Imagine if Palm Beach were 10 times larger and had only nine police officers to patrol it.
The park is part of the Greater Lebombo Conservancy in western Mozambique. To its east is South Africa’s Kruger National Park, home to half the world’s population of white and black rhinos.
And while South Africa has hundreds of charities working within Kruger National Park to stop poachers, the majority of poachers are from Mozambique and they use the less-patrolled conservancy, in their country, to enter and exit Kruger, according to Australian Damien Mander, chief executive officer of theInternational Anti-Poaching Foundation .
As part of a lecture and fund-raising tour, Mander explained his organization’s mission on Sunday before a crowd of about 50 people at Nick & Johnnie’s.
Based in Sabie Game Park, the foundation trains game rangers, develops security plans and buys equipment to reduce poaching.
Mander first visited South Africa and Mozambique in 2009, after completing several tours of duty in Iraq as a Navy clearance diver.
‘Iconic species’
There he witnessed the challenges faced by native game rangers who leave their families for two weeks at a time to conduct dangerous patrols with sparse resources, he said Monday.
“I’d come from a special forces background where we had every resource we needed. These guys were protecting iconic species, the elephant and the rhino, with next to nothing,” Mander said.
A particularly grisly scene inspired him to create the foundation.
While on patrol with game rangers, he saw a Cape buffalo struggling to free one of its back legs from a wire snare set by poachers.
“It ripped its own pelvis in half trying to get free. When we shot it to put it out of its misery, we found it had a calf inside,” Mander said.
Improving the odds
With the aid of others, Mander is improving the odds for rhinos in Kruger National Park and the buffer zone to the east.
“We need the support of the global community to save what wilderness that we have left,” Mander said. “The rhino and elephants are the hardest animals to protect because poachers go to the greatest lengths to hunt them.”
Poachers get tens of thousands of dollars for rhino horns, which are sold in Vietnam and China to people who wrongly believe they cure a variety of illnesses.
Shrinking the battlefield
Palm Beacher Jason Paterniti, a managing partner of private investment firm Global Risk Capital, supports the foundation and visited the office in Mozambique earlier this year.
He was there to help establish a system that uses drones and a computer model developed by University of Maryland professor Thomas Snitch to determine where rhinos and poachers are most likely to intersect. The system is based on a program the professor created to help soldiers avoid improvised explosive devises in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Sabie Game Park is 10 times the size of Palm Beach. And when we got there, there were only nine rangers to patrol and protect a 60-mile perimeter and 70,000 acres,” Paterniti said. “What we are trying to do is shrink the size of the battlefied so that we can optimize the probability that poachers will not reach the rhinos.”
Paterniti plans to return to the park in November. He is providing support for a team from the University of California at San Diego creating a “persistent surveillance sensor system” to further boost rangers’ effectiveness.
The aim is to give rangers around-the-clock real-time surveillance information about the locations of rhinos and poachers.
The animals, like elephants, have existed on the planet for several thousand years, with predecessors going back millions of years, and both need protection, Paterniti said.
“It’s only in the last 100 years that man has brought these animals to the edge of extinction,” Paterniti said. “If we don’t protect the most charismatic (African) species, the rhinos and the elephant, then there’s no hope for the other animals. Once they are gone, they are gone.”