See The Last Clouded Leopard: WildAid’s Wildlife Conservation Goes After The Poachers

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Outside Magazine May 2004

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See the Last Clouded Leopard (Cont.)


	Where the wild things aren't: The Sriracha Tiger Zoo, near Pattaya, is an infamous tourist attraction where protected tigers and crocodiles are put on display. The zoo was busted by the Thai police in fall 2003. (James Nachtwey)

LIKE MANY CONSERVATIONISTS, Galster zeroes in on charismatic megafauna—"indicator species," he says, that forecast the situation of the ecosystems they dominate. He instills this idea in the rangers WildAid trains, which is why the guards who patrol Khao Yai and Bokor national parks focus much of their attention on bears, tigers, clouded leopards, and elephants. Khao Yai's elephant-monitoring team heads into the forest each week to make sure the park's 120 pachyderms are accounted for. But animal-defense patrols are not enough for an armistice; the whole culture of poaching needs to be undermined as well.

At the end of a muddy road in Khok Saard, a village on the outskirts of Khao Yai, 118 miles north of Bangkok, Sompong Prachopchan is standing over a boiling vat, stirring mushrooms. At 39, he's a new convert to the agrarian way. There's a tiger tattooed across his chest, a reminder of his former life, that of a mercenary for the Thai military who fought the Khmer Rouge and other insurgents. Throughout the eighties and nineties, when he wasn't doing that, he was poaching protected tigers, bears, elephants, and barking deer.

That all ended three years ago when Sompong was caught with an 18-pound haul of aloe wood by a WildAid-trained ranger patrol in Khao Yai. After his arrest and trial, a few days in jail, and a hefty fine, he was enlisted to work on the group's community-outreach project. In this program, villagers who used to forage in the park for food, or hunt endangered species to sell to traffickers, now receive seed money for alternative livelihoods, like growing flowers and mushrooms.

Standing under a plastic tarp in the pouring rain, Sompong stops stirring and walks over to a table piled with chrysanthemums. "When I was a poacher, a middleman sent me into the forest to get aloe wood," he says. "We all knew that if we shot an elephant or a tiger, he would buy that, too. But after I was arrested, I decided to leave poaching. If we keep on destroying the forest, there will be none left for the next generation." As he talks, Sompong rolls bunches of flowers into old newspapers. The bouquets will be sold in local markets, the profits to be shared among the villagers. Galster says he tapped the ex-mercenary to work on the village-conversion project partly because he figured "he would have cred among fellow poachers," and partly because he views the fight against wildlife trafficking as a counterinsurgency movement.

"What you do is apply counterinsurgency war-gaming to poaching and trafficking," he continues. "The poachers and traffickers are the insurgents; the local villagers are their moral support; and the big boss trafficker at the top of the food chain is the logistical support, funneling money and weapons. Counterinsurgency teaches you that the people fighting your war really have to believe in it themselves. You can't just be giving them rice, because they'll see right through you, take your rice, and still go into the park and poach animals. For it to work, you have to be genuine."

Sompong seems to believe in Galster's conservation model, though he admits to keeping his old aloe-wood saws around for a rainy day. "I am earning ten times less than I made poaching, but that's OK," he says. "My new job is influencing poachers in my own village and in other villages to find different work. Some poachers are changing their attitudes, and some are waiting to see if this works out or not."

At this, he points to a man walking down the road. It's the middleman who used to buy Sompong's aloe wood; Sompong still owes him 6,000 baht (about $153) for helping pay his poaching fine. Later that day, when Galster learns that Sompong is still paying off the vig to his old boss, he quickly and quietly sends the reformed poacher an envelope with enough cash to cover the debt. WildAid's model park program, it turns out, is called Surviving Together.

And as Galster knows, not everyone in Khok Saard is willing to be reprogrammed. "The women in the village have turned into a capitalist force, reinvesting their profits back into the business. But some of the men are still poaching. The good news is, the men don't want to risk getting caught, so they've stopped carrying guns into the forest, which means we are documenting fewer animal kills."

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