- 2 months ago
Wildlife criminologist Allison Skidmore discusses going undercover to investigate poaching and wildlife trafficking networks. She explains how criminals move illegal wildlife, exploit transit hubs, launder money, and use corruption to evade authorities.
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00:00My name is Allison Skidmore. I've gone undercover to investigate illegal wildlife
00:04trafficking networks across Russia, Africa, and Southeast Asia. This is how crime works.
00:11The biggest part about being undercover is you are essentially lying every day.
00:17What happens when there's six guys with rifles and you're in the forest alone and you blew your
00:23cover? I was fortunate that I was able to evade the Russian secret service, the FSB, for as long
00:31as I did. They have a reputation for a reason. This is the first time I've ever spoken publicly
00:37in such a capacity. I am an independent investigator. I was undercover in the Russian Far East
00:50investigating Amur tiger poaching between the winters of 2019 and 2020. I was invited to a
00:57conference in Khabarovsk, Russia by a good friend of mine who studies tigers. And I gave a speech
01:05about whether or not people in California, the Vietnamese and Chinese community, were actually
01:11using products from tigers in the U.S. And what happened was an American scientist saw me at this
01:20conference. And he asked me, I know you're already two years into your PhD, but is there any way you
01:26would just drop everything? He says, we know the Russian government is lying about tiger poaching
01:33statistics. They're telling the world that only 15 are being poached per year, but I'm really worried
01:39that number might be three to four times higher. He's like, I can't do with my organization, but if you
01:44could embed yourself in the network and to get a poaching estimate, that would be very useful.
01:51And I asked National Geographic and they agreed to it. Tiger poaching is really taboo and one of the
02:00worst types of wildlife crimes. Tiger populations have declined dramatically. They inhabit only 6% of
02:07their former range. So for the Amur tiger population, where there's about 350 adult tigers, just one
02:14being poached is a large part of the population. I'd already spent a lot of time in Russia as well.
02:21I already knew a lot of people. And so this individual in my work, he's called a gatekeeper.
02:27He was the one who wanted me to do the project. He was only made initial introductions. He was very
02:33clear that I cannot help you. If something goes wrong, you cannot contact me. I first went to
02:39Primori in the Russian Far East in the winter of 2019. It's a different world than European Russia.
02:46It's very remote. Usually there's no running water. Sometimes there's no electricity. And so people are
02:54on these little tiny like hunt houses in the taiga. In Russia, especially the Far East, hunting is huge.
03:02So I knew that I would find poachers within the hunting community because those are the only people
03:09that have rifles and the only people that are out in the taiga in the winter. I would spend a
03:15lot of
03:16time doing whatever they would do. If they wanted to go shooting, if they want to go snowmobiling,
03:22if they wanted to go out on traditional skis, I would do that. And so I am spending every day
03:28with
03:28them either outside snowmobiling or inside drinking a lot of vodka, which that was actually important
03:35because the camaraderie is really important to get people to talk. The first time I actually found
03:43out about someone poaching a tiger was essentially we were sitting around at a table drinking and they
03:52pulled out a photo album and they showed me a picture of the all of them around the carcass of
04:00a tiger. And they were very casual about it. I hadn't even asked about tigers. But what I did is
04:06I spent a
04:06lot of time with people going through their lives. I would ask about their kids. Like I would ask about,
04:12you know, where they grew up, how they learned to hunt. And these photo albums would sometimes come out.
04:17And sure enough, we're flipping and it's like someone's birthday and then it's a dead tiger.
04:21Admittedly, I went in there expecting to not like these people. They're killing tigers.
04:27And I came out with a tremendous amount of empathy for the people in the Far East.
04:32I realized that the tiger poaching was embedded in systemic types of corruption.
04:44There are three different categories of main drivers or motivations for people poaching tigers.
04:51And that is poverty, human wildlife conflict, and elite poaching. You have huge amounts of unemployment.
04:59And so people rely on subsistence hunting. They were originally sable trappers. Sable is like
05:06a small type of animal that is really useful for fur. What happened is sometimes we don't realize
05:13that we think we're being like environmentally conscious. But we can disrupt systems that we
05:19don't understand. So there was a huge outcry about not wearing fur. Almost every poacher I talked to
05:28told me the story that they were sable trappers, but the market for fur dropped out because of the
05:35people in the West didn't want it anymore. And so they had to turn to something else.
05:40And so this is this something else is tiger poaching. It's musk deer poaching. It's illegal
05:47ginseng harvesting. It's illegal logging. And these people are doing this not because they necessarily
05:53want to. There is a class of people that are doing that, the elite poachers. But the general population,
05:59the general people that are poaching are doing it out of desperation.
06:10I had to get a special visa, a scientific exchange visa, but I wasn't truthful about what I was doing.
06:17I was, in fact, working on tiger monitoring with a friend who has a reserve in the Habarovsk region.
06:24And so I was doing tiger trap studies with him. So I just said that that's what I was doing.
06:31I was
06:31able to get a scientific exchange visa. And that was another layer of protection. If I was in Russia
06:37on a tourist visa, it would have been game over. But I was actually there legally allowed to do
06:43research. I just wasn't honest about what research I was doing. But that wasn't my cover story.
06:49The biggest part about being undercover is you are essentially lying every day. And so you want
06:55your lies to be as truthful as possible because you don't want to forget what you're lying about.
07:02I said that I was a South African hunter. And why I use that is because South Africans are notorious
07:12for
07:12being big game hunters. They also go to Russia a lot. And also I had lived in South Africa for
07:20years.
07:20I even photoshopped pictures of my head, like with like a dead zebra, like saying I was a trophy
07:27hunter. I don't try to put on an accent. I can, but I can speak Afrikaans. Again, like if they
07:33wanted to
07:33look into my background, that would have checked out. And things like when they took me target shooting,
07:39I'm a really good shot. So if I had been really bad, my cover story would have blown. Like it
07:45wouldn't have worked. I do not use my name usually for the most part. In Russia, I did not. So
07:53I said
07:54that I was wanting to see like how, what the tiger population was like in Russia, if it would be
08:01possible to hunt them. Um, I might have clients or friends that I could bring to Russia. Um, and so
08:08that's the, that's what I told people I was there for. And I didn't know how far I would go.
08:16Would,
08:16I mean, I know I never would shoot a tiger. Of course I never would, but would, could I be
08:22present
08:22for a tiger being killed or would I shoot the person? And I thought about that. Luckily I witnessed a
08:31lot of tiger poaching incidents like hours after they occurred. Like I was behind a car at night
08:40where the people had killed a tiger and had run into the forest. And the next day we went and
08:45found
08:46it in the far East. The hunting community is completely a hundred percent dominated by men.
08:51I did not meet a single woman who was part of the hunting community. I would have to say it
08:59was
08:59to my advantage, completely to my advantage that I was a woman. They thought I was very non-threatening
09:05and I played into that. They put their barriers down, if you will, because they didn't see me as a
09:12threat. I had an interpreter, um, even though I did get really good at understanding Russian. I worked with
09:20a woman, uh, like a young man and an older man. And by far the best response that we got,
09:28that I got was
09:29with the female interpreter. Um, and so she, that, so like there was two of us for the most part.
09:37Um,
09:38she didn't go on more of the like dangerous types of environments, but she was with me a lot of
09:44times.
09:44Then I also, a lot of the time had a male driver and he was a contact from my gatekeeper.
09:51I was
09:52fortunate that I was able to evade the Russian secret service, the FSB for as long as I did.
09:59I almost got caught twice. One of my close calls was in Lazo, which is the main national park for
10:06tigers
10:06in the far East. It's also one of the larger villages. I was really on the fence about going,
10:12um, but I went and I met with this American woman. She was studying tigers. She was studying
10:19their reproductive stuff. She actually told me like, I don't want anything to do with you. Like
10:24I met you, but like, I don't want anything to do with you. I can't help you. And I respect
10:27that.
10:28What happened was I left Lazo and I got an email from this woman and she said, oh, like,
10:34I'd really like to meet you again. I knew right away that she was under duress sending that email.
10:41And so essentially the FSB, um, and I feel horrible that this happened, but they forced
10:48her into inner broke into her house, forced her to write this email to try to get me in a
10:54trap.
10:55Luckily it screamed trap to me and I did not go and she's okay. I know she's okay,
11:00but I feel horrible that she was forced to write this email. And again, the FSB,
11:04they didn't know exactly what I was doing. They knew that I was looking into tigers,
11:08but they didn't specifically know what, what I was doing. They just knew a foreign scientist who
11:14they call a foreign agent was investigating something. There was this group of, of hunters.
11:20I really bonded with, and I decided like, um, it's really important to have contacts that know what
11:27you're doing. But this group of hunters, I ended up telling what I was really doing.
11:31Um, and so when I was staying at their hunting hut, one of the villages, one of the hunters had
11:39gone
11:39into village to get supplies. And when he was in this small village, the FSB were swarming it.
11:46And so he came back to the hunting hut and was like, we got to get you out of here.
11:53We went,
11:54we essentially took the back door out of the hunting lease on a snowmobile. So if I didn't
11:59have these groups of this group of men who knew what I was doing and were willing to help me,
12:05then I would have, I would have gotten caught much earlier. And so there are like these types of contacts,
12:11um, that are, that are essential for a project like this. You have, some people have to know
12:17like what you're doing. And that comes down to gut instinct about who you tell what you're doing,
12:22because it could easily have backfired on me.
12:30Myself and my colleagues have been trying to draw attention to something called crime convergence.
12:35Crime convergence is when wildlife trafficking overlaps with other serious forms of organized
12:42crime. There's a tremendous amount of illegal logging in the Far East, and they're only targeting
12:48three types of trees. And in order to target those trees, you have to build roads. If you look at
12:54a
12:54satellite image of the Far East, the amount of illegal logging roads is substantial. And it's because of
13:01these roads that poachers get access. That's like, one of the big problems is if the region stayed
13:08inaccessible, if there weren't these roads, it would be so much harder to poach tigers. They use these
13:14logging roads to drive through the taiga. Usually at night, the more wealthy poachers can afford heat
13:22vision goggles. So they can actually like look and see what's moving in the dark. The people that can't
13:29afford those will use a spotlight. And essentially they drive up and down these logging roads at night
13:35looking for tigers. Amur tigers have huge ranges. They have ranges that are up to 2,000 square
13:43kilometers. So you could set a snare and you're never going to catch a tiger. Almost all of their
13:49population is outside of like national parks. It's in the forest. So tigers will move on the road
13:55network too, because it's a lot easier than running through the snow. So it's all about opportunity.
14:01And this is what I study from a crime science perspective. You can have someone that's extremely
14:06motivated to poach a tiger. They really, really, really want to do it, but they have to have the
14:11opportunity or they won't be able to poach. And so it's these illegal logging roads that give them the
14:18largest chance to find a tiger and they will shoot that tiger. Um, sometimes the tiger doesn't die
14:25right away and they'll have to follow the blood trail sometimes in the morning. Um, but they'll
14:31shoot the tiger from the car. Of course, there's other instances, and this is why it's so context
14:35specific. Of course, there's other instances where a tiger will come into a village and kill a dog.
14:41And then of course someone will poach. Um, but for the most part, people are driving around on, on,
14:46on roads at night with a spotlight or heat vision goggles looking for tigers. The first time I had to
14:53watch poachers piece out a tiger, I said I had to pee, but I went behind a tree and I
14:59puked for 10
15:01minutes. It was, it was the hardest time of my life. The only way to do this work is to
15:08put it in a box
15:09in your brain. And so, um, the first time it ever happened, as I said, I went and threw up,
15:15but after
15:15that I was able to keep my cool because that would blow my cover. It's all methodical. They know what
15:22parts
15:23they want. They burn the skin and then they take the specific joints that they're after,
15:29they take the canines, the claws, and they burn the corpse. If there's not a lot of trust,
15:36then the poacher has to take the carcass, the whole carcass to the buyer. So after,
15:42but there is trust in this, in this system, um, with these poachers and the local buyer. And so they
15:47took the parts directly to the local buyer who stockpiled them. And I was actually able to see
15:53his musk deer and other canines that he had.
16:02The local buyers would stockpile items. And this is not just tiger. This is musk deer. This is ginseng.
16:09This is bear paws and bear gallbladders. They would stockpile everything because they have to pay a
16:16bribe for a paid corridor. They want to wait till they have a lot of items. And then they would
16:22go to
16:22this town called Usurisk. Usurisk is closer to the Chinese border. So Usurisk is when all of the
16:30products exchange hands between the local buyer and the regional buyer. And the regional buyer
16:36is one making a substantial amount of profit. Even though there's Russian and Chinese buyers
16:42in Usurisk, all the product would end up with the Chinese who would smuggle it across the border.
16:48All the products start vast all over the Primori region. They all go to Usurisk. All of them go there.
16:55And then they spread out to five different, um, like ports that they enter China, um, that they have
17:03to go through a custom checks. When you have a product crossing an international border, that's
17:08expensive because you have to pay what I, it's called a paid corridor. A paid corridor is when you
17:14bribe people in advance, usually a custom officer. And you have like a set time where you're gonna,
17:23a set date where you're gonna go. And they're smuggled across the Russian border in a variety of ways.
17:29Um, it depends if there's trust in the network. So if there's a lot of trust in the network,
17:35a bone can be ground down completely because there's trust and that's easier to smuggle.
17:40You can just put it in your bag. If there's not a lot of trust, then someone wants to see
17:44that
17:44that came from a tiger. And so it has to, it has to either be attached, um, which makes it
17:52harder to
17:53smuggle. I came across tigers being smuggled in illegal logging trucks. So you could have a tiger
17:59carcass inside all of those logs and no one would know. If you're talking about other products,
18:04particularly products coming from Africa, smugglers will most likely use, uh, ship shipping containers.
18:12Smugglers in places like Africa will not ship directly to China. They'll go through what you
18:18call transit countries, places like, um, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong. And that way it
18:25makes it harder to trace. These smugglers have been using these routes for decades for other
18:30types of products. And they're using the same routes now to smuggle wildlife, but they're really
18:35good. They use huge ports because you can't keep track of anything in these giant ports. The most of
18:41the profit ends up with, I would say the Chinese organized crime groups and the Russian organized crime
18:47groups further down the supply chain is when you have organized crime getting involved. Obviously
18:53the seller at the end in the China, in China is making the most amount of profit from these products.
19:00A hunter will get a couple hundred dollars, maybe for a canine, but the, by the time that goes for
19:07sale
19:07in China, that one canine is worth up to five, $6,000 for a big male canine. A whole tiger
19:15in the far
19:16will fetch between three and $4,000. But once you piece and part that tiger up, it's worth
19:24substantially more. The, the product essentially gets more and more valuable as it moves through
19:32the supply chain. And then you have one, one canine being sold for $5,000. So it's a lot of
19:39money.
19:40It took me months to get, um, access to a buyer. I was trying to put together this big story.
19:48I wanted
19:48to learn how many tigers are being poached per year. Poachers don't know how many tigers are being
19:53poached. They were actually the least important aspect of my work. I wanted to build trust with them
20:00so they would introduce me to their buyer. Buyers are businessmen. And so they have territories and
20:07they know how many tigers are being poached per year or how many they buy per year. And so
20:14by talking to 12 buyers, I was able to get a statistic that between 49 and 73 tigers are poached
20:20per year. Buyers are making more money than poachers. Um, because again, as products move through,
20:27you increase the value. The most important contact I had and my whole research was the
20:32one buyer that was a key informant. Key informants are people that know what I'm doing. They, they know
20:39the cover story, but they know the actual story. His family was forcibly deported to the Far East.
20:45And after the fall of communism, he set up a local grocery store. It became successful. So the government
20:52took it from him. Then he set up a local fishing operation. Salmon fishing is really popular. And
20:59there's a lot of salmon in the Far East. That business became successful. The government took
21:05it from him. And so he was a buyer because he had, he, he told me like angrily, I tried
21:13to follow the
21:14rules. I tried to be part of the community in a good way and not a bad way. The government
21:18kills everything. They took everything from me. So I became a buyer because it was the only option
21:24available for me. You want to know a lot of people and have a lot of contacts if you're a
21:28buyer. So by
21:30default, he was a illegal wildlife product buyer because he couldn't do anything else to make a living.
21:36They know a lot of people. They also, most importantly, they have to have a connection with
21:42a regional buyer and usurisk. During their life, they would have had to travel, make contacts,
21:48know people. And so and form a connection, a trust connection with a buyer and usurisk. And so those
21:55are sort of the essential characteristics of buyers. Tigers fall into one of the four categories of
22:08demand for the illegal wildlife trade. You have luxury goods, the medicinal trade, the pet trade,
22:15and processed commodities, and also food like bushmeat. But of those categories of demand,
22:24traditional medicine, also known as TCM or traditional Chinese medicine, is the most important
22:31because it's an ingrained cultural use, mostly in China, but also in places like Vietnam. I also
22:39want to be really clear that this is happening in places like Europe and the US too. There's actually
22:44huge demand for tiger products in places like California, where there's a large Vietnamese and
22:51Chinese population in Los Angeles and in San Francisco. So the demand is spread more globally than you
22:58would think. It was only really wealthy people doing it before, but now the middle class has grown so
23:04much and so has the demand. And so because tigers are so endangered, people want them even more. And
23:11so the tigers, unfortunately, almost every part of their body is in demand. Canines and claws are gifted
23:19as like trinkets or medallions. They're given to like newborns to make into necklaces. Specific types of
23:28bones are in demand, not all of them. The joints on the back, the knees, the elbow bones, the neck
23:36bones,
23:37the vertebrae, those are the bones that are wanted. And essentially what people do is they're either ground
23:44down or put fully, it just depends on the consumer, into wine. And so it's called tiger bone wine.
23:53Essentially, within this TCM community, people think if they drink wine that has tiger in it,
24:01then they will imbue the strength of the tiger in them. I actually watched poachers burn tiger skins
24:08in the forest, which was shocking to me. But that comes down to how you traffic these things,
24:13because you can grind down a bone and it can fit in someone's handbag. But if you have a huge
24:18pelt,
24:19it's really recognizable. Corruption is called the universal enabler of wildlife crime. None of it
24:30could happen if there wasn't corruption at every single level. Over 70% of the people that I spoke to
24:37during my study mentioned corruption. It was an astronomical amount. Everyone is aware of
24:44corruption. From a political science perspective, it's called enemy. It means when the entire moral
24:52climate of a society has degraded. And this is what happens when corruption becomes embedded in a society.
24:58They expect it, they know it's there, and they don't think it will change, and they don't think anything
25:04will happen without corruption. In this town called Olga, which is a coastal town in the Far East,
25:11I was speaking to someone who said he's poached 10 tigers in his life because his son is in the
25:17FSB.
25:17When I was talking to people, they told me, well, of course I know people in government. Of course I
25:23know
25:24police officers. I wouldn't be able to be a buyer of tiger products if I didn't know anyone in the
25:30police
25:30or in the government. They were very open about how, if you're in the tiger business, you have to
25:37have connections. So you have people that are insulated from the law. Because rangers don't
25:42necessarily make a lot of money, so elite poaching doesn't necessarily mean it's because they're rich.
25:47It means that they won't get in trouble in some capacity. And then you have people that just want
25:52to kill a tiger because it's fun. Or because they are rich. Those people, whatever happens,
26:01they're not going to get prosecuted. Even if you are lucky enough to find a ranger or cop that's not
26:07corrupt, persecution rates are so low that really it's not a factor. And that's unfortunate because
26:18deterrence, which this is from crime science, deterrence theory is essentially relies on people
26:26thinking that they'll get caught and scared of getting caught in the punishment. And so they're
26:31generally not worried about the authority or they are the authority, right? You have, you have members
26:37of rangers and people in FSB also poaching tigers. Even though elite poaching made the smallest amount
26:47in terms of my research, it was the smallest amount of people. It's like the worst factor though for
26:53what's happening over there because it creates a type of embedded corruption that is systematically bad
27:02for everyone in the area. Those people were the most nefarious, I would say, the elite poachers,
27:09even though they were the smallest category. The authorities were aware that I was doing research
27:22in Russia and, but they didn't necessarily know what I was doing research about. And so there was heat
27:30on me, I would say the whole time because I was a foreign scientist. Looking back, I should have known,
27:37I was feeling invincible. I was getting a little cocky. When I was deported in April of 2020,
27:44this was the start of the coronavirus. I did not know anything about COVID. When I say I was in
27:51a
27:51remote location, like access to nothing, right? So I didn't know this, but the Russian authorities were
27:59shutting down all types of travel. So they were setting up roadblocks between all major towns and villages.
28:07I got stuck at a roadblock and I was recognized. And so that's when I was taken back to Vladivostok.
28:16When I was arrested by the FSB, I knew I was extremely nervous, of course. I knew that I had
28:25done
28:26everything I possibly could to protect myself. And so I just denied, they didn't exactly know what I was
28:34doing. So if they did, um, like if I had published my papers beforehand and after they found out what
28:42I
28:42was doing, things would have been a lot different for me. I didn't know what information they knew
28:47or what they had on me, which was why I was extremely good about uploading everything I
28:53had into the cloud and wiping my phone, my hard drive every, almost every single night. I didn't
29:00want to be caught with evidence. The Russian FSB, the former KGB, they have a reputation for
29:06a reason. What I was worried about is that they wouldn't allow me to leave. I thought I was going
29:12to
29:13be shipped off to Siberia, which does happen to criminals in Russia, right? I think that the only
29:20reason that they deported me is because I protected myself with deleting everything. I was really good
29:28about it. And COVID worked to my advantage because it was just pandemonium. In that pandemonium,
29:34they just didn't want to deal with me. They're like, this is an American citizen. It's going to cause
29:39like a huge uproar. Let's just deport her. Everything was taken from me except my passport.
29:45Like I was deported in the clothes I was wearing, all of my stuff, all of it was gone, taken
29:51from me.
29:52But the relief when they told me they were sending me to Tokyo, I can't, it's hard to put into
29:58words
29:58that relief because the Russian authorities also have a way of intimidating you by keeping you isolated
30:05and not telling you what's going on. And that's like a fear tactic of theirs. So I really didn't have
30:11any idea what was going on. So my parents were, of course, following when I could. I had a satellite
30:18communicator because most of the time I didn't have signal. So when I could and it was safe, I would
30:24update
30:24them. And then I called them once I got to Tokyo and they got me a ticket back to the
30:30US.
30:35My research was published in 2020 and 2021. Um, actually the last paper was published in 2022. So
30:44I have three like main takeaways from my research. One is that ethnography is a really good method to
30:55use for investigating the legal wildlife trade. Essentially you embed yourself within the community
31:01and the culture that you're trying to understand, because why would you want second or third hand
31:06information? You don't know if it's true. You don't know if it's accurate. Like government officials
31:11only have so much information, getting information from the source itself is pivotal. The other
31:17takeaway is motivations are really contextual, extremely contextual. And I, I published a paper
31:25about people's motivations. And again, I want to, I want to state firmly that the lowest category
31:32of demand in terms of like people, like why they said they were poaching tigers is elite poaching,
31:39but it's the most insidious of them all because it leads to this enemy, this moral decline in
31:46society. It leads to this embedded corruption. Everyone's always focusing on the poacher, the
31:52poacher, the poacher, and they're doing it from an impoverished perspective. They're doing it because
31:57they don't have a lot of money, of course. But I want to focus on these elite poachers because that's
32:04actually the root of the whole problem because of the embedded corruption is the reason why people
32:09are poor. But the biggest takeaway that what the NGO originally wanted me to get was that poaching
32:15estimate, 49 to 73 tigers poached per year. That is a huge amount of tigers, you know, up to 24
32:23%
32:23of the population. Leonardo DiCaprio actually re he has like one of the biggest following on the earth.
32:31He reposted my National Geographic article, which really made me happy. And then the Russian government
32:39had this response, basically slamming him and my work and calling me like a pseudoscientist.
32:46I can safely say I have not, the FSB has not come after me since I left Russia. I think
32:53they have
32:53bigger issues. So my organization is called Leave Them Wild and it is essentially focused on solving
33:01wildlife crime issues on a context specific basis. I wanted to set the record straight. I also wanted to
33:10get a presence online that wasn't just negative. So I either approached someone or they approached me,
33:16and I go on a pilot project. And that's essentially why I started my organization is to just
33:24be found in order to do this work because I am autonomous. My autonomy is extremely important.
33:30I am currently based in Austria. I am a visiting professor at the University of Innsbruck.
33:37My goal is to get wildlife crime programs at more universities. I want to bring attention
33:44to wildlife crime issues. And the only way to do that is to embed it within the educational system.
33:56When I got back from Russia, my research drew a lot of attention. I was approached by a large
34:02NGO. They wanted me to look into cheetah trafficking in the Horn of Africa. We know that cheetah cubs
34:10are trafficked from the Horn of Africa. They end up in the Middle East, but no one is quite sure
34:15where
34:15the cheetahs come from, who's in charge, who's making money. And so I was approached by this organization
34:22to go to Ethiopia, Somaliland and Somalia. And essentially what my goal was, was to do the
34:32same thing I did in Russia. So within the first few days, I was actually able to narrow down the
34:39trade
34:39to three key markets where poachers were selling cheetahs before they crossed the sea and went into
34:49Yemen. Unfortunately, I was betrayed by someone that I trusted, which can happen. This is the reality
34:56of this work. I was arrested and deported again, unfortunately. And that's why I do pilot projects,
35:03because you don't want to invest huge sums of money if you get deported right away. Right now,
35:08I am working in Malaysia and I was approached by an individual in Malaysia who was concerned with the
35:15amount of tiger poaching and the fact that an NGO in Malaysia who should be monitoring tiger poaching
35:22was not monitoring at all. They weren't looking into it. They didn't seem to be concerned at all about it.
35:28And there's only about 100 Malay tigers left. And I went over to Malaysia at the end of last year
35:35for my pilot project. I was there for about a month. I was able to already narrow in on a
35:45couple
35:45different key aspects. One is China is very involved in the illegal logging. You'll notice a theme,
35:52illegal logging and poaching go together because illegal logging opens up the wilderness. There's two
35:58different types of poachers in Malaysia. There's the local Malay poachers that are more small scale.
36:04I interviewed a few of them and they admitted to poaching tigers. And then you have the international
36:10poachers that are coming from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand. The area I'm working is called Royal Bellum
36:19National Park. It's on the border with Thailand. And so poachers will enter the forest in the national
36:26park through the Thai border. It's very different than poaching in Russia because it's done with
36:31snares. And so that means you can place snares and you don't have to come back for weeks and weeks
36:38and
36:38weeks again because it's not for the live trade. No one cares if the tiger decomposes. I was able to
36:44get
36:44multiple people on record on my microphone saying that they were involved in tiger poaching. And so that
36:53is enough evidence that I'll be able to go back at the end of the year this year for a
36:58longer term
36:59project. This is the first time I've ever spoken publicly in such a capacity. And I have to weigh the
37:06risks with the message I want. I decided to do this interview because most of the people I'm dealing
37:13with are never gonna, they're never, they would never come across something like this. Of course,
37:17there is a risk that it could happen. I decided to do this because of the message. It's so important
37:22to me. Wildlife trafficking is not getting the attention it needs. And so I decided to do this
37:29in order to make my voice heard on a larger, on a larger stage. I need, I cannot, I cannot
37:37sleep with
37:38myself at night unless I'm doing everything I can in my power to use my platform to increase the
37:44attention of wildlife trafficking. It's that important to me.
37:52I started out my career as the type of biologist everyone wants to be. I was studying great white
37:59sharks and cheetahs and I wanted to study lions. What every little girl that dreams of conservation
38:07wants to do. I was, and I was in Zimbabwe doing my research for my masters at the University of
38:15Cape
38:15Town. And what happened was I saw poached elephants for the first time in my life. It's one thing to
38:21see them on TV and it is another to see them in person. It changed the trajectory of my life.
38:28I realized that as much as I want to study those live animals, the live lions and the live tigers,
38:33I knew that it's going to come down to people and what we decide to do with the planet. And
38:39so I
38:39switched gears completely. Like, it's funny. We all have dreams when we're little and it never works
38:46out. Like you change your mind or whatever. I've been a vegetarian since I was six. I've wanted,
38:51I saw the Lion King as a kid and I was like, oh my gosh. And that's why I lived
38:56in Africa. I had a goal.
38:58I wanted Africa. I wanted animals. I've always loved animals. And so it's really interesting
39:04that I actually study people a lot more than animals now, even though it, it might be putting
39:10like some of my dreams aside, the overall picture of seeing a more biodiverse world is what the main
39:17focus of my life's work is. And I think what I'm doing is the best avenue for, um, for securing
39:25a better
39:25future for wildlife. The illegal wildlife trade is rapid in terms of trends and how things change
39:37and evolve. And so you have things, you have animals that are always in demand, tigers, elephants, rhinos,
39:45pangolins. The demand is pretty consistent and high. What we're seeing is a decline in a lot of those
39:52species. So you have to have what you call a substitute. What we're seeing now is we're running
39:58out of tigers and they're starting to farm tigers, which you would think would help the demand. A lot
40:05of wildlife is now being farmed, but unfortunately people have a preference for wild caught. So what
40:12we're seeing is a shift since we're running out of tigers, there's a huge increase in poaching of
40:20jaguars. Their canines and claws are now being used as a substitute for tiger. Also lion bones. In South
40:28Africa, trophy hunting of lions is legal. A wealthy American comes over, kills the lion. Its head is a
40:36trophy. Its bones are now being shipped legally as a substitute for tiger bone wine. So that's what we're
40:43seeing now in the market and organized crime are, they're so good at, at seeing shifts and changes
40:52and taking advantage of that. They know that this trophy hunting is a loophole and they can get the
40:57bones exported. The live animal trade is one of the categories of demand or the main categories of demand.
41:03When I was in the Horn of Africa, cheetah cubs are being like taken from their mom and they can
41:10be
41:10sold for as much as a hundred thousand dollars as a pet. Predominantly in the UAE, like in Saudi Arabia,
41:18in the Middle East though, you have to keep the animal alive. Well, a lot of animals do die in
41:23transit. Poachers don't care, but because the animals have to be kept alive, obviously that's going to
41:29take a lot more bribes because you're smuggling them in plain sight. Unfortunately, things like
41:35TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Meta doesn't regulate the pet trade at all. They're horrible about it. My
41:42colleagues and I have petitioned many times to, to get them to change their algorithms because
41:50when you start looking at a picture of someone with like a rare parrot, like an African gray parrot,
41:56being humans as we are, see if you see it, you want it. For example, otters are now very popular
42:04in
42:04Southeast Asia and in Japan. And it started all with Instagram, people dressing up otters in these
42:10cute little outfits and boom, the demand took off like that. So social media is directly linked to,
42:17to trends and also increasing tourists and like the regular person who doesn't know it's bad,
42:24increasing their participation in this crime that's happening. So they might be an unwilling,
42:32the unwitting person. They might not know it's bad, but just by doing it, other people are seeing
42:36it, they're posting it and it just creates a bigger problem. This will surprise you, but the,
42:41the Netherlands is the largest, one of the largest bird markets in the world. And so you have,
42:47you have people who are participating in the legal wildlife trade and they don't know it.
42:52Basically what people are told is that they're buying a captive bred animal. But the reality is,
42:58is that bird, that African gray parrot did not come from a breeder in South Africa. It came from the
43:04DRC and it's a live animal, but it's, so you have a lot of consumers that actually don't know what
43:11they're doing is bad. Once you take an animal apart, um, it's really difficult to sometimes distinguish
43:21what it is or where it came from. And so someone can be buying like feathers or, um, fur and
43:29they don't
43:29necessarily know what it is or where it came from. And so you have people that absolutely know what
43:34they're doing. And those products are really expensive. You have the unwilling, unwitting
43:39tourists too, then. Um, and then there's of course, a range in between. Poaching is happening
43:45in countries where like there's corruption, um, where there's, you know, stratification,
43:54which is the difference between the wealthiest and the poorest. If you look at the most stratified
44:00countries on earth, I guarantee you that's where wildlife trafficking is occurring.
44:03You have human trafficking, you have drug trafficking, and you have wildlife trafficking,
44:08all overlapping. I would say that poachers for the most part, of course, motivations vary,
44:14but for the most part, they are doing out of desperation. So policies like the militarization
44:21of conservation, which is shoot on site policies. This is happens in South Africa. You can shoot a
44:27poacher without arresting them. I used to think that that was the solution, right? Shoot on site policies.
44:33It's the poacher. It's the poacher. And unfortunately I have a lot of shame for how I used to think.
44:39That's not the root of the problem. And it's not how you tackle the illegal wildlife trade. There's
44:43always going to be another poacher and they're doing it because they're desperate. The people that we need
44:48to focus on are demand, where the demand's coming from, and also dismantling these smuggling networks.
44:55Some solutions, in my opinion, in the short term in Russia would involve creating income for people
45:04in the Far East. Ecotourism is a good solution because it can give the local people not only jobs,
45:10but incentive to conserve wildlife. Unfortunately, in my opinion, this would not work in Russia.
45:16There's a lot of infrastructure set up for ecotourism globally in India and Africa and Central America.
45:23There's no infrastructure in the Russian Far East. There was a study done in South America that I think
45:28could be replicated in the Far East. And that is essentially an NGO paid a community. They gave
45:36them camera traps. And if the community could prove that they had jaguars in their area over time,
45:44they would get money. So that is incentivizing the local community to not only not poach jaguars,
45:51but to actually encourage them to come to the area. Long term is how do we tackle demand? That's the
45:59real problem is the demand. And that's cultural. It takes a long time to change people's hearts and
46:07minds, if you will. Traditional Chinese medicine is thousands of years old. So how do you change
46:15that overnight? Wild Aid is a really good organization that focuses on demand and they do
46:21campaigns with celebrities. For example, the basketball star Yao Ming, they did a program
46:26where he declined shark fin. They also got Jackie Chan involved saying, no, Ivory, Ivory's not cool.
46:33And if you get a big celebrity to say, don't do this, there actually was a marked decrease in shark
46:40fin consumption because of that Yao Ming commercial. And so that, Wild Aid is an amazing organization.
46:47And that is how they tackle demand. An NGO called Mongabay just wrote an article about the mental toll
46:57that people in conservation have that no one really recognizes. And we are stuck with a world that
47:04will most likely be less biodiverse by the time we pass away. And so it's overwhelming for me to think
47:13about because I'm a really empathetic person. That's why I'm in this work. And it's if I think
47:18that I'm leaving the world worse than I found it, it would ruin me. So what I do is I
47:25focus on one problem.
47:28This is one problem and I can fix and I can help this one problem. So I think that tiger
47:35populations
47:36can stabilize in my lifetime. That's my goal. That's my one problem. So I can't talk about all
47:42biodiversity because there's too many problems. I want to leave the world with more tigers than there
47:48was when I got here. And I think that my work can do that. And that's all I can focus
47:55on because it's
47:57too big.
48:04So
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48:49Hi, I'm a producer on how crime works. If you enjoyed this video, then please subscribe
48:54and comment below with more ideas of topics you'd like us to cover in this series.
49:03So
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