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

Outside Magazine May 2004

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See the Last Clouded Leopard (Cont.)

WILDAID DIDN'T INVENT the idea of wildlife protection; the concept originated decades ago with farsighted field biologists. But the group has managed to turn aggressive protection into one of the hottest trends in conservation.

"In human society, if you want to stop murder and lawlessness, you create a police force. Same goes for stopping animal crime," says Alan Rabinowitz, the 50-year-old director of science and exploration for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which manages wildlife habitats all over the world from its base at the Bronx Zoo.

Rabinowitz ought to know. A well-known big-cat expert and author of such books as Chasing the Dragon's Tail: The Struggle to Save Thailand's Wild Cats, Rabinowitz first saw the need for strong, sustained species protection when he traveled to Belize in the 1970s to study the country's dwindling jaguar population. His research, he soon realized, had little practical impact on the jaguars' survival. So he established the world's first jaguar preserve and raised money to protect its boundaries.

"When I started my fieldwork, nobody in conservation wanted to talk about protecting parks," Rabinowitz says. "Even today, you'd never see a line item in a conservation budget for guns and bullets. But in part due to WildAid, it is now acceptable to fund ranger training and salaries. If species are to survive, a national park has to be a truly inviolable wildlife core protected by well-trained people."

This same debate—armed and active enforcement versus passive security—has roiled the conservation ranks in Africa for decades, and has led to a wide array of protection schemes on that continent. Now, with WildAid pushing its hardcore protection agenda, wildlife groups are moving more forcefully into the protection game in other parts of the world. Since 1999, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has been working with the Thai government to improve anti-poaching enforcement and wildlife monitoring with the border patrol; and in 2001, Conservation International started funding ranger training in Cambodia's Cardamom Mountains, turning former Khmer Rouge guerrillas into anti-logging brigades.

"Science-based organizations such as WCS are increasingly realizing that we have to get into enforcement issues, and WildAid is the core team that has experience we can draw on," says Elizabeth Bennett, 47, director of the hunting-and-wildlife-trade program at the WCS. "But protection can have an impact only if it works in concert with biological monitoring and a deep understanding of ecosystems. We're learning a lot from WildAid, but I'm not entirely sure how much they are learning from us."

She's right. WildAid is not a replacement strategy for the science-based conservation movement; it's been designed to plug what Galster and Gauntlett see as gaping security holes in wildlife protection. But there are still some in the conservation community who think that strategy is shortsighted.

"Protection is WildAid's niche," says Sybille Klenzendorf, director of the World Wildlife Fund's tiger conservation program. "But that's a kind of first step you take when a species such as the tiger is facing imminent extinction from hunters. It's putting out a fire....Now the direct threats to tigers have become habitat loss and loss of prey. So we moved into that area."

Once they've put out these fires, though, Galster says WildAid's plan is to work itself out of existence—maybe even by 2030. He hopes the group becomes redundant, turning its overseas offices into locally run NGOs with all-local staffs, as he has already done with the Phoenix Fund in Russia. It is, perhaps, WildAid's most radical idea.

"One of the differences between us and mainstream U.S. conservation groups is that they still believe foreign governments need to be educated to step up wildlife security," Gauntlett explains. "But governments in Third World countries already want to protect their parks. Once groups like WildAid give them budgetary and training support, we'll be able to bow out and let those governments entirely take over protecting the wildlife within their borders."

In the meantime, Galster is hatching WildAid's grandest project yet: unplugging what he calls "the Chinese vacuum cleaner, sucking up Southeast Asia's wildlife left and right." It's widely known that practitioners of Chinese traditional medicine use tiger bones and bear gall bladders as remedies, and that tiger and reptile meat is considered exotic cuisine to some Chinese. What's less well known are the numbers. Traffic, the UK-based monitoring group, reports that during 2000, 20 tons of turtles were shipped from Indonesia to China every week. And in just seven months in 2002, Thai officials intercepted 1,800 mammals and 21,000 reptiles bound for their voracious neighbor to the north.

Galster's goal is to level the illegal wildlife trade in Asia over the next five years—corresponding with the buildup to the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008—by getting indigenous NGOs to work across borders and fight poachers, traffickers, and consumers. In addition to the programs they've already got up and running in Cambodia, Thailand, and Russia, WildAid is hoping to beef up wildlife-security operations in Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan by stitching together a $10 million grant from a number of sources, including the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF), a consortium that includes the MacArthur Foundation, the World Bank, and the Japanese government, which has already given them $250,000. It sounds grandiose, but the CEPF was set up precisely because its donors concluded that the only way to save endangered habitats was to sponsor creative broadband approaches.

"We are at a point where conserving biodiversity hot spots is so complex that no single group can go it alone," explains Jorgen Thomsen, senior vice president of Conservation International and the executive director of the CEPF. "Direct support to civil society groups from a partnership of public and private funds has a higher probability of success for protecting both species and habitats, especially when you are dealing with ecosystems that straddle the boundaries of several countries. China may well be a very big market for wildlife, from tigers to turtles, coming in from abroad, but you can't look at the China consumption issue separately. It's tied to he markets in neighboring countries which are suppliers."

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