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The author is Executive Director, Wildlife
Trust of India and Senior Advisor to the
President, IFAW.nature conservation, I could aff ord to dial up memories of
the past and say: “Not surprised!”
Not to say that I had seen them before, these dried
reptilian jewels being touted as a panacea to the gullible. But
not to be surprised by anything new was one of fi ve major
lessons taught to me in the business of unravelling wildlife
crime. Come to think of it, there are small stories behind all of
them, so here goes.
In the early 90s, the legendary American wildlife guru
George Schaller wrote to Ashok and me about hundreds of
Tibetan antelope being massacred on the Tibetan plateau.
Their wool, he told us, was being smuggled into India. “What
would we do with the wool of an antelope?” we conferred.
Nada. It could not be. We wrote back, foolishly, asking
whether he was sure that the wool was coming into India, for
there could be no earthly use for antelope wool in India. We
know now that this was shahtoosh, used by Kashmiri weavers
to craft the world’s most expensive shawls, but those were
the days when people believed that shahtoosh was the wool
of some high altitude goat. Lesson No. 1: Never be cocksure
about what is traded in the underworld of wildlife crime.
And when you learn of it, never be surprised.
Cut to a few years later. Undercover in a stifl ing basement
in Yashwant Place market, Delhi, with a Spanish WWF
colleague who was using his Hispanic descent and passport
to open doors that were usually closed to Indians. He was
the tourist looking to buy an expensive fur coat for his
girlfriend, I was the tour guide. Deep in the bowels of the
market the goods were unwrapped. A snow leopard coat:
15,000 dollars, the quoted price. The undercover agent had
to seal the deal now. But he was hot and bothered. Without a
thought he took off his black faux-leather jacket, revealing in
all its telltale glory a white WWF T-shirt with a snow leopard
and the words ‘Save Snow Leopards’ emblazoned on it. I am
unsure how we managed to get out of that basement but we
learnt Lesson No. 2: Concentrate on the small details. For in
the world of busting crime, you rarely get second chances.
The third lesson was learnt deep in the southern jungles
‘buying’ ivory from a poacher and his middlemen. After
vouchsafi ng that the ivory was genuine, the signal for the
back-up team to arrive was given. There were four criminals
in the dark shack and I was the only one with them. The
three others in my team were in a jeep supposedly counting
the money for the ivory and only one was armed. Suddenly
the sound of a jeep approaching could be heard. My back-up,
surely. I led the poachers out to receive their payment. The
jeep arrived on cue but it wasn’t the required armed support
- it was a media crew brandishing a video camera. He had
overtaken the enforcement team to get his shot head-on.
“What the hell is going on?” I shouted before I could be asked
the same question by the poachers, swinging at the nearest
man. The drama caught them by surprise for just enough
time for the real back-up vehicle to arrive. But it was a close
shave. Lesson No. 3: Keep the media well away when doing
undercover work. It is just not worth it in the fi nal analysis.
Lesson four was learnt in multiple exposures. On the
Burmese border looking out for a key rhino horn buyer,
I sat watching a group of tough-looking men drink and
brawl and bicker over their women. Which one could it be,
I wondered? The toughest-looking one, or the one with all
the money, or the other one dealing cards insouciantly, with
an air of inherited intelligence that the other two clearly
didn’t possess? I waited and watched for two weeks while a
peanut vendor crossed the border daily with his push cart
and possibly a cargo of rhino horn. Lesson No. 4: Never go
by appearances. No one in this business looks like their real
self. Even I, after all, was not who I was taken to be.
Finally, Lesson No. 5: Never put down money. Something
I learnt not from personal experience but from the tales
of others. It is a great temptation to leave an amount for
promised wildlife deliveries, but ever so often the money
is used to procure goods that were till then still alive.
Two instances, once of a leopard and another time of musk
deer killed for people who put down money in their haste
to get a seizure, come to mind. Ashok was crystal clear in
that teaching. All the show money carried by us was a layer
of notes covering Hindustan Times clippings in a brown
duff el bag.
There are more lessons and many, many more stories. But
for that I must write a fi lm script. This we must end
here, with the added note that the weirdest thing
I have ever seen is a live monkey de-scalped and
with its skull cut away, for a cancer patient to
dip into the bloody cranium and eat its brains.
Wildlife crime is a cruel, wanton waste of life
and the fi ght against it is a moral, legal and
ecological necessity of our times. Eeeemust end
st thing
ed and
t to
ains.
fe
dB. C. C
HOU
DHURYABOVE The author with an elephant tusk, part of a larger cache of
ivory seized during an operation conducted in September 2002.
FACING PAGE An ivory-processing unit in Japan that the author came
across during a wildlife crime control operation in 1997.WTI