Pursuing Poachers in Tanzania

So there’s this expectation that because I spent so much time in East Africa studying lions that my most impactful stories will be about lions. And as it turns out, one of those stories that really, was the most moving to me and, and remains at the top of my mind. So, so much is about a giraffe that I never even saw alive.

I’m Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant and this is a different kind of nature show. A podcast all about the human drama of saving animals. I want to tell you my story and what it’s actually like to track bears in the Sierras, Chase lemurs in Madagascar, live with lions and Tanzania and do all of that as a black female scientist. This is Going Wild.

Poaching in East Africa is a really big threat to wildlife. Poachers go after animals for their hides, their bones, their organs, all kinds of things and I was about to experience it firsthand.

It was the year 2009 and I was in the middle of my master’s degree and my research was to go to Tanzania that summer to work with the African Wildlife Foundation in their Tarangire lion project. In Swahili it was translated to utafiti wa simba.

So I finally arrived at the camp and it was this super rugged, you know, roughing it, dirty, scrappy, little camp in the middle of the Bush. And although that might be intimidating to some, and maybe even a different version of me would have been intimidated, it was exactly what I wanted. “Look at this, you know, I’m, I’m part of this team and this is an exclusive place, you know, for real science. It was a wonderful place to call home for that summer.”

So besides me, the team consisted of Eufura who was our fearless leader, Steven, who was a pretty general assistant in all kinds of ways, Edie who was a fix-it man, and then Peter, who was second in command to Eufura. He was another up-and-coming scientist, a super tall guy. He came from a nearby Maasai village, so he also helped us relate to the community.

Every day, most of us on the team would pile into our junky, clunky field vehicle and head out into the Bush to look for lions.

We wanted to know where lions went and where they didn’t go in order to figure out what kinds of habitats they need for their conservation. But also in order to communicate with the local Maasai who are pastoralists, so they could understand where it was safe for them to herd their cattle and where it wasn’t.

So there’s this one week where instead of the whole team coming out to do the lion surveys, it was just me and Peter. And it was pretty fun when it was just us because we would hit it early in the morning and then we would usually have a lot of extra time. And instead of wanting to just head back to the field station, Peter loved taking game drives… Just driving around, seeing what kind of animals were out and about, and really taking note of them. And it wasn’t like this leisurely thing for Peter. He actually was studying them all the time.

Peter wanted to be a park ranger for Tarangire National Park. That was his big goal. And so I really loved the days that it was just us together because I wanted to support Peter and his preparation for being a park ranger. And also I loved going on game drives, too.

So we were kind of the perfect team and we were just geeking out all the time by driving around and seeing zebras, gazelles, impala, and especially, the super tall majestic giraffes. They were everywhere in this part of the landscape and they were incredible.

I think I love them for a lot of reasons. It was one of the first Swahili words I learned, the word twiga, which means giraffe.

And they’re really special because there are so many grazers on the Savannah. There are so many animals that put their heads down on the ground and graze grass, but giraffes are browsers. And so they browse from trees and they have this cool tongue that I’m kind of obsessed with. It’s this black tongue and it’s long and it’s strong. It’s like a huge muscle. And it wraps around the branches of trees and pulls leaves off and even Acacia trees, which are full of thorns. So a lot of animals can’t eat them; giraffes have no problem at all.

And one day we were driving and found a paved road. And I have to tell you, finding a paved road was something that rarely happened, you know, in my experience there, cause we were so far out in the Bush, in a pretty wild area.

Hey, where are we going? And he just replied, Oh, I need to drop something off to a friend. And I thought to myself, a friend we’re in the middle of nowhere, but okay. You know, he was someone I trusted completely. And so we made this turn and we drove up this hill again on another dirt path.

And we get to the top of the Hill and there’s a camp.

And there were a couple of guys at this camp and they were wearing uniforms. They were in these dark green uniforms and they all smiled really big when they saw Peter.

And so I realized, Oh my goodness. Okay. These are, I guess some of his friends he was talking about. Not only did I not know that he had friends in this area, I don’t know where the heck we are, but Peter introduced me as, Rae, a researcher on his project. He introduced me to these guys as park rangers for Tarangire National Park. It all clicked for me really, really quickly because I realized, oh, of course, he would be friends with park rangers because he aspires to be one.

And Peter was just there to, I think, you know, if I were to translate it into my kind of terminology, he was networking.

They had all kinds of walkie-talkies and radios going on, like a police station or a fire station, how there’s, you know, this area where there are just all kinds of chatter coming over in the walkie-talkies and the radios. And no one seemed to really be listening to it. In fact, sometimes they just turned it down, you know, so they could listen to each other. And we were there for a while, sipping our water and talking about Tarangire and you know, business stuff. And then one of the rangers who hadn’t been sitting with us walked over quickly and said something so fast in Swahili that I wasn’t able to catch it, but everyone dropped what they were doing and immediately stood up and ran to their vehicles. Peter told me in English, okay, get up right now. We have to go.  We jumped into the car and I, of course, asked what’s going on. And that’s when Peter told me they found some poachers. There are poachers in Tarangire National Park.

I got really worried that we were unsafe. That somehow, you know, we were in close proximity to poachers who might actually kill us. So I started panicking. I said, well, where are we going? You know, if there are poachers, like where are we? Where, where are we going? Can we stay here? Are we going back to camp? What are we doing?

It appeared that we were following the park rangers as they were driving super fast, way faster than I thought our little truck could go down the dirt road, making tons of dust, you know, fly into our, um, windshield so that we could barely see anything. It felt like a high-speed chase almost, you know, almost like, like cop cars or an ambulance or fire truck, you know, racing to the scene of a crime.

 

And as we were following them, we were listening to the radio.

 

He was listening for a while and he translated with me. Okay. There were three poachers, they’ve been captured…

 

And he told me that they had killed a giraffe.

 

Unfortunately, the poachers were caught too late.

 

I could see the giraffe in the distance and it made me realize that I had never seen a giraffe lying down because of course, kind of, who has? One of those cool things about giraffes is that they don’t lie down. It takes them so long to get up from even a seated position, let alone a laid down position that they don’t, you know, they even do a lot of their resting standing up.

So it was this weird, unnatural sight to see a giraffe completely on its side. And its belly was so big and under normal circumstances, its belly would be inflating and deflating with deep breaths. But this time it was just very, very, still.

It was not bloody. In fact, if I had come across that giraffe on my own, I don’t think I would have realized that it had been shot.

It was beautiful, you know, and peaceful and calm and a beautiful day. And under any other circumstances, it would have been an amazing sight to be so close to an animal like that.

And instead, it was dead.

It was kind of this double impact because, you know, as much as I cared for the animals and really, you know, hated the idea of them being shot,

I also knew that any poacher in Tanzania was motivated by their own needs that were unmet. You know, I had a lot of compassion for these people who are criminalized as poachers, because more than likely they came from some kind of severe poverty situation and they were getting paid to do this dangerous, risky, horrible work. They’re choosing to do it because it probably paid better than anything else.

So I had a lot of complex emotions, you know, going through my mind about the fact that we had a dead giraffe and also, you know, a couple of men whose lives were probably ruined at that moment and might not have much of a future themselves.

As I was having those emotional feelings, I remember also having a lot of logistical questions, kind of pop into my mind, mostly, you know, well, what do we do now?

Maybe they’ll take the whole giraffe’s body and bring it to a museum. Maybe it can be brought to a university and can be dissected or, you know, used for science. I had all of these thoughts and I realized, well, let me just ask Peter, he’s standing right next to me. And he’s listening to all of these park rangers speak so rapidly in Swahili about what to do.

So I nudged him again and I asked what happens to the giraffe? And he pulled me away from the circle. And I think he was actually a little bit embarrassed because he thought it was obvious what happened next. And it was silly of me to not realize. But he pulled me away from the circle and he said, “Well, now we’re all going to take some.”

 

And I didn’t understand. And I thought, “Take some of what?” And he said, “We’re all going to take some of the giraffe.”

 

Whenever an animal gets killed by poachers and is caught in time, everyone from the community is actually able to benefit.

A giraffe is about a ton of weight and that amount of meat can feed so many people for so long, but we have to act rapidly. He explained that word had already been distributed throughout all of the neighboring Maasai communities and people were on their way with baskets, with bags, with pots and pans, and everyone was going to line up, take their machete, hack off some giraffe meat and bring it back home.

We’re in a landscape with no electricity and that meant no refrigeration. So all of this had to happen while the meat was still fresh and before nightfall came, when surely carnivores were going to scavenge on the carcass, it was only safe for us to be there for a really short time.

I almost felt embarrassed that that kind of thing didn’t dawn on me. Of course there is this opportunity to use the whole animal. What, we were just going to let it sit there and rot? Absolutely not. And of course this community already has a protocol for what happens when an animal is poached or illegally killed in some kind of way. It was such a great lesson for me and all of a sudden I got excited. I was the first person to run over to the back of our truck and grab two big machetes. But before I knew it, Peter himself had his arm raised really high, almost like he was holding an ax and bringing it down really strongly and hacking into the hip area, cutting meat from her body. And it was gross, you know, it was really like, uh, disturbing.

So again, part of my body and mind was divided, part of me with those thinking, yes, purposeful, this is good. Let’s get it done. Another part of me was thinking, Oh my goodness, this is really gruesome and brutal. And as if this poor giraffe hasn’t been through enough already now we’re hacking her body to pieces.

He gave me big pieces of giraffe meat, and some of it even had this skin still on it, you know, with the iconic giraffe pattern.

So I threw big, big, you know, 20 pound hunks of giraffe meat into the back of our trunk over and over and over again. And as I was doing it, at one point I looked up on the horizon and that’s when I saw them.

I can still see it so clearly, even right now, I remember seeing a line, a single file line of Maasai women in the distance and Maasai women wear these beautiful robes, you know, so these reds and blues and whites against dark, dark brown skin in a single file line. It looked like they were maybe 50 women, you know, walking over. And many of them had these big baskets on their heads, that were empty, but that would be used to carry the meat back.

But it was also such a powerful, very, very emotionally moving sight to see women who I so strongly think of as leaders of the community walking for miles and miles and miles to the site of a dead giraffe that everyone was upset about, but also to know that they were going to be bringing at least a day or two or three days’ worth of nutrition back to their homes for their children, for their partners, for, you know, their families and community members.

And all of a sudden, I thought to myself, you know, this is what’s missing from the conversations in my classroom. We talk about how bad it is, how bad it is, how illegal it is, all this, all the tragedy that comes from poaching, but we’ve never talked about all the opportunity that it brings, the nutrition that it can offer to communities that don’t often get it, communities that used to have full rights and stewardship over these landscapes that have now been barred from it.

It kind of shook me back into remembering that humans are more important than animals, period. Human life, human dignity, human livelihoods are way more important than any animal, anywhere. And that’s a really difficult concept to always keep at the top of your mind when your whole career is oriented towards saving animals.

 

At the same time that I was working so hard to understand lions, to figure out how to best protect them. There’s an entire community of people living with lions, living in these ecosystems that don’t have everything they need to be healthy, successful, and thriving, and no lion project or no environmental project is complete if the human communities in those places have unmet needs.

And that’s what I mean by humans are more important than animals. I think that in the conservation community, we need to prepare ourselves for the infrequent, hopefully infrequent, times that we’re going to have to prioritize human wellbeing, potentially over an environmental goal. you know, if there’s any compromise that ever needs to be made in the future, it might need to be made for the benefit of human dignity and well-being, and that should be seen as a win, not a loss.

You just listened to Going Wild with Dr. Rae Wynn Grant.

 

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This episode of “Going Wild” was hosted and written by me, Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant. Production by Rachel Aronoff, Danielle Broza, Nathan Tobey, and Great Feeling Studios. Editing by Jakob Lewis. Sound design by Jakob Lewis and Rob Heath.

 

Danielle Broza is the Digital Lead and Fred Kaufman is the Executive Producer for Nature.

 

Art for this podcast was created by Arianna Bollers and Karen Brazell.

 

Special thanks to Amanda Schmidt, Blanche Robertson, Jayne Lisi, Chelsey Saatkamp, Natasha Padilla, and Karen Ho.

 

Going Wild is a new podcast by PBS Nature. NATURE is an award-winning series created by The WNET Group and made possible by all of you. Funding for this podcast was provided by grants from the Anderson Family Charitable Fund and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.