Military leftovers - a gamechanger for saving wildlife?

The white rhinoceros - pictured here in Kenya - is particularly vulnerable to hunting as it is relatively unaggressive and lives in herds, according to the WWF. Photo / Getty Images

On the brink of her own mission, Jamie Joseph speaks to an ex-special forces commando who dropped his old life to fight for endangered wildlife.

OPINION: About 15 months ago, I saw Damien Mander step up to the TEDxSydney stage with a sense of purpose and determination that left the packed theatre unnervingly challenged. His talk has been described as "provocatively jarring" and "a wakeup call to arms that should be viewed by all human beings".

Mander is a former Royal Australian Navy clearance diver and special operations military sniper turned anti-poaching crusader. He used his life savings and liquidated his investments and assets to fund the start-up and running costs of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation (IAPF) - an organisation dedicated to the protection of elephants and rhinos in some of Africa's most volatile poaching regions.

Sitting in the Sydney Opera House that day, even while the TED community around me were still applauding, I knew my life would be forever altered. In that moment, I knew I would be returning to my African homeland.

I was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in South Africa, and I moved to New Zealand in 2009. I had lost touch with my African roots, unconscious of just how bad the poaching crisis had become - an elephant killed every 15 minutes, a rhino every nine hours - and suddenly I was wide-awake. That evening I introduced myself to Damien Mander, and my work as a writer and an environmental activist, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Starting in October, I will be hosted by IAPF on the frontline, spending 30 days across various poaching hot spots in Africa, writing "stories from the trenches" - on location, every day. The objective is to showcase the brave work of the rangers, and to educate and inspire global citizens to take action in their home country - because everyone can do something to save our iconic species from extinction.

It's a war out there and Mander does not mince his words when it comes to facing facts.

"If under any other scenario, armed units were to cross international borders and violently take out high profile targets, it would be a front-page incident or act of terrorism," he says.

"Yet this environmental terrorism happens daily in the poaching of high target species in many parts of Africa, and we sit here struggling to justify to the international community that rangers need the same access to training and equipment as our soldiers do."

Photos (supplied): Damien Mander and a victim of illegal ivory trading in Africa

The war on poaching cannot be won unless the demand countries get on side. Even on a shoestring budget, WildAid is doing a sterling job in the race for new Chinese thinking. But demand reduction will take years, and a lot of political will, and in the meantime Africa's wild is haemorrhaging.

It is no exaggeration that in some parts of Africa, rangers aren't even paid, and they're going up against AK47s with stun guns.

Mander says there has been a dramatic change in attitude and confidence after rangers have been given access to proper training and equipment. Unfortunately, much of the equipment desperately needed to protect what wildlife we have left is collecting dust in military warehouses, while the conservation industry struggles along, trying to replicate technology that was superseded decades ago.

"A while back, we tested smaller drones which everyone else was working on, and quickly identified that they actually don't have a great capacity for conservation," Mander explains.

"You need much larger drones flying, which can carry a payload capable of sending back stabilised imagery to ground teams that can utilise and respond to real-time intelligence. This is a very important tool in the box, but it is not a cure," he says.

"Drones saved human lives when I was in the military. Why can't drones and other technology reserved for military or law enforcement be easily applied in the protection of our natural heritage?"

There is an extensive manifest of equipment coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq where Mander was once based, and it would save many lives if some of that stock went to conservation.

Mander says that while wildlife rangers are running around in rags, the military are cutting up nearly new uniforms to decommission them. Sometimes when the military upgrades their night vision, he says, the previous models are destroyed.

If the military started handing down their leftovers, this would be a game changer in the poaching crisis. Animals populations are being decimated, rangers are getting killed trying to protect them, so why is this not happening already?

"We don't know," Mander says. "We ask, and it just goes around in circles. It's incredibly frustrating, especially since these same components are being employed by criminal syndicates to destroy our natural world."

Upskilled and properly equipped rangers would be a major deterrent to poachers and would be able to neutralise situations without resorting to escalating violence, in the end preserving human lives as well as wildlife.

Killing subsistence poachers is never going to solve the real problems, because there will always be another living in poverty that is willing to risk his life to feed his family. Essentially, all it does is devastate local communities and turn them against the good fight. What will make a real difference is smart intelligence, and a trail to the 'king pins'.

"We have subsistence poachers in Victoria Falls that have been rehabilitated to become passionate rangers," Mander says. "And in other situations we've managed to get to the poachers before they'd even made a kill. The most notable sentencing we've had is a collective 37.5 years in Zimbabwe for rhino poachers, and we got them on firearms charges before a shot was fired."

We live in unprecedented times, and we all need to dig deep for solutions in this battlefield of poverty and greed, supply and demand. Eventually, we're all going to have to decide how much sin we can live with.

Jamie Joseph is a writer and environmental activist living in New Zealand. Next month. she will return to her homeland to join wildlife rangers in poaching hotspots across Africa, writing "stories from the trenches" - every day for 30 days straight. Follow her journey at savingthewild.com or Facebook.

Like what you see? For weekly Element news sign up to our newsletter. We're also on Facebook and Twitter.