American helps deploy drones tonab rhino poachers in Africa

White rhinos in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The park, home to one of the oldest

rhino conservation efforts in Africa, has a large population of white rhinos, as well as rarer black rhinos.

Photo: Stephanie Bolstad/MCT

WASHINGTON — The exact location of the anti-poaching operation is secret, as

is the number of rangers who will be on duty. Also confidential: where the

drones (https://www.newsela.com/?tag=drone) will fly as they search out

poachers intent on slaying rhinos for their horns — one killed every 11 hours in

South Africa alone.

But over the next several days, Tom Snitch thinks that his project, at a private

game farm adjoining South Africa’s famed Kruger National Park, will prove that

unmanned aerial vehicles can end the scourge of rhinoceros poaching.

Demand for rhino horn has boomed in recent years, with criminal syndicates

offering as much as $30,000 a pound for the horns. Poachers already have

killed 350 rhinos in South Africa this year; last year, 668 endangered rhinos died

for their horns. They’re sold in Asia, particularly in Vietnam, where ground-up

horns are touted as a cure for hangovers, cancer and other ailments, and where

rising incomes have made the horns accessible to more people and their

By Erika Bolstad, McClatchy-Tribune on 06.02.13

Word Count 1,764

possession a status symbol. Save the Rhino International, a conservation group,

won’t talk about the street value of rhino horn, saying that any mention

“stimulates poaching.”

Snitch, who’s on the board of visitors of the College of Computer, Mathematical

and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, hopes to use predictive

technology to deploy the drones. His team will use the same software that helps

predict where terrorists might plant bombs and that recently helped nab arsonist

suspects accused of torching more than 60 houses on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Although controversial in their military use, drones have unlimited civilian

applications that many hope to deploy in the U.S. in law enforcement, farming

and other uses, pending Federal Aviation Administration approval.

In Africa, they’ll use small, hand-launched Falcon UAVs that weigh about 12

pounds and have a range of about six miles. Their mathematical modeling, as

well as their eyes in the sky, should catch rhino poachers before they act, Snitch

said. His team’s goal: Use patterns to anticipate where poachers will be, and

then quickly mobilize game wardens to intercept them. They’ll gather

information about previous events and plug it into their formula: weather

conditions, the number of poachers working when rhinos were killed, how far

they are from borders and other facts they think are helpful.

“We look at previous events,” Snitch said. “We statistically re-create the

environment of when the incident happened. Was it a full moon? No moon? Was

the wind out of the east? Was it raining? What time did it happen? What day of

the week? What else was going on?

“We start layering in this data. And then you put animal movement patterns on

top of it,” he said. “On nights where this happened, where were the rangers

deployed? Where do we think these people came from?”

Wildlife groups say they’re eager to deploy the technology to combat poachers,

and not merely to “document the demise of nature,” said Carter Roberts, the

president of the World Wildlife Fund. “We’re not winning this battle,” Roberts

said recently at a conference in Washington that looked at the civilian use of

drones. “It’s become a huge crisis, and the bad guys are extremely

sophisticated. They have night-vision goggles. They’ve got helicopters. They

have all kinds of funding and resources, and we need to up our game to combat

what we’re dealing with.”

The wildlife conservation group recently received a $5 million grant from

Google’s foundation to help the Namibian government use a drone to help catch

poachers there. Roberts, who was in Nepal recently to relocate and tag rare

tigers, said it was dispiriting to place $10,000 radio collars on the animals and

then to learn they’ve disappear at the hands of poachers. Drones could have

helped, he said.

“There’s got to be a way to have real-time data on the animals, real-time data on

the poachers and then a software system that enables us to mobilize people to

get to the right place at the right time,” Roberts said.

Top-secret U.S. drone operations have killed thousands of suspected terrorists

in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, and the Obama administration hasn’t been

forthcoming with the legal basis of its targeted killing program. But few people

question the utility of drones in catching poachers in wilderness areas. Not only

are there few privacy concerns in these areas, but they’ve also been ravaged in

recent years by the demand for rhino horns.

One week earlier this month, South Africa lost 13 rhinos in Kruger National Park.

Two poaching suspects were arrested and one was wounded in a shootout with

rangers, who found a .458 hunting rifle, a silencer, ammunition and an ax and

knife.

The criminal syndicates have even tempted some of the people whose job it is

to protect rhinos. In neighboring Mozambique, investigators think that rangers

helped poachers kill all the rhinos in the section of the park that borders South

Africa. Mozambique is widely considered the entry point for many of the

poachers who enter South Africa.

Snitch calls his project a modest one, fueled mostly by his longtime interest in

Africa. He helped get his team to Africa with frequent flier miles, and he handled

the export permits required for drone demonstration himself.

He and his wife have visited South Africa repeatedly over the years, spending

most of their time in remote, primitive camps where they can hike through parks

with guides for up-close views of elephants, rhinos, cheetahs and other wildlife.

As poaching swept South Africa’s rhino populations in recent years, Snitch

wondered what he could do to help.

He’s also affiliated with DigitalGlobe, a company that specializes in using

satellite imagery and data to solve problems. So he thought he might be able to

use mapping knowledge to help crack the poaching problem.

He hopes that his work with drones at a private reserve will persuade the South

African government to use the technology in its public parks.

“As soon as we demonstrate this, I believe the South African parks will come

and say, ‘OK, you took the risk. You showed it can work. Now we want to get

involved,’ ” he said.

Helping African governments catch poachers also is a big deal to U.S.

authorities, who awarded $10 million in grants from 2011 to 2012 to support

such efforts across the continent. That money was matched by $13 million from

other sources, including conservation organizations and African governments,

and went to 122 projects in 25 African countries.

Some of the grant money from the United States comes from seizing the assets

of people who’ve been caught buying and selling rhino horns in the United

States. On May 15, a federal judge in Los Angeles sentenced two California

businessmen, Vinh Chung “Jimmy” Kha and Felix Kha, as part of the U.S. Fish

and Wildlife Service-led “Operation Crash.” (A crash is a group of rhinos.) The

investigation netted 14 people in the United States who are accused of buying

and selling rhino horn for markets in Vietnam and other Asian countries.

The forfeited assets include $800,000 in cash, gold, jewelry and precious

stones that will be turned over to the Multinational Species Conservation Fund,

said Dan Ashe, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service.

“Rhinos in Africa are being poached to the brink of extinction because of the

demand for rhino horn,” Ashe said after the sentencing. “It’s only fitting that the

ill-gotten gains of rhino horn traffickers be used to protect those animals that

remain in the wild.”

U.S. officials who oversee work in the region are concerned in particular about

unrest in the Central African Republic, where the forest elephant population

faces a threat from rebel groups. They’d love to get in there to see what’s going

on, but the remote region is unsafe and nearly inaccessible, said Richard

Ruggiero, the chief of the Near East, South Asia and Africa branch of the Fish

and Wildlife Service’s Division of International Conservation. Drones, he said,

would be ideal to shed light on the scope of the problem.

“It would be a perfect application,” he said.

Conservation groups also are targeting demand for the product, which is a more

puzzling problem, said Matt Lewis, an African species expert for the World

Wildlife Fund. One ad campaign in Vietnam pictures a rhino with human feet

growing where its horn should be. In an effort to disgust people, the campaign

emphasizes that rhino horn is made of keratin, the same ingredient as human

fingernails. One private game reserve in South Africa is injecting the horns of its

rhinos with pink dye and a poison that’s safe for the rhinos but dangerous to

anyone who grinds it up and consumes it.

In South Africa, there’s a campaign to paint rhino poaching as deplorable and

protection of the species as a patriotic duty. Billboards near many parks show

gruesome images of slain rhinos, and arrests are up.

Although many of the parks have poor cellphone reception, people driving

through the parks often try to post on Twitter to alert fellow visitors to spectacular

sightings. Everyone is willing to share cheetah and wild dog sightings, and they

happily post the coordinates for roaming herds of elephants they’ve spotted.

The exception is the rhino: No one tweets about seeing them for fear of alerting

poachers to their whereabouts.

There’s something majestic and ancient about rhinos, conservationists say, and

they’ve worked hard to restore populations that nearly went extinct a century

ago.

“We don’t want it to be on our shoulders, to be the ones responsible for the

extinction of a species that’s been on Earth for millions of years,” Lewis said. “I

think we should just pull out all stops and say this cannot happen on our watch,

and we cannot let rhinos go extinct. We cannot be the ones to let that happen.”

U.S. Involvement

The United States spends about $10 million annually helping governments in

Africa fight poaching.

Projects the U.S. government supports include programs to deter poaching of

leatherback sea turtle eggs in Equatorial Guinea and to monitor elephants in

some of the most remote parts of Africa. That support includes a $75,000 grant

that helped the Democratic Republic of the Congo develop a bloodhound unit to

help track poachers in Virunga National Park.

In Kenya and Namibia, $25,000 in U.S. money supports better training in crime

investigation aimed at improving the conviction rates for rhino poaching. Money

also goes toward fitting rhinos in Namibia with tracking devices, and the

continued aerial surveillance of one of the biggest rhino populations on the

continent, in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park in South Africa.