Why It’s So Hard to Fight Wildlife Crime | Nat Geo Live

People are selecting specific firearms, specific ammunition, going out into the forest looking just to kill this gorgeous animal. It's not just a simple cops and robbers model. It's not as easy as you know, good guys, bad guys. We need to be able to put law and order into the equation.

This is where I started in Conkouati-Douli in a park in Southern Republic of Congo. This elephant is one guy that we would see relatively frequently and as you can see he's got enormous tusks. In over three years nobody has seen this elephant. It's a national park. It's got boundaries. But criminals don't care at all about where you drew those lines on a map.

Criminals have much more complex networks and their logistics go as far as they need to. We're not talking about a guy hunting to feed his family. Wildlife trafficking is not subsistence hunting. We're talking about addressing the industrial scale problem that we're dealing with. Leopard skin's a very tough one because we're trying to catch the traffickers, but at the same time, we know that the hunting in the forest is often opportunistic, so hitting the traffickers and getting that message back to the poachers, so that the trigger isn't pulled in the first place or the snare isn't laid in the first place is very hard.

That is not the case of course, when it comes to ivory where people are selecting specific firearms, specific ammunition, going out into the forest looking just to kill this gorgeous animal. We're seeing some giant seizures over in Asia. From Central Africa it's coming from Congo, Gabon, right smack in the middle where we have the best elephant populations. You get hundreds of kilos of ivory going out all the time, accumulating into thousands of kilos inside of big port cities like in Lome in Togo.

Please notice that the ammunition was an AK47 clip. I don't know if you want to call that a leftover from conflict or just an excuse for a big problem that we need to talk about, which is corruption. You have people in militaries or police forces providing ammunition to poachers using their authority as a cover so that they can go and make a lot of money off this stuff.

So who are these guys? Everybody has this basic notion, we have the poachers, they give it to a trafficker, the trafficker gives it to a middle man, he goes to bigger traffickers, down the line to your kingpin. And so from a law enforcement perspective, you'd think alright it's easy, we're gonna intercept these guys with anti-poaching on the poachers, some police forces along the way, and we'll work it out.

Gets a little bit more complicated when maybe someone in your police force is part of your network. And I could add a lot of other bubbles and make this far more complicated when you look at who's providing the ammunition, who's getting them out of jail, who is making it so that even if they get that strong prison sentence, that they can still slip away or get a fake medical slip or something.

We have seen every permutation of corruption that you can imagine. This is an operation which we did with the National Central Bureau of Interpol in Conakry where over $30,000 was seized and over 800 pieces of ivory.

This fellow is an [bleep] that I really want to put in jail. I have put him in jail a couple of times and he's still doing that. He's smiling there but he's not smiling here when we're trying to arrest him. This is a failure of ours. We failed with this guy. He is too powerful. We have been trying everything to get him arrested. His name is Ikama.

Our dogs have come in and scanned the place, found hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pieces of ivory. But this fellow got out of jail because his son is an ex-rebel leader, an ex-member of parliament and he's using every bit of political weight that he can get to traffic his influence across the Congo to make sure that his father doesn't go to jail, even though his father is one of the biggest ivory dealers in Congo.

At the same time, he has the audacity to go to the police station a few weeks later and figure out how to get his ivory back. So these are the types of problems that we have to figure out, is babysit these cases every single step of the way to make sure that he doesn't get his ivory back.

Here's a success. 126 kilos of ivory seized in Brazzaville. A big trafficker, he's got a connection to Cameroon and into Nigeria, he was probably going to go on to go to Togo and all of that stuff. We get the dogs in, they search the place, the guy gets two years in jail. The dogs do lovely stuff on their own.

We took them into forestry concessions, you can't hide anything from these dogs. And that enables us to prove that these camps were not actually working for logging concessions or just doing their job, and lit them on fire. Obviously I like playing with the dogs. It's amazing to have live animals around in our work.

That's the US ambassador as well who's shaking hands with Shon, and that's really important for us. We need political leverage, we need that kind of political weight, and that's kind of the take home message here is that with all of this complicated reality of how illegal wildlife trafficking networks function, we have to accept that it's not just this simple, cops and robbers model.

It's not as easy as you know, good guys, bad guys. It's really complex, we need a lot of political pressure to make sure that we're actually able to put these guys behind bars and neutralize them for as long as possible. We need to be able to put law and order into the equation.

So spread the word about that please and let's not make it a simple thing. Let's address this problem with the reality that it is. Thank you very much.