She stares at the image as the truck she’s rid-
ing in bounces over the rutted road. The cat’s
neck is slashed and its bloody paws hang slack.
“Before this job, I didn’t think about the ani-
mals,” she says.
Now Kumire, 33, and her all-female wildlife
ranger team, the Akashinga, are among the ani-
mals’ fiercest protectors. The rangers are an arm
of the nonprofit International Anti-Poaching
Foundation, which manages Zimbabwe’s Phund-
undu Wildlife Area, a 115-square-mile former
trophy hunting tract in the Zambezi Valley eco-
system. The greater region has lost thousands of
Mander, a former
Australian special forces
soldier who has trained
game rangers in Africa
for more than a decade,
leads the women
through hand-to-hand
combat exercises. After
years of training male
rangers, Mander con-
cluded that women
are often better suited
for the job. He says
they’re more adept at
de-escalating violent
situations and less sus-
ceptible to bribery.
30
30
0 mi
0 km
ZAMBIA
ZIMBABWE
PHUNDUNDU
WILDLIFE
AREA
MANA POOLS
NATIONAL PARK
MATUSADONA
NATIONAL PARK
AKASHINGA
BASE
Kaf
ue Zam
bez
i^
L
ak
e^
K
ariba
AREA
ENLARGED
AFRICA
ZIMBABWE
KATIE ARMSTRONG, NGM STAFF
SOURCE: INTERNATIONAL ANTI-POACHING FOUNDATION
Sgt. Vimbai
Kumire holds
up a photo of
a dead leopard
on her phone.
WILDLIFE WATCH
The nonprofit National
Geographic Society
helped fund this story.
To read more reporting
about wildlife crime, visit
natgeo.com/wildlife-watch.