As the wildebeest herd moves north through the border regions with Tanzania, it faces a human threat: an invisible web of wire snares. Poachers sneak across the fenceless border from Tanzania to hunt animals for bush meat, using wire snares.
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TRANSCRIPT
- [Narrator] As they approach the northern border of Tanzania, they face a human threat.
An invisible web of wire snares.
- Snares. That's a new thing.
A wildebeest can get a smell of a lion, but this is a totally invisible thing to them.
- We are the patrol teams, we normally do our intensive patrol.
We go to the thickets looking for the poachers.
- [Narrator] Daniel Kijape heads up a team of 43 rangers who patrol the Kenya-Tanzania border.
The poachers sneak across the fenceless border to hunt animals for bush meat using wire snares.
- You find that the wire snares are concentrated on the border, on the track where the animal passes.
So when the animal comes, gets in maybe their head, leg, it can kill many, many, many animals.
During migration, every day they set 200 wires.
Those are 200 animals gone.
- [Narrator] This is their busiest time, with huge numbers of migrating animals crossing the border from Tanzania into Kenya.
(dog barking) Large numbers of animals on the move are an easy target for communities living on the edges of protected areas.
- It's a business.
They come and see the animals and they capture.
They go and sell to the villages.
People eat that meat, it's food - [Narrator] Poverty and a growing hungry population drives them, but it is illegal.
Tens of thousands of animals are poached every year across this region.
If mortality continues to increase as human population increases, these numbers may become unsustainable and the wildebeest population could crash.
- So you're finding that if you don't do intensive patrol, our animals are gonna become extinct.
We have hope.
Why? Because we are there.
