The N.G.O. Earth League International intends to stop the global trade in rhino horn, elephant ivory, shark fins, and more than 7,000 species by penetrating transnational wildlife smuggling networks.
Social media is a powerful market facilitator and accelerant. A 2020 study of Facebook found four hundred and seventy-three pages that openly traded wildlife and another two hundred and eighty-one groups that participated in the global bazaar. The code words were transparent: “ox bone” for elephant ivory, “striped T-shirt” for tiger skin.
The United States is often looked to as the globe’s animal cop. The Lacey Act, in concert with other federal statutes, dictates that if any part of an illicit wildlife transaction touches American territory—even if a payment merely passes through a server in the U.S.—federal agencies can step in. Yet, while Homeland Security receives nine hundred and fifty billion dollars in annual funding, its Wildlife and Environmental Crimes Unit, which launches this year, will get just $7.5 million of that.
Crosta, truckling as much as he could bear to, had blazoned a photo of a mother elephant and her baby across the event’s posters. And he began his presentation by recalling his earlier days as a security consultant who occasionally trained park rangers: “My story begins twelve years ago in Kenya, in the middle of the elephant-poaching crisis, when we were losing up to fifty thousand elephants a year.
Donors like direct action, and they like feeling that their donation is fixing the problem. So N.G.O.s display photos of rescued animals and skim over measurable outcomes. Jane Goodall told me, “Facts, facts, facts—people don’t care.” In Crosta’s situation, she said, “I’d show video of someone pulling a scale off a live pangolin.
Poachers, too, could be indiscriminate. They sometimes killed elephants using oranges spiked with strychnine or pesticides—which had the additional effect of killing vultures, whose circling might otherwise alert wardens to a dead elephant. But the policy of vigilante justice eventually inspired moral revulsion. “Many N.G.O.s aren’t comfortable anymore with ‘shoot to kill’ policies, with funding a paramilitary institution,” Brighton Kumchedwa, Malawi’s director of parks and wildlife, told me.
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