Washington Hunter
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Monday, January 1, 2007 - 12:00 AM
Anti-poaching work pays off, UW prof shows
By Sandi Doughton
Seattle Times staff reporter
Africa's Serengeti National Park seems an unlikely place for a salmon biologist from Seattle.
But Ray Hilborn has found a way to combine his marine expertise with a passion for wildebeests, elephants and other creatures that roam the famous wildlife preserve.
Using a method to estimate abundance of fish stocks, Hilborn and an international group of colleagues recently helped settle a controversy that has long dogged anti-poaching efforts in Africa's protected areas.
Some critics argue that the $2 million Serengeti National Park spends each year on patrols to catch illegal hunters has been a waste of money. They point to statistics that show the number of arrests is going up, not falling.
"They say poaching is terrible. Hundreds of thousands of animals are being taken," said Hilborn, a professor of aquatic and fishery science at the University of Washington. "They're wrong."
His analysis, published in November in the journal Science, found the patrols have been highly effective at reducing the losses of buffalo, elephants and black rhinos killed by poachers.
"The probability of a poacher getting caught now is very high," Hilborn said, in an interview in his UW office.
To prove the point, the team sifted through records at the park going back to 1957, when ranger patrols started. Since it's impossible to directly measure the level of poaching, they did it indirectly, by calculating the amount of time and effort required to catch a poacher.
The assumption behind the approach is one that fisheries managers have used for decades: The longer fishermen have to work to land their quota, the less abundant the fish they're targeting.
Hilborn and his colleagues discovered it takes a lot more effort to catch a poacher today than it did 30 years ago. The number of arrests is climbing only because each day the park now fields up to 10 patrols made up of well-trained, well-equipped rangers who get bonuses based on the number of poachers they nab.
Aerial surveys also show that wildlife populations have rebounded as anti-poaching patrols increased.
"In a very pragmatic sense, this helps us estimate the return on the dollar invested in enforcement," said co-author Peter Arcese, a wildlife ecologist at the University of British Columbia.
Modern poachers range from teenage boys, learning to hunt, to organized rings that sell bush meat as far away as New York City. Snares are the poachers' method of choice, using wire extracted from steel-belted radial tires. Looped and hung from small trees, the snares trap wildebeests, antelope and even leopards.
Illegal hunting in the Serengeti soared in the late 1970s and 1980s, after Tanzania closed its borders and the nation's economy collapsed. Park rangers went without pay for months. There was little gasoline and no money to repair Land Rovers. Emboldened poachers constructed windrows of brush to funnel animals into snares.
Rhinos were nearly wiped out in the park, and elephant numbers plummeted as a result of unchecked trophy-hunting.
During those tumultuous years, Arcese and fellow scientists once were attacked by bandits who mistakenly believed they were prospecting for gold. "We were able to barricade ourselves in the house, and they finally left," he said.
To reconstruct the 50-year history of anti-poaching efforts for their study, Hilborn, Arcese and their colleagues combed through park archives. In the chief warden's office, they found a poster that logged basic data on patrols and arrests dating to the 1950s. They pored over rangers' handwritten logbooks. Hilborn's wife searched a stack of files 10 feet high to extract a few details on how much fuel the patrols used and how many Land Rovers they had.
The researchers visited the park's armory, where the warden pulled out a footlong key to open the heavy metal doors. Inside was a rack of AK-47s, carefully secured in a country where firearms are rare. About 50 elephant tusks, confiscated from poachers, were stacked against the wall.
Wooden crates held radio logs from the 1950s and 1960s, which yielded a few bits of additional information.
The study results have cheered wildlife-park officials across Africa, Hilborn said.
"Everybody involved in anti-poaching has really been trying to make the case it works, but there hadn't been much evidence."
The data will help in the ongoing debate over management of the parks, said Kent Redford, director of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society Institute.
"I think it's extremely important that the conservation community begin to actually document the efficacy of many of the things we have stated as fact but never proven," he said.
Critics of enforcement say the money spent on anti-poaching patrols would be better invested in local communities, boosting residents out of poverty and giving them a stake in protecting wildlife.
"Part of the conversation about enforcement has also been whether it is ethically correct to impose no-hunting restrictions on people who might have been hunting historically in these areas for hundreds or even thousands of years," Arcese said.
Since 2000, Serengeti National Park has spent about $100,000 a year on community-development projects, from schools to insecticide dips for cattle herds.
Expanding those efforts is a good idea, Arcese said, but the new study shows it's important not to scale back enforcement.
"We need to win the support of people outside the park and convince them of the long-term value of animal protection," he said. "And we also need to deal with the people who just don't play by the rules."
Sandi Doughton: 206-464-2491 or [email protected]
Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company
Anti-poaching work pays off, UW prof shows
By Sandi Doughton
Seattle Times staff reporter
Africa's Serengeti National Park seems an unlikely place for a salmon biologist from Seattle.
But Ray Hilborn has found a way to combine his marine expertise with a passion for wildebeests, elephants and other creatures that roam the famous wildlife preserve.
Using a method to estimate abundance of fish stocks, Hilborn and an international group of colleagues recently helped settle a controversy that has long dogged anti-poaching efforts in Africa's protected areas.
Some critics argue that the $2 million Serengeti National Park spends each year on patrols to catch illegal hunters has been a waste of money. They point to statistics that show the number of arrests is going up, not falling.
"They say poaching is terrible. Hundreds of thousands of animals are being taken," said Hilborn, a professor of aquatic and fishery science at the University of Washington. "They're wrong."
His analysis, published in November in the journal Science, found the patrols have been highly effective at reducing the losses of buffalo, elephants and black rhinos killed by poachers.
"The probability of a poacher getting caught now is very high," Hilborn said, in an interview in his UW office.
To prove the point, the team sifted through records at the park going back to 1957, when ranger patrols started. Since it's impossible to directly measure the level of poaching, they did it indirectly, by calculating the amount of time and effort required to catch a poacher.
The assumption behind the approach is one that fisheries managers have used for decades: The longer fishermen have to work to land their quota, the less abundant the fish they're targeting.
Hilborn and his colleagues discovered it takes a lot more effort to catch a poacher today than it did 30 years ago. The number of arrests is climbing only because each day the park now fields up to 10 patrols made up of well-trained, well-equipped rangers who get bonuses based on the number of poachers they nab.
Aerial surveys also show that wildlife populations have rebounded as anti-poaching patrols increased.
"In a very pragmatic sense, this helps us estimate the return on the dollar invested in enforcement," said co-author Peter Arcese, a wildlife ecologist at the University of British Columbia.
Modern poachers range from teenage boys, learning to hunt, to organized rings that sell bush meat as far away as New York City. Snares are the poachers' method of choice, using wire extracted from steel-belted radial tires. Looped and hung from small trees, the snares trap wildebeests, antelope and even leopards.
Illegal hunting in the Serengeti soared in the late 1970s and 1980s, after Tanzania closed its borders and the nation's economy collapsed. Park rangers went without pay for months. There was little gasoline and no money to repair Land Rovers. Emboldened poachers constructed windrows of brush to funnel animals into snares.
Rhinos were nearly wiped out in the park, and elephant numbers plummeted as a result of unchecked trophy-hunting.
During those tumultuous years, Arcese and fellow scientists once were attacked by bandits who mistakenly believed they were prospecting for gold. "We were able to barricade ourselves in the house, and they finally left," he said.
To reconstruct the 50-year history of anti-poaching efforts for their study, Hilborn, Arcese and their colleagues combed through park archives. In the chief warden's office, they found a poster that logged basic data on patrols and arrests dating to the 1950s. They pored over rangers' handwritten logbooks. Hilborn's wife searched a stack of files 10 feet high to extract a few details on how much fuel the patrols used and how many Land Rovers they had.
The researchers visited the park's armory, where the warden pulled out a footlong key to open the heavy metal doors. Inside was a rack of AK-47s, carefully secured in a country where firearms are rare. About 50 elephant tusks, confiscated from poachers, were stacked against the wall.
Wooden crates held radio logs from the 1950s and 1960s, which yielded a few bits of additional information.
The study results have cheered wildlife-park officials across Africa, Hilborn said.
"Everybody involved in anti-poaching has really been trying to make the case it works, but there hadn't been much evidence."
The data will help in the ongoing debate over management of the parks, said Kent Redford, director of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society Institute.
"I think it's extremely important that the conservation community begin to actually document the efficacy of many of the things we have stated as fact but never proven," he said.
Critics of enforcement say the money spent on anti-poaching patrols would be better invested in local communities, boosting residents out of poverty and giving them a stake in protecting wildlife.
"Part of the conversation about enforcement has also been whether it is ethically correct to impose no-hunting restrictions on people who might have been hunting historically in these areas for hundreds or even thousands of years," Arcese said.
Since 2000, Serengeti National Park has spent about $100,000 a year on community-development projects, from schools to insecticide dips for cattle herds.
Expanding those efforts is a good idea, Arcese said, but the new study shows it's important not to scale back enforcement.
"We need to win the support of people outside the park and convince them of the long-term value of animal protection," he said. "And we also need to deal with the people who just don't play by the rules."
Sandi Doughton: 206-464-2491 or [email protected]
Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company
