The Harland Highway - PREMIUM MEMBERS ONLY - More AFRICAN anti poaching talk with a Q&A session.

Episode Date: June 21, 2017

If you enjoyed hearing from the Anti Poaching organization you will enjoy this candid Q & A session with CEO Damien Mender Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, premium members, thank you for being premium members, first and foremost. God bless you, angels. I hope you're enjoying the premium membership, listening to all the archived episodes of the Harlan Highway, and these bonus segments that I put up from time to time. As I mentioned in my podcast regarding the International Anti-Poaching Foundation, a foundation that serves to protect all the animals in Africa from these horrible poachers and sending them over the brink into extinction. I have some more of the conversation that was given when I attended a function

for the International Anti-Poaching Foundation. the founder and CEO Damien Mander at the end of his presentation took a Q&A session from people in the crowd. And this is about 12, 13 minutes long, but I thought you guys who are interested might like to hear how you can get involved, how you can make a difference, and just hear some of the questions and concerns from people that were there and hear Daniel's answers, or Damien's answers. Here's some more of his stories and just kind of be a little more in tune with this incredible cause which I urge you all to donate to.

The website is www. I-A-P-F-org. So have a listen. I hope you enjoy and thanks for being premium members. Here's Damien Mander. And then look,

you know, we also have A 12-year-old kid, he came out and spent some time in Africa recently, saw that it was a problem, went home, and I thought, shit, I'm going to write a book, and he wrote a book, a children's book, and he had it published that's now in stores around Australia and selling it, he's putting the money back into conservation. I thought, that's initiative from a 12-year-old kid. So there's ways that we can get involved, and, you know, I think sometimes you're just going to go and see it up close before you can, or learn as much as possible, before you can decide how

you're going to be a positive part of a solution. funding is always a big one, something that I hate asking for and I'm terrible at. Yeah, my specialty is counter-insurgency warfare, not fundraising. Maybe I could combine the two. That's what we're here for.

At times the bank throws, yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I mean, fundraising is fantastic. We also have a program called the Green Army, where we have people from around the world that come and spend time out there on the front lines with our rangers. patrolling, helping around the camp, teaching or imparting various skills with the rangers.

That's a two-way street. People get to see Africa, not from the back of a Jeep, drinking gin and tonic, but they get to see it on foot up close and helping the animals at the same time. The other side of that street is rangers who sometimes think what they do is a thankless task because they're out there in such remote areas. They understand that people from around the world give a ship and they're willing to come over and spend time patrolling with them on the front lines. and you know so that's i mean you can get on our website just have a look at green army

and uh yeah if anyone wants to come out it's it's great we've got fantastic indemnity forms we've only lost about 20 people uh it's been it's been really good it's run by really good people correct uh yeah out there on the front lines who are extremely plugged into nature and how things run out there yes i want to know what you do when you actually find him next question what do we do when we find the poachers okay so in a lot of the countries we operate there is a shoot-on-site policy for armed poachers

so if we see someone about to hurt an animal we are allowed to engage however what we've done as an organisation not you know having us beyond stand in public forum and justify our existence is not being some vigilante force

operating out there in Africa you know we work in conjunction with the governments and the laws of the policies of the country where we operate We've stepped back from a shoot-on-type policy and we've trained our rangers to a point where they are able to use the minimum amount of force required to get the job done,

correct escalation of the use of force. It's like any Western law enforcement model except for the one here in America. It doesn't mean that ranges cannot use lethal force in the first instance if they need to preserve life. But what we want to do is we want to get them alive. We want to get the information out of them.

want to have correct evidence collection, crime scene preservation, preparation of the prosecution. Then you'll have an example we had in Zimbabwe, a landmark case at the time, 37 and a half a year sentence for rhino poachers before they got to the rhino. How long do they stay in jail? It depends on the judge, depends on the sentence. African jails are not friendly places. HIV, tuberculosis, hepatitis. seems to roam around those corridors.

So, yeah, at the same time, a lot of the syndicates that we operate with have some of the best lawyers that they employ and get these people out. It's frustrating for us sometimes when people go into jail on the Friday, they're back out on the Monday, but we just got to keep hitting it and hitting it. If the stats weren't showing us

that the problem was dropping in the areas that we're working, even though some of the poachers come in and come back out, then we'd pack up and go home. But the fact is, there's not, just an elephant and rhinos, these are the hardest animals to protect. So when we're protecting them, everything else in that ecosystem is being looked after. The birds, the bees, the flowers, the trees. There's millions of other little creatures that get to live out there and live out their lives in a happy way because the rangers are protecting them. And when the elephants and

the rhinos go, the tourists stop coming, where the tourists stop coming, the funding stops coming in for the anti-poaching units. The fences come down, all the other animals get poached, the trees get chopped down you have desertification and so that's what these ranges are helping to do it's not just elephant and rhino these are just the hardest animals because of their the value of their tusk or horn yes i keep seeing that handguard i'll get to it sorry no it's all right no it's all right no yes we do uh we certainly do uh different NGOs in different countries where we operate um yeah it's it's it's it's it's There's too many other players over there doing various things that we need to be a part of

to try to ignore other initiatives. And as I said, we very niche in what we do. We go to areas as an organisation where high target species are being hit by organised crime that is paramilitary tactics. That's a very sort of niche capability. So we're not very good at the community stuff because that's not what we aim to be good at. We're not very good at demand reduction because we don't, we're not a market. marketing team so what we do is we partner with organizations that specialize as

much in that as what we specialize in what we do and that allows you know people just to focus on being really good of what they do you know in the beginning I was trying to build this organization that would appeal to everybody and you know a little bit of this little bit of that and then so we're doing like 20 things in a mediocre way and I thought I'd rather be good at three or four things than try and be mediocre at 20 things and Yes, it's been working out very well, actually. So I would love to hear your thoughts on the legalization of farming rhino horns?

I can give you my thoughts, even though it's above my pay grade. It's a cop-out. Look, I don't know. I think the argument for trade is as good as the argument against trade in Rhinohorn. We don't know if we don't have a crystal ball to tell us that if we start traded in Rine. I started trading in rhino horn if it's going to flood the market and drop that exclusivity away from this product that has been in the traditional Vietnamese traditional Chinese market for thousands of years. For those of you that don't know, you can take the horn or cut the horn off a rhino without that animal dying. It's made up of keratin.

Same thing as a fingernail. And if you cut it just above the nerve, that horn will keep regrowing. Now, poachers want the whole thing. That's why they kill the rhino so they can cut out the rino. so they can cut out the whole face. Now, there's been previous examples in Vietnam of deer out of wine, soft-shell tortoise, barebile. It used to be very exclusive in what is a growing economic superpower in Southeast Asia where people don't generally travel outside of the country a lot.

They stay at home, where they speak their own language. They spend a rising disposable income on consumer-related goods. And we call it a Ferrari syndrome where nobody has it. everybody wants it. It's this nice shiny thing. So we don't know if flooding the market is going to drop that exclusivity off, as it did with those other products I mentioned, or if it's actually going to reinvigorate something that we can't meet the demand of. Right now I know that the most effective way to protect these animals

is out there in the bush on the front lines. I think what we've done is going to the hardest place on the planet for a rhino to exist in Mozambique where they were declared extinct in 2013 and they now re-exist back in that country. We've gone in with a relatively cheap formula in the big scheme of things. There's less than a million dollars a year, and we've secured that area to a fairly large extent without having to open up an international trade in Rhinoborn. So it's demonstrated that this thing can be gotten on top of if we get the systems right on the ground.

I don't think people are as scared of an international trade in Rhinan as they are scared of corruption, which is what we know is going to be fed into that system if it's not run correctly if and when it eventually does get off the ground. Does that answer the question? We're a good time for one or two more. Can I just ask? One more, one more.

Last one, make it good. So right at the moment, I've heard that IAPF, any donations being made on IAPF.org are being matched. Can you tell us until when and why and how? Just so everyone knows. We get a bunch of donors that are matching donations, a small group of donors that are matching donations up to a total value of $140,000

to about the 16th of this month, actually. Excellent. Everyone knows. I just finished with the story, just to give you guys a bit of an idea of how dangerous it is out there on the front line. So a few years ago, we're doing a show with 60 minutes, and filming in NIASA, which is one of the most remote places on the continent.

Nyasa National Reserve is 42,000 square kilometres. It's the size of Denmark. It's a 12-hour drive from the nearest town to where we were. We're doing a story on using drones to protect elephants. And on top of one of these big Inselbergs, like a rock formation, we're driving back down on sunset. Now, Mozambique has a snake there, a deadly snake called the Mozambique Spitting Cobra,

or the sniper copra it's nicknamed because it spits deadly venom at your face from nine feet away so I'm driving down now off the top of one of these Inselbergs this is the money shot on sunset so I'm in like a jeep

so it's got no windshield it's got no doors no roof and that's just this open shell of a car I'm driving down sleeves are rolled up too much a little bit of a Chuck Norris that a magnum PI thing going on producers loving it suns setting there and then on camera I get spat all in the face

and I start squealing and carrying on I can't remember if I mention the word mother or mum but I was basically behaving in a way that you would not expect to perform a special operation not an Australian one anyway and you know the guys are tipping water in there and it's getting worse and worse and worse and I'm contemplating not only life without vision

but you know perhaps I'm going to die out here because we're so far from any hell and I'm squirming around and Derek's looking at me he's like you know you should be going into shock or something by now what's wrong don't know this is a is this a miracle or is there something else here that we've missed and then I can eventually you know through the grimacing pain I can start looking around and trying to piece together what's happened

and of course nobody had found this snake yet and we figured out what had happened is I was paying too much attention to my reflection in the river vision mirror for the cameraman that was on the bonnet that I'm coming down over all these broken shale and rocks I bumped the windshield wipers and they spat up water in my eyes and I thought it was a spitting cobra it was very embarrassing actually having to plead with the cameraman to not put this in into the final edit of this 60-minute show that's going to go out to millions of people but he did

We did a handshake agreement somewhere in the 60 Minutes archives is the footage of me squealing like a little schoolgirl and they still call me the windscreen viper. Thank you very much, guys. Thank you, guys. We're scared. I have a blight. So, da.

you go gang i hope you enjoyed that i hope you found that informative and just keep in mind that this is a man that that uh you know helping to keep species of animals alive and existing in our world today he's putting his life on his line the people that do this work are putting their life on the line and it's very important work so that that we may have these incredible creatures with us through perpetuity as we continue to move along as a planet, as a human race, as a race that shares the planet with so many other incredible, beautiful species. And we all need to coexist to get along and survive.

So I hope you enjoy that bonus Q&A session from Damien Mander. He is the founder and CEO of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation. As he said, you can go and join. them, go on safari with them, go and work with them, or think of a creative way like create a children's book or whatever to help raise money for the foundation, or you can just go on the website, IAPF.org, and make a donation. A cash donation helps their cause. You could send $20 and be out of it. You could send $1,000. You can click a button where they can, you can send them money every single month automatically.

But hopefully you'll find it in your heart to help this important cause. And thank you for being a premium member. Thank you for listening. And we'll catch you back at the main podcast. Until then, let's all protect the critters on the planet that we share it with. And until then, chicken. Chow main, baby.