund for drones to track both the herds and the killers. An outstanding idea: And if that or some other foundation will donate more, drones -- and with them the capacity to pass information rapidly to law enforcement on the ground -- could in short order cover the most vulnerable regions.
Conservative foundations, too, instead of just keeping "fellows" flush at CATO and elsewhere, could get outside their think-tank comfort zone to accomplish something real, enduring, and altruistic in Africa. As Jonah Goldberg put it last January, "the poachers need to be crushed." Though he is "not sure it makes a lot of sense for the U.S. government to get officially involved militarily, I would love to see some foundation hire some ex-special forces to lend a hand." Why not? A voluntary effort, perhaps in concert with well-targeted U.S. military support, to show that here, too, the good can be more resourceful than the wicked.
"Policy to Come," as speech drafts put it when enthusiasm runs ahead of practical details. Enough to point out that the details and obstacles here, whatever they are, haven't prevented foreign mercenaries from getting involved already, apparently, along with French soldiers and our own special forces assigned to get terrorists poaching in Central Africa. And somehow a British zoology professor is leading soldiers of the Gabonese Republic up and down the Ogooué River in defense of the elephants. How might a unified effort by highly trained American ex-servicemen and women, along with British and European counterparts, affect the security environment? The mere presence, in proximity to every herd, of expert warfighters with equipment and technology equal to the task, would have an enormous deterrent effect. If the aim is a sudden and sober recalculation of risk by ivory poachers, then let word get around the range states that reinforcements have arrived, and from now on it's not just a few valiant men with old rifles that they'll have to contend with.

[Mel]

Of all people, it was a Chinese delegate to CITES who, on the way out the door in Bangkok, advised that everyone "focus less on the demand side of the equation and instead consider the anti-poaching capacity of countries which were losing their elephants." He had a point, at least for the short term, in a year when another thirty or forty thousand elephants will die for their ivory. The great flaw in the libertarian's demand-must-prevail argument is that, unlike illicit narcotics, ivory is finite in supply and limited in location. And if those ranges, broad and scattered as they are, can be forcefully defended, then demand will be killed off instead of the elephants. Demand for ivory might be a craze but it is not an implacable addiction. And commerce in the material depends on unique skills that pass away with the carvers, so that even a decade of earnest protection buys vital time. In that crucial period, for a fairly small price, private foundations, and all the more those with an environmental agenda, could accomplish more than CITES has in its four decades, saving people and elephants alike from a threat that brings ruin to all.
The non-military aid could go to WildAid, Humane Society International, and other such advocacy groups, or straight to those like Save the Elephant, a faithful and long-suffering organization that posts on its website such humble but essential objectives as: "Goal 1. Get a supercub aircraft in the air over Tsavo National Park in Kenya, scene of a recent poaching surge, to assist the Kenya Wildlife Service in protecting the areas. ... The aircraft and pilot are ready to go. We need to build them a hangar and put fuel in the aircraft to keep it airborne every day this year."

Someone get these people the hangar and fuel. Get the anti-poaching forces all of the equipment, weapons, aircraft, and communications and surveillance capacity they need, in every place they need them. Provide chief ranger Joseph Okouyi in Gabon and his men the planes and boats and camps that they need, and Professor White whatever he asks, and the Sheldricks and others like them funds to nourish the orphans and keep them safe. And in every way, on every front, let them know that the United States of America is on their side.

We should give to these kindhearted people all that we can, and our prayers, too, because this forlorn, sentimental cause of theirs is the cause of humanity, in the story of life that is bigger than humanity, and right now the fight is not going our way. This is ground we cannot afford to surrender, the final refuge of animals who mourn their own, and deserve more than to be let go and mourned by us. We would miss the elephants, forever, with only regrets and recollections to fill the space, these grand, peaceable fellow creatures whose final, bloody departure from the earth would warrant a rebuke of Old Testament proportions: "What is this that thou hast done?"

Let the spirit of it all be Francis -- the pope and, better still, the saint, who "walked the earth like the pardon of God." But let tactics, strategy, and diplomacy, across Asia and Africa, be inspired by men a little more familiar with what it takes sometimes to protect the beauty of the created world. Poachers, explained chief ranger Paul Onyango to Jeffrey Gettleman, as they surveyed the bodies of twenty slain elephants at a park in Congo, should not expect negotiations, or warnings, or even much in the way of due process: "Out here, it's not michezo." As the Times translates, it's a Swahili way of conveying to enemies that this is serious and we don't play games.

[Mel]

MATTHEW SCULLY is a former senior speechwriter for President George W. Bush and
author of Dominion: the Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.