Bryan Christy: Bringing wildlife crime to a global audience

Bobo the Tiger had escaped from this Tarzan wannabe in Florida [in 2004]. I thought, “Huh, why don’t I go down and try to find the tiger before anyone else does?” I pitched it to Playboy and they said, “Okay, we’re interested.” Just as I was leaving, they shot Bobo. But my car was packed already, so I went to Florida anyway. On my way down, I got a call from a news editor at Playboy who said, “I hear you’re doing a story for us on illegal wildlife.” I said, “Uh, yes.”

As I started looking into writing in the wildlife exploitation or crime space, I discovered it was more advocacy than accuracy. The level of journalism was pretty poor and I thought, “I can definitely do better than this.”

It’s not just the journalism. It’s the way we speak about wildlife. Think about the list of human crimes we recognize versus the single word “poaching.”  We recognize the difference between a killing and mass killing. We say murder and genocide. We make no distinctions with animals. We say poaching whether it’s hunting a deer out of season, catching a live Pine Barrens tree frog or extinction.

Because the victims are silent, all the big advocates in the wildlife space get to say whatever they want. So the big voices, a lot of the time, aren’t police. They aren’t federal agencies, the way you have for drugs or human trafficking or arms trafficking.

In the wildlife space you have the Fish and Wildlife Service, but the much stronger, more powerful voices are NGOs. They can really say whatever they like without fear of criticism from anyone but another NGO — and they have. So we have had, historically, a very distorted view of how big the problem is, what the problem is, and we’ve had very limited inquiry into who actually is the problem.

One impossible goal is to get [NGO’s] to cooperate. We have NASCAR species out there — the elephant, the tiger, the rhino. NGOs cover these animals with their stickers as if they were race cars they were sponsoring. Nobody wants to be a little sticker on the gas cap. As a result, you get a competition for resources. In an ideal world, we would have NGO’s being much more efficient in terms of saying, “Okay, we do this best, but you do that best,” and working together better.

There are species that we could look at: the pangolin, that’s the poster child for over-exploited, unreported. It’s not a charismatic pin-up model, and ugly things definitely need more attention. Beyond wildlife, timber needs more attention, and that story needs to be framed in terms of organized crime. The quick response to timber is, “Well, these are trees, and trees don’t make for a very great victim.”

Environmental journalism has been victim-based storytelling, and victim-based storytelling never goes very far. The journalism needs to move to villain-based stories. I think these stories need to focus more on the people than the animals. Instead of feeling sad, people should feel mad.

I don’t get very much or any remorse. But everybody creates their own life myth or their own value system. So one of the things I try to do, and it takes me maybe triple the time it would otherwise take me, is to get the perspective of the other guy, of the trafficker or the collector of the illicit substance. In general, they have a very rational view of the world.

So, if they are a trafficker of endangered species, their responses can include: “If I don’t do it, somebody else will.” “I’m not the one who made them endangered. My marginal impact is tiny compared to whatever industrial process ruined their habitat, and that is on the shoulders more often than not of the people complaining about me. The same people who want their teak pool furniture are the ones who cut down the forests in Madagascar that made this chameleon rare. Why should I be penalized for them?”

I had one big trafficker say to me, “We’re all going to be extinct one day.” And, if you really extend that far enough, I get that too.

Corruption is the biggest enabler worldwide. You have to identify the individuals who are enabling the trafficking of these animals. Either name them or name their department or show the “but-for” relationship to criminals. So, “But for the inaction of this department, this would not be possible.”

In some cases, you don’t have to name the individual, but that “but-for” test can get you pretty far, in terms of saying, “All right, maybe it’s not you. Maybe I haven’t proved it’s you. But you’re in charge of stopping it, so you’re either incompetent or complicit. But either way, your office has to change.” That sort of approach needs to be done more often, I think.

I’m going to return to something I said earlier: Part of the problem is that we only have one word for crimes against wildlife. We say, “poaching,” but that misses the complexity of what’s happening. We wouldn’t use a single term for the many ways people can be harmed, but we pretty much have one word to describe what happens to animals. That means we’re forcing everything through a single funnel.

I’m spending time right now pulling apart the types of poaching that are out there, and they’re very different. [As are] the reasons for killing animals: People in remote places will kill animals for food. People kill animals to trade.

I try to spend enough time with the victims to have a sense of the costs of what’s happening, but I try to spend as much time as possible with the perpetrators of what’s going on, and put myself in their value system. And it’s their value system that ends up affecting me emotionally during the reporting of these stories. These people don’t think they’re doing anything wrong.

It does [wear on me] over time. It’s hard for me, but I feel very bad for the NGO people who work exclusively in these spaces. I at least get to step out and move to a different story. But if you’re a tiger advocate or a tiger researcher, that’s your life.

The big impact I would like to have is to affect the way stories are told. The framework for telling wildlife crime stories, and even wildlife stories, needs to evolve. We no longer have the luxury of telling stories that assume a limitless supply of wildlife. Success for me will be when these stories are told bringing all the tools of real crime reporting to the table, and when society gives the respect to wildlife crime fighters that we give to the FBI, the CIA or DEA. I think that’s all a function of better storytelling.