Every year, roughly 1,000 rhinos are killed for their horns.
Rhino poaching has transformed into a sophisticated global business, where horns fetch up to £80,559 per kg. Demand, fuelled by Chinese and Vietnamese buyers that use the keratin-based substance as medicine or status symbols, has escalated a criminal practice into a vast illegal network of corrupt government officials, police officers, safari operators and arms dealers, as detailed in a 2019 report by the Conflict Awareness Project, Follow the Guns.
As that four-year investigation reveals, there is a core element to the unwieldy criminal practice that can be stymied to slow the escalation. “By systematically supplying the transnational criminal organisations with firearms, the Rhino Rifle Syndicate helped elevate small-scale commercial rhino poaching to an extraordinary industrial level,” the report found. If we can prevent gun sales in specific locations, that industrial-level killing could be thwarted.
Thousands of legal hunting rifles manufactured in the Czech Republic by Česká zbrojovka Uherský Brod (CZUB) have been shipped by arms dealers in Portugal to gun retailers in Mozambique. Then, with the assistance of a network of corrupt officials, the guns are purchased by middlemen and distributed to rhino poaching groups across Mozambique and South Africa. In some cases, guns sold in Mozambique shops were found in the hands of poachers just weeks later.
The Follow the Guns report is calling for governments and manufacturers to better regulate the export and sales of hunting rifles and similar, and to prosecute gunrunners and investigate arms dealers. It urges manufacturers to ban sales to regions where poaching is rife, and to create a new association to help trace serial numbers identified on guns used in wildlife crimes.
Government-level regulation will always be tough, points out Dave Ward, SVP, CTO engineering and chief architect, Cisco. “Whether we’re talking about European or US firearm laws, this is a very challenging and emotional situation. These are perfectly legal items sold at perfectly legal conventions.”
The Geneva-based Small Arms Survey published a report in August outlining the major infrastructure changes that some African nations must make to help prevent arms diversions. But it’s the tracing element that Ward is most enthused by. He has been working on reducing poaching through a track and trace system piloted by Cisco’s Connected Conservation programme, in collaboration with Dimension Data. The team has installed a network of sensors and cameras in a South African reserve that, with the help of machine learning, monitor activity and alert keepers to intruders. The efforts have reduced poaching incidents by an astonishing 98 per cent in just three years.
The programme will expand to other reserves in the hopes of replicating this success. But Ward is interested in how the approach – tracking everything but the animals – can be translated to prevent gun diversions.
“Much stronger, stricter tagging of the arms themselves, so we know where they are made, when, where they going and into whose hands, is invaluable,” says Ward. “Technology can be used to track both firearms and ammunition.”
This kind of tracking is a long way from the shipping receipts and serial numbers that informed the Follow the Guns report. And getting manufacturers and governments onboard with such a drastic change is an even longer road. The easier sell, Ward argues, is with the rangers. “All rangers want to know where other rangers are – it’s a safety issue. We have built solutions for tagging and tracking and offer it as an option for car tracking, tourist vehicles – anything from firearms to the magazine that holds the bullets can be added to the network.” Safari operators can then visualise the moving parts of the entire connected reserve – its people, vehicles and weapons. “They can instantly know where the arms are, or if a truck has been held up or stolen. It’s incredibly easy to add these types of tags into the system.”
“The ideal case would be that firearms would be tagged and tracked in organised natural reserves or sanctuaries – then from there, it becomes a cultural norm.” Ward argues that today we have the technology to track all weapons – but not the will. If we can make it a cultural and societal norm by using reserves as a proven testbed, lawmakers will be more willing to take up the fight to regulate gun sales at a wider level. “Then we could work with lawmakers so they could know when all guns are coming into the country, and where they go.”
It is already socially acceptable to track our steps and to map our daily journeys, Ward argues. Gun tracking, if instituted correctly, does not seem in the realm of impossibility. (Cisco points that it doesn’t keep any data on its customers – that’s in the hands of the network owner.)
When we speak to Ward, it is days after a mass shooting in the US left seven people dead and more than 20 injured in Odessa, Texas. While Ward knows tracking and tracing guns will never eradicate crime and gun violence, he suggests it’s an obvious step that could one day help prevent such tragedies. “Technical tools are driving towards that – it’s just how people would respond to it.”
South Africa-based data science company Data Shack has been collecting data on rhino poaching since 2014, and that work led to arrests in the supply chain when underreported imports were identified. Arguably, the more data we have from a connected reserve, the faster we can scupper perpetrators’ plans.
“When there is corruption at play and these objects are of such a high value, it’s difficult,” says Ward. “There are desperate people on both sides – people desperate for cures and willing to pay for it; desperate people who live near rhinos and have someone willing to pay them an annual salary.” These societal challenges are far reaching and harder to resolve. Tracking and tracing technology can help at a community level, though. The programme has the potential to not just upskill local communities, but help bring them closer to the animals they live alongside, and demonstrate their worth.
Technology, Ward points out, is not a fix-all. “But it is a tool to help solve it.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
