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.)


	Tiger tales: Galster giving a talk at the Southeast Asia Environmental Law Enforcement Training Center, which WildAid established at Thailand's Khao Yai park to teach rangers how to use counterinsurgency tactics against poachers (James Nachtwey)

FEWER ANIMAL KILLS is also the goal of WildAid's new U.S. print-ad campaign, which graphically depicts a hornless rhino bleeding on the concourse of Grand Central Station and a tiger oozing blood on the steps of the New York Public Library. Whether these will shock jaded Americans into writing checks remains to be seen, but a similar WildAid campaign a few years ago, against the consumption of shark-fin soup in Thailand, got that entire nation's attention.

Shark-fin soup is an expensive delicacy throughout Asia that's served to honored guests at birthdays and weddings. The key ingredient comes from a cruel practice: slicing the fins off live sharks and throwing the carcasses back in the ocean. Just about any shark will do. In 2000, after Peter Knights put out a report based on data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, estimating that fishermen kill more than 50 million sharks per year worldwide, Galster called on the Thai government to ban shark finning. When there was no response, he escalated with a provocative public-awareness campaign created by J. Walter Thompson, the international advertising powerhouse based in New York.

The ads ran in Thai newspapers and magazines in July 2001; the most provocative one depicted Chinese tombs in the shape of upside-down soup bowls, with the tag line "Tests show that shark fins sometimes contain mercury, making this endangered species more dangerous to you dead than alive."

The Thai press went crazy, sales of shark-fin soup initially dropped by 30 percent, and Bangkok's soup purveyors organized into a group called the Association of Shark Fin Restaurants. The restaurateurs produced counter-research claiming that their shark fins were mercury-free; then they filed a lawsuit against Galster, his PR assistant, and J. Walter Thompson to recover what they claimed were $3 million in losses. The suit is still winding its way through the Thai courts. In the meantime, WildAid has successfully lobbied CITES to get whale sharks listed as a protected species, and is trying to get the great white listed as well.

"When we designed the ad campaign, our feeling was that we would see a slow build. After all, by telling Thais not to eat shark-fin soup, we were asking them to change a deeply ingrained social and cultural behavior," says Marc Capra, 46, who was managing director of J. Walter Thompson's Bangkok office at the time. "But the reaction was dramatic. Even people of Chinese heritage who used to take the soup for granted were appalled and could not help being emotionally affected." Lately, Capra has broadened J. Walter Thompson's relationship with WildAid, creating an international pro bono campaign for their Asian Conservation Awareness Program. Hard-hitting print ads currently running in Malaysia show humans bleeding where noses, genitals, or other appendages have been cut off. Sample tag line: "Your hand is chopped off. Infection sets in. Then they cut off the other hand. You've just lived a bear's last few moments."

Galster excels at building such partnerships. Last September, he convinced Thailand's environment minister, Prapat Panyachatraksa, to sign a memorandum of understanding to cooperate with WildAid on reducing wildlife crime. It seemed like a mere formality, but in October, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra gave the go-ahead to unleash the biggest crackdown on wildlife trafficking in Southeast Asia. Since then, WildAid has helped the government save more than 35,000 animals, and the Thai police have arrested dozens of traffickers.

"It's been very exciting," Galster says. "The police have been busting people every day. After a tip to our hotline, I went with 50 investigators to a slaughterhouse in Sai Noi [a town north of Bangkok], where we found live and dead animals, tame bears, tigers in cages ready to be slaughtered and sent as meat to exotic restaurants, and tiger cubs that looked wild." Police netted a gruesome haul: 100 pounds of tiger bones, 46 pounds of newly slaughtered tiger meat, three tiger skins, and 20 black bear paws, still bloody.

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