American helps deploy drones to nabrhino 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 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.”

By Erika Bolstad, McClatchy-Tribune on 06.03.13

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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.

Quiz

1 Which of the following provides an edge to poachers over government officials?

(A) availability of real-time data on the location of rhinos and rangers

(B) availability of all possible funds and resources needed by them

(C) availability of latest technology tools that help evade rangers

(D) illegal use of drones to track the exact location of rhinos

2 All of the following are reasons for an increase in the poaching of rhinos EXCEPT:

(A) an increase in the street value of rhino horns

(B) lack of funds to put a stop to poaching

(C) increasing popularity and demand of rhino horns in Vietnam

(D) rising incomes have made the horns accessible to more people

3 The article explains the use of drones to track poachers by:

(A) providing a detailed description

(B) stating two sides of an argument

(C) including advice from experts

(D) sharing research data

4 The article draws connection between:

(A) forest elephant population and $10 million in grants

(B) hand-launched Falcon UAVs and rhino poachers

(C) DigitalGlobe and Kruger National Park

(D) Tom Snitch and World Wildlife Fund

Answer Key

1 Which of the following provides an edge to poachers over government officials?

(A) availability of real-time data on the location of rhinos and rangers

(B) availability of all possible funds and resources needed by them

(C) availability of latest technology tools that help evade rangers

(D) illegal use of drones to track the exact location of rhinos

2 All of the following are reasons for an increase in the poaching of rhinos EXCEPT:

(A) an increase in the street value of rhino horns

(B) lack of funds to put a stop to poaching

(C) increasing popularity and demand of rhino horns in Vietnam

(D) rising incomes have made the horns accessible to more people

3 The article explains the use of drones to track poachers by:

(A) providing a detailed description

(B) stating two sides of an argument

(C) including advice from experts

(D) sharing research data

4 The article draws connection between:

(A) forest elephant population and $10 million in grants

(B) hand-launched Falcon UAVs and rhino poachers

(C) DigitalGlobe and Kruger National Park

(D) Tom Snitch and World Wildlife Fund