TRACKING THE TIGER BUTCHER

Large numbers of tigers are being farmed, killed and trafficked in Laos. Karl Ammann pursues those responsible

- Terrence McCoy

He was up there somewhere, at the top of the hill, the man Karl Ammann had come to see. It would soon be night. The forest was all shadows and sounds.

Ammann had driven across Laos to reach Tha Bak, a remote river village, to confront the person he believed had murdered more tigers than anyone in the country. In the distance, he could hear dozens of tigers roaring.

For nearly five years, Ammann, 71, a Swiss counter-trafficking conservationist, had tracked Nikhom Keovised. He had placed hidden cameras inside what had once been the largest tiger farm in South East Asia, an illegal operation where tigers had been raised to one end—slaughter. And he had listened to the man doing the slaughtering describe it in his own words: “Use the anaesthetic,” Keovised had said. “Then just cut the neck.” Then “peel its skin.”

Now Keovised had just opened here in Tha Bak what his boss—considered one of the nation’s biggest wildlife traffickers—described as a zoo, but what Ammann suspected was a front for selling tigers.

Ammann knew the risks. He was in the country without permission to investigate its wildlife practices. He was unarmed. Neither Keovised nor his boss had ever been charged with anything, let alone arrested. If discovered, the equipment Ammann had with him—the drone, the hidden cameras, the satellite images of the country’s tiger farms—would immediately unravel his cover story: that he was a tourist.