Hearts And Minds And Rhino Horns

A week in the bush with VETPAW, a veterans organisation fighting to save endangered African wildlife while healing the wounds of war

- Peter Simek

It is just past one a.m. and I am deep in the South African bush with Ryan Tate, a 33-year old native of Fort Myers, Florida and former United States marine. We are following the perimeter of an electrified fence that surrounds a 26,000-hectare private wildlife preserve situated in the northern fringes of Limpopo province. Just over the horizon lies the trinational border between South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, a hotbed of smuggling nicknamed Crooks Corner.

In recent years some denizens of Crooks Corner have been trafficking in a new and peculiar contraband: rhinoceros horn. Between 2007 and 2014 rhino poaching increased by 9,000 percent; some 7,245 rhinos have been killed in the past decade. Most rhino species are now endangered, which is why Tate is out here, under cover of night. In 2013 Tate founded Veterans Empowered to Protect African Wildlife, or VETPAW, an antipoaching security organisation staffed by U.S. military veterans who use the skills they sharpened in war to combat poaching in Africa. After launching in Tanzania — a rocky start, but more on that later — VETPAW has spent the past three years patrolling this private South African wildlife preserve that’s home to all of Africa’s “big five”: lions, leopards, giraffes, water buffalo and one of the few thriving rhino herds left in the region.

Before landing on the continent, the closest Tate had ever come to African fauna was at a local zoo. Now he is one of the more controversial figures in the world of wildlife conservation. Some laud VETPAW for its innovative approach to the poaching problem — offering veterans a way to lend their military training to a peacetime cause. Others see Tate’s organisation as a dangerous misapplication of American-style militarisation to an already violent corner of the world.