When a British woman named Claire Bye plunged into the Yacuma River in the Bolivian Amazon last January to frolic with pink river dolphins, she couldn’t have conjured a more Disneyesque scene.

She was three months into a life-altering journey across Central and South America, and she found herself surrounded by tropical birds, humming cicadas, and swimming companions that seemed as dreamy as unicorns. It was heaven—until it wasn’t. Someone in her tour group picked up a baby dolphin, and the pod became agitated and commenced ramming people. Wisely, Bye climbed out of the water and watched from a pontoon. But when she jumped in later to retrieve a wayward water bottle, one of the creatures chomped her foot and held on. She started screaming.

“Oh, my gosh!” blurted out Mike Smith.

“Jeez!” said Jeff Larson.

“Man,” said Smith.

Smith and Larson weren’t watching this live, of course. They were four months and 4,739 miles removed from the attack, ensconced with snacks and sodas in a cozy, snow-covered mountain cabin outside Salt Lake City. More precisely, they were assembled around a coffee table arrayed with audio equipment, recording the latest episode of , the world’s most popular wildlife podcast.

Twenty-six minutes into the episode, Mike and Jeff were hanging on every turn of Bye’s dire situation, as described to them by Wes Larson, a wildlife biologist who is also Jeff’s older brother. Each week for the past three years, Wes has shared a harrowing tale of human-wildlife conflict, peppered with scientific insights, conservation intel, and tips on surviving dustups with nature’s scariest predators—or, in this case, predators the color of a Barbie Dreamhouse.

“What’s the tooth situation again with these dolphins?” Mike asked.

“They have 100 to 140 teeth,” Wes said, sounding like a human Wikipedia page. “And they have different types of teeth. The front teeth—what it used to grab her foot—they’re very sharp. They’re used for grabbing and ripping.”

With Claire now missing the top of her foot and spewing blood, it was not the time for Jeff and Mike to go full goofball, which is essentially their role on Tooth and Claw. But leading up to the attack, they’d been having a field day. Before Wes described the dolphins’ long snouts, bulbous heads, and chubby cheeks, he encouraged the guys to search for visuals online. The creature quickly drew comparisons to “a sausage seared on one side,” “genitalia,” and “your newborn nephew that’s just ugly.” Wes explained that the dolphins are born gray but become increasingly pink from abrasions sustained while fighting.

Wes: “Males are typically much more pink, because they fight a lot.”

Jeff: “Tough guys wear pink in dolphin world.”

Mike: “It’s like Seamus in WWE. You know who Seamus is?”

Wes: “No idea.”

Mike: “Super-pale Irish guy who gets slapped and turns bright pink.”

Wes then steered the episode safely through a discussion of the scientifically documented sexual positions of Amazon pink river dolphins, followed by a review of tribal myths involving the species, including one about the animal’s transformation into “a tall, handsome, elegantly dressed man” who hides his blowhole with a hat, charms village women, and then impregnates them. When he finally guided the episode back to Bye’s ordeal, we learned that she spent an agonizing amount of time in several inadequate Amazon medical facilities, and that her badly infected foot was saved only after surgery in London involving skin grafts from her groin.

Eventually, it was time for a segment called Ouchies, where the guys rate a victim’s ordeal on a scale of one to ten, one being a mosquito bite, ten being an enraged chimpanzee ripping off your face (a scenario featured in an episode from November 2020). Jeff figures it’s a six, based on the possibility that Bye might face lifelong health problems. Mike gave it a five—it’s not terrible, he said, compared to bears eating you alive (January 2022)—before acknowledging the trauma of enduring half-ass jungle medical care, and bumping it up to a six. Wes concurred: sixes all around. The show concluded with a discussion of conservation—pink river dolphins are endangered, largely because of encroaching development—and tips on avoiding an attack. For starters, don’t pick up baby dolphins. Better yet, said Wes, “You probably shouldn’t swim with dolphins at all.”

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A few months ago, I had dinner at the home of ecologist David Haskell. As we were transitioning toward dessert, he asked me, “Would you like to see my mammoth flute?” Haskell has a slightly awkward and formal manner, and he is something of an idiosyncratic genius (he once had his biology students at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, swab their anuses with Q-tips to reveal which of them showered with antibacterial soap, based on the colors of the resulting petri-dish cultures), so I knew this wasn’t the setup to a bad joke. He was writing a book on the history of sound, a topic of mind-bending ambition, and the flute was key to his narrative. The instrument he produced was about ten inches long, slightly curved, and just larger in diameter than a pencil. It had been carved from a woolly mammoth tusk by a German craftsman who re-creates artifacts for museums, and it was an exact replica of in southern Germany in 2004. They are the oldest known musical instruments created by humans. Haskell had commissioned the replica to study its sound.

The fact that I, like most of humanity, had never heard of these flutes or this epochal moment in our species’ development—the creation of instrumental music—was a problem, Haskell told me. “We have simply not valued sound, either its history or its diversity,” he said, fingering the seven evenly spaced holes along the flute’s shaft. “That’s why the world’s soundscapes are disappearing.” I knew that if anyone could make me or anyone else care about the precarious fate of soundÌęon earth, it was him. That’s exactly what he attempts to do in his latest book, , out this month.

Haskell’s previous works leveraged two tools that established him as one of America’s premier nature writers: his Zen-like ability to pay granular attention to what most people ignore and a lyrical writing style few scientists can muster. In , a Pulitzer Prize finalist, he monitored the same area-rug-size patch of forest floor daily for a year and managed to draw from its inhabitants more drama than a Mexican soap opera. When I learned of the title of his second book, (funded with a Guggenheim Fellowship), and that it involved his sitting contemplatively for weeks on end with 12 individual trees scattered around the world, I knew I had to meet the guy. On assignment for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, I accompanied him on a research trip to one of his trees, a Bradford pear at 86^th and Broadway in New York City. For two days, he made observations about the tree ranging from quirky to astonishing. We became friends after Haskell later moved to Atlanta, where I live, and in no time he had familiarized himself intimately with every species of plant and animal in his leafy corner of town, as well as the sounds those species make.

Ahead of the release of Sounds Wild and Broken, I asked him what compelled him to write a whole book about the topic. Part of it stems from the dissertation he wrote as a Ph.D. student at Cornell University on the noises baby birds make when begging for food from their parents. He learned that the sounds different species emit offer insights into their evolution. “Birds that nest on the ground make radically different sounds because they are a lot more vulnerable to predators,” he tells me. Over time, he became more curious about what factors created sonic diversity worldwide. “And in particular, where do humans fit into this?” he says. “Is human language and music somehow outside of the creative processes of life or do we belong within?” If it’s the latter, and human sound making unfolded the same way it did for every other species, then that raises a larger question: Why are we destroying the soundscapes of our fellow species? Should we not be valuing the glorious sounds they produce?

The first two thirds of Sounds Wild and Broken celebrate the evolution and fabulous diversification of sound on earth. After three billion years of a planetary soundscape consisting of howling wind and waves, crashing thunder, and falling rocks, life emerged, and with it dynamic new sounds. Haskell walks us first through the vibrations of cilia-powered bacteria, then the drone of crickets—the first creatures to produce communicative sound—and the blossoming of birdsong and beyond. We learn how creatures developed specific sounds in the context of finding food, locating mates, and dodging predators, and how these sounds were shaped by their respective ecosystems.

As he did in The Songs of Trees, Haskell enlivens the science by taking us on a journey, hopping from continent to continent. He wanders the mountains of southern France, treks Ecuador’s Amazon jungle, and noses about eucalyptus forests in New South Wales, all to illustrate the connection between sound and place. On a mountain ridge in Colorado, for example, he listens as a red crossbill pitches its song higher to penetrate the great gusts of wind that roar regularly through the Douglas firs. “The character of the mountain is contained within this song,” Haskell writes. “When this male crossbill offers his springtime melodies, the combined experience of thousands of ancestors flows to the air. Only those predecessors whose songs accommodated the particular challenges of the wind in these trees passed on their genes. Evolution shaped the song to the place.”

Audio Clip: Red Crossbill Call in the Rocky Mountains

Haskell’s evocative writing placed me on that ridge in the Rocky Mountains, and smack inside those aforementioned Paleolithic caves in southern Germany, where he shows that the evolution of human sound did indeed unfold like every other species’. The people who lived here created sounds that reflected their environment and circumstances, not unlike the red crossbill’s developing songs to deal with mountain winds. Stuck in these caves for months to avoid frigid cold and predators, residents fashioned instruments from one of the few prey species available and created sounds in conjunction with their acoustic space. Haskell claps and whistles inside the caves to sample their rich acoustics. “The musical instruments crafted in that space are a great match for it,” he tells me. “If you play a flute in that kind of resonant space, it sounds gorgeous. So, right from the dawn of instrumental music, there was a tight association between the form of music, the musical instrument, and the space where it was played.”

Audio Clip: Mammoth Ivory Flute Replica (Performed by Anna Friederike Potengowski)

Haskell gets irked when discussing how humans have overlooked seminal moments in the history of sound, and this goes beyond the Pleistocene flutes. At one point in his research, he was walking a mountain road in France where in 2003 a fossil was discovered bearing a sound-making structure, a ridge on the wing of an extinct insect called Permostridulus, an ancestor of modern crickets. This fossil is the oldest evidence of a living organism exhibitingÌęsonic communication. Nobody knows why Permostridulus risked predation and shattered the relative silence of earth’s preceding four billion years. Maybe the sound afforded an advantage during breeding season or maybe it served a defensive purpose. Regardless, it happened, and in so doing it altered the course of evolution on earth. And yet Haskell tells me there’s no shrine noting this pivotal moment. There’s no monument, museum, or even a roadside plaque. No media anywhere covered the fossil discovery. “What pisses me off is we have this incredible opportunity for celebration, and we’re not doing it,” he says. “The first creature that made communicative sound seems like something we should at least know about, yet it took me months of digging through the literature to piece together who was the first singer on earth.”

Audio Clip: Permostridulus Chirp Reconstruction

We’re not just ignoring sounds, we’re destroying them, as a by-product of our destroying ecosystems. The stats are overwhelming. There’s the felling of four million hectares of rainforest annually, the loss of 80 percent of the planet’s grasslands, the disappearance of half its wetlands, the massive insect die-offs in Europe and North America. Our greatest sin, however, is offshore. “If there’s an acoustic hell,” Haskell assures me, “it’s today’s oceans.” For millions of years, the oceans teemed with sounds and songs of marine life. We then removed most of the whales and filled the seas with human-made noise—the racket of commercial shipping, the sonar of navies, and, worst of all, the seismic exploration for oil. “These ships drag arrays of air guns that make loud bangs every few seconds over months,” Haskell says. “You can hear them across oceans.” He asks me to imagine a jackhammer throttling my living room. That’s what the ocean is like for marine life. Of course, I could leave my house anytime to escape such noise. Fish and whales can’t do that. Haskell calls this crime “sonic violence.”

About a year ago, prompted by some combination of inspiration from Haskell and adjustments to the COVID pandemic, I began drinking my first cup of coffee each morning in my backyard garden, where I took up the practice of active listening. Beyond the signature hoot of barred owls, I still have no idea which birds make what sounds. But what I can do now is distinguish when four or five species are singing, whereas before all I heard was a tangled knot of birdsong. I can discern the respective distant hums of the interstate versus a passing jet versus surface street traffic. When squirrels issue their warnings, I know to look for red-shouldered hawks or neighborhood cats. It’s not much, but at least now I’m paying attention. Haskell tells me he hopes his book will be an invitation for humanity to start doing that, paying attention, as a first step toward preserving the earth’s many sounds. “We need to notice and celebrate the rich diversity of sounds on earth,” he says. “Without joyful appreciation, why care? Paying attention is one foundation of ethical action.”

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In many ways, Jim Jaffee and Ari Marsh have a lot in common. Both are lifelong surfers in their fifties who have traveled the world chasing waves off four continents. Both are environmentalists. And both live near the beach in north San Diego County, a pillar of American surf culture—Jaffee in Solana Beach, Marsh in Encinitas. But when they met for the first time, in July 2018, on the 85-foot bluff overlooking in Encinitas, what stood out were their differences.

The scene that evening was classic Beacon’s. With the sun low over the Pacific, surfers schlepped their boards up and down the long switchback trail connecting the clifftop parking lot with the beach below. From the bluff’s edge, parents chatted over post-surf beers, kids bounced around in wetsuits, and dogs tugged at their leashes. Couples enjoyed the endless ocean view, and surfers evaluated the waves. Beacon’s produces waves that are more modest than those at San Diego County’s legendary breaks, including Trestles to the north and Swami’s to the south. On the right day, however, with the right swell and the right Santa Ana winds blowing offshore, any of the breaks here—South Reef, Middles, Bamboos, North Reef—can make for fantastic surfing. Not that it matters. Ultimately, Beacon’s is a neighborhood surf spot, a place locals cherish as much for the community as for the waves.

Still, Beacon’s had a problem. Geologists consider the bluff an active landslide, eroding from wave action, water runoff, and groundwater penetration. Geotechnical studies of Beacon’s include phrases like “clear and imminent danger” and warn that bluff failure could “cause damage to life, health, or property.” There had been up to ten feet of landward erosion at the bottom of the bluff since 2002. With the parking lot and its 25 spaces extending to the edge of the bluff, the concern was that, without warning, the entire landscape could collapse, sending an avalanche of rock, asphalt, and cars hurtling toward the beach.

Jaffee is not a coastal engineer, but an electrical one with a major telecommunications company. He brings a problem-solving approach to life. He’s also a longtime volunteer and beach-preservation expert with the . He agreed with geologists that the parking lot needed to be pulled back from the “slide plane.” And since a landslide would obliterate the bluff-hugging trail and eliminate access to a popular beach, a stairway was needed—something sturdy enough to withstand a bluff collapse. City officials were considering a proposal that did both of these things. The plan made sense to Jaffee.

Marsh, on the other hand, has a Zen poet’s approach to life. In his published collections of surf poetry and essays, Beacon’s figures prominently. In one piece, he calls the formation of waves at Beacon’s and his ­moments upon them “sacred mandalas” that ­symbolize “the ever-changing nature of our lives.” To Marsh, geotechnical studies didn’t capture the essence of Beacon’s. Transcendent, often inexplicable things happened there. One time, when he and some other surfers were lined up way outside at South Reef, a sea lion pup surfaced suddenly. The critter hopped onto Marsh, who was lying on his board, and clutched onto him for almost 15 minutes. It was shaking. Had a shark been chasing it? When a particularly big set rolled in, Marsh duck-dived under the waves and the pup hopped off. The two locked eyes for a moment after Marsh reemerged, then the animal disappeared. The experience reminded Marsh that Beacon’s is a hallowed place.

For Marsh, the city’s proposal was a desecration. The designs for a concrete stairway amounted to an industrial intrusion into the last bit of pristine coast left in Encinitas. He also couldn’t fathom Beacon’s without that iconic switchback trail. Similar trails and their retro quality were now a rarity in Southern California. The proposal was scheduled to be considered by the Encinitas Planning Commission in one week’s time. Marsh had launched an opposition movement called Preserve Beacon’s with another surfer, Pete Brately, and they arrived at the bluff that evening hopeful that they could sway Jaffee. Surfrider, since its start in 1984, had evolved from a ragtag group of surfers defending California’s surf breaks into a heavyweight coastal-advocacy organization. If Marsh could get Surfrider on board, the plan would almost certainly fail.

At the bluff, the three were joined by Jaffee’s colleague Julia Chunn-Heer, who was the policy manager for Surfrider’s San Diego chapter. Everyone agreed they loved the trail, but keeping it long-term meant securing the slope with a seawall at the bottom. Beaches are dynamic systems that naturally migrate landward, Jaffee explained, with eroding bluffs providing sand. Fixed structures stop that migration and eliminate sand supply. Plus, with sea-level rise, the advancing surf would eventually reach the seawall and cover the beach, like water filling a bathtub. A seawall basically meant losing the beach. Marsh wasn’t pushing for a seawall—he just wanted to leave things be. There had not been a major slide at Beacon’s since 2001. Why all the urgency?

Still, the meeting was cordial. Jaffee and Chunn-Heer clearly leaned toward the city’s plan, but they hadn’t taken an official position yet. That gave Marsh hope. He left the meeting thinking, That was weird. I mean, it’s Surfrider. They support surfers, right? They support maintaining the character of beaches. Marsh believed Jaffee would eventually come through.

Six days later, 48 hours before the planning commission vote, the local newspaper, the Coast News, carried the headline “.” Marsh was crushed. “They’re ignoring local surfers,” he told Brately. “They’re ruining something iconic.” It was one thing to battle the city, he thought, and now they had to fight Surfrider, too? They couldn’t possibly win.

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In early 1833, during , Charles Darwin found himself in a corner of the world he didn’t particularly care for, an archipelago near the southern tip of South America called the Falkland Islands, whose windswept moorlands he described as “desolate and wretched.” The local birdlife didn’t help matters. An unusual species of falcon seemed to derive pleasure from tormenting him and the ship’s crew. “A large black glazed hat was carried nearly a mile, as was a pair of the heavy balls used in catching cattle,” Darwin wrote of the avian thieves, “and a small Kater’s compass in a red morocco leather case, which was never recovered.” Crew members complained about the birds’ “boldness and rapacity,” and a lookout was posted to prevent them from picking apart the ship’s rigging. Whalers who had visited the Falklands previously had likewise cursed the creatures as “flying devils” and “flying monkeys,” although science would ultimately settle on the name striated caracara, or, informally, Johnny rook.

Darwin was both repulsed and intrigued by this prankster, which resembles a cross between a hawk and a raven, with an orange face, glossy black plumage, and the ability to run with the speed and agility of a pheasant. Although he called them “false eagles” who “ill become so high a rank,” he couldn’t ignore their strange alertness, sociability, and curiosity. In , he wrote more about Johnny rooks and their shenanigans than any other bird. Why, the great naturalist wondered, was such a seemingly intelligent species scratching out an existence in this tiny, remote range at the bottom of the planet? Ultimately, however, he set this question aside and never returned to it.

Now, nearly two centuries later, Jonathan Meiburg has taken up the obscure task of answering Darwin’s question in . Although Meiburg, up to this point, has made his mark not as an ornithologistÌębut as a Texas-based indie-rock musician , the name of his band () and the titles of some of its albums (, , ) suggest that birds are never far from his thoughts. He first met striated caracaras 25 years ago during a postcollege that sent him around the globeÌęto study daily life in remote societies, and while in the Falklands, the birds gave him the full-on Darwin experience. They stole his cap, tugged the zippers of his backpack, and looked right through him in a manner both knowing and unnerving. The experience prompted Meiburg to get a master’s degree in geography, with a thesis titled “The Biogeography of Striated Caracaras (Phalcoboenus australis),”Ìęand he remains smitten to this day. “Calling them odd birds of prey,” he writes, “feels like calling the painters of the Italian Renaissance a group of unusually gifted apes.”

Early in the book, we come to know a striated caracara named Tina, who is a resident of a falconry center in England. Tina’s keeper, Geoff, shuffles three shells on a table in a bid to confuse the bird, but Tina always picks the one concealing a treat beneath. When Geoff asks for a particular colored ball from a tub of balls, she always retrieves the right one. Her enthusiasm for playing, solving problems, and wanting to know moreÌęis off the charts. In the world of raptors, this is unheard of. Most birds of prey, like peregrine falcons—one of the most widespread birds on earth, residing on six continents—are designed for one thing:Ìęhunting. Johnny rooks, like us, appear designed for thinking.ÌęAnd yet only a couple thousand remain on the planet, living on a handful of subantarctic islands that, due to sea-level rise, may soon disappear. This vexes Meiburg, whose subsequent quest for answers produces a lively mashup of evolutionary biology, travelogue, and biography, ushering us on an eye-opening romp through time and space. Meiburg journeys back millions of years to consider plate tectonics, mass extinctions, sea-level change, glacial movement, and the rise and fall of species.

Woven into this account is aÌę19th-century British naturalist who was equally captivatedÌębyÌęthe bird.Ìę was one of the first people, Meiburg notes, “to write a kind word about caracaras.” Hudson grew up on the ArgentineanÌęPampas alongside a type of caracara called theÌęchimango, and he admired them. They hunted when hunting made sense, scavenged when scavenging made sense, and otherwise explored, investigated, and took risks. Hudson, a lonely soul, also shared their outcast status. He’d moved to England seeking like-minded bird lovers, and while his books were praised by luminaries like Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf, noted ornithologists like John Gould, who cataloged Darwin’s specimens, snubbed him as an uncredentialed amateur.

As science had shunned Hudson, so it shunned the caracara branch of family Falconidae.ÌęOrnithologists have referred to them as “aberrant falcons” and “a rather unimpressive lot,” with Falconidae’s so-called true falcons—including peregrines—hogging all the research. But the upshot of Meiburg’s sleuthing is that falcons are less related to other raptors than they are to a bird famous for its chatty intelligence:Ìęparrots. ThoseÌętwo share a common ancestor that survived the asteroid-triggered Cretaceous extinction by occupying then forested Antarctica. A land bridge subsequently allowed falcons to migrate to South America, where 64 species evolved, including tenÌętypes of caracara. (Parrots, meanwhile,ÌęlikelyÌętook another land bridge, to Australasia.) When North and South America joined up five million years ago, peregrines and other falcons migrated north, while the lineage that produced striated caracaras never left South America,Ìęmeandering the length and width of the continentÌębefore ending up back where theyÌęstarted, near the bottom of Argentina, on the doorstep of Antarctica. Meiburg schleps across the continent himself to trace this lineage and learn what he can from the Johnny rook’s caracara cousins currently dwelling inÌęGuyanese jungles, altiplanoÌędeserts, and remote Andean valleys.Ìę

The book is most compelling with Meiburg on the ground in these difficult places, discovering consistently fascinating caracara behavior. Deep in the rainforest of Guyana, he finds red-throated caracaras who survive primarily byÌęeating wasp larva. The birds have deduced that if they dive-bombÌęwasp nests as aggressively as possible, the shocked residents will choose flight over fight. In the Chilean altiplano above 12,000 feet, Meiburg spends one of the coldest nights of his life in a sleeping bag on the edge of a salt lagoon, staking out mountain caracaras known for working in groups to flip over heavy flat stones in search of edible creatures.Ìę

Meiburg’s goals are ambitious. In trying to pin down exactly why a single species occupies a particular range on earth, he explores an unwieldy assortment of planetary forces spanning eons, and if that isn’t enough, he throws in a biography of Hudson to boot. It’s a lot. He mostly keeps the narrative moving, although now and again he lingers too long in spots. We might not need the level of detail on Hudson’s novel Green Mansions, for example, or the blow-by-blow account of Sir Walter Raleigh’s efforts toÌęfind El Dorado in southern Guyana. He more than makes up for it, though, with consistently evocative writing, as in this delightful passage about a pair of sun bitterns one morning on the banks of the Rewa: “Their song was equally beautiful and odd: a set of hollow notes that ascended by quarter tones, so airy and diffuse that they seemed to come from everywhere. As the sun broke through the canopy, they were joined by a bird I couldn’t place, singing a descending countermelody in the same octave—then another, whose sparkling seven-note song was like a peal of tiny bells.” In moments like this one, Meiburg brings his deep musical knowledge to bear.

In the end,Ìęwe find out thatÌęthe polar vortex has keptÌęstriated caracaras pinned down in the FalklandsÌęand on a couple of nearby islands off Tierra del Fuego. They will remain stranded, Meiburg notes sadly, until some combination of ocean pollution, overfishing, and sea-level rise erases them forever. But that doesn’t keep him from dreaming of creative interventions. If peregrines can colonize dense urban centers, why not Johnny rooks? Meiburg imagines translocating some to Hyde Park in London and then letting them do their thing. Hell, they’re smarter than pigeons, and pigeons know how to use the Underground. “It’s not hard to imagine Johnny rooks following suit, running under turnstiles of the Circle Line at Paddington Station and riding out to Hampstead Heath, then returning home to roost at night,” Meiburg muses. We’re talking, after all, about a lineage of birds that successfully stole from Darwin, determined how to eat wasps without getting stung, and can organize a community rock-flipping to find dinner. London would be a piece of cake.

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Stanza Mbanga Molaodi had big plans this spring. On May 17, the owner of Ìęin Botswana was due to accompany six Italian clients into Chobe National Park, home to a third of the continent’s 600,000 elephants. From its base camp in the bush, the group would go on game drives, day-trip to Victoria Falls, and enjoy cocktails and crocodile-watchingÌęon sunset cruises up the Chobe River. The gang would then relocate to the park’s semiarid Savuti region, a landscape of baobab trees and rocky outcropsÌęwhere dense herds of zebra and buffalo congregate at watering holes and try not to get picked off by the Savuti lionÌępride. Next up would be the Khwai Community Area, where indigenous bushmen would guide the Italians on walking safaris and take them paddling down the Khwai River in traditional mokoro canoes. The 12-day adventure would end with a birding extravaganza in the Okavango Delta, a UnescoÌęWorld Heritage site. “It’s a beautiful place to end a safari,” Molaodi told me, sounding almost emotional.

But the trip was not to be.

FrightenedÌęby the coronavirus, the Italians canceled. All of Molaodi’s clientsÌęhave canceled or postponed. When I reached him by phone recently, he was holed up at home with his family in Kasane, fretting. On the day we spoke, the Botswana Defense Force ordered all troops on leave or off duty to return to their posts immediately, and Molaodi predicted a military-enforced lockdown, not unlike what neighboring South Africa had announced that same day. Molaodi seemed to be speaking for Africa’s entireÌę$40 billion wildlife-tourism industry when he confessed, “We are all retrenching. Everyone is panicked.”Ìę

Simply put, the safari business in Africa and Asia has stopped. Completely. Maybe that’s not surprising at this point in the pandemic. Between flight cancelations, national lockdowns, border closures, emergency visa restrictions, and required quarantine upon entry, clients fearless enough to travel couldn’t reach their destinations if they wanted to. Even if they could, in some countries they’d be sorely disappointed. India has shuttered all of its tiger reserves and national parks. Congo has closed Virunga National Park, fearing that its famous mountain gorillas could contract COVID-19Ìęfrom humans. Gabon, deeply scarred from losing 15,000 lowland gorillas in a 1995 Ebola outbreak, has likewise halted all ape tours.Ìę

What is surprising are the domino effects of this economic catastrophe and the ultimate impact they will have on wildlife. Starting in April, Molaodi’s six staff members will receive half their normal salary, but for May and beyond, all bets are off. Roberto de Sibi, owner of Savannah Explorers in Tanzania, had already placed 17 of his 45 employees on half salary when we spoke (I found him under 14-day quarantine in Milan, where he’d fled to be near his 82-year-old father, having caught the last flight from Tanzania to Italy). Neither Molaodi nor DeÌęSibiÌęwould be paying anything to the many freelanceÌędrivers and guides they hire during busy periods. Molaodi wouldn’t be paying the bushmen to take clients paddling, and De Sibi wouldn’t be paying Dadoga tribesmen to show his clients how to melt metal to make knives. Their clients wouldn’t be donating solar lanterns to villages or otherwise leaving generous contributions.Ìę

Crucially, neither operator would be ponying up the various fees required by parks and community conservation areas for tourist entry, guide entry, vehicle entry, and overnight stays. Large percentages of such fees go to local communities for development projects and conservation measures, like funding anti-poaching scouts. Ninety percent of Zambia’s more than 1,000 scouts come from its communities and are paid from tourism fees. In Namibia, tourism fees pay for the country’s 600 game guards and support more than 6,000 families.Ìę

With rampant unemployment, unpaid game guards, and fewer tourists in the bush to report suspicious activity, it’s just a matter of time before wildlife gets hammered. “Poaching will increase,” De SibiÌęinsists. “People who are jobless must find money or food.”Ìę

Everyone I spoke with concurred on this point. “One of the biggest fears is that, if scouts can’t be paid, I can foresee people poaching,” says Maxi Louis, director of the Namibian Association ofÌęCommunity Based Natural Resources Management Support Organizations. “Poverty will drive people.” Louis also anticipates that local tolerance for crop-raiding herbivores and livestock-killing predators, both common in villages near protected areas, will plummet. “There will be no scouts to manage human-animal conflictÌęand no funds to compensate for lost livestock,” she says, expecting a spike in retaliatory killingsÌęof troublesome wildlife.

In a 2012 study, ecologist Ralf Buckley ofÌęGriffith University in Australia found that most of the more than 1,400 species listed as threatened by the International Union forÌęConservation of Nature depend on tourism for their survival, including iconic species like lions, elephants, and rhinos. “Many parkÌęagencies worldwide now rely heavily on tourism for routine operational funding, more than 50 percent in some cases,” the study reported. “This puts rare mammals at a new risk, from downturns in tourism driven by external socioeconomic factors.”Ìę

Given the magnitude of this potential biodiversity implosion, mentioning a silver lining might seem frivolous. But there is one. Tourism is a double-edged sword. It funds conservation, yes, but too much of it can disturb breeding patterns, feeding habits, and migratory movement. It can pollute landscapes and destroy habitat. “This travel hiatus of several months will give a chance for resilient natural environments to recover from the stress inflicted by tourism,” says Frederic Dimanche, director of the Ted Rogers School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Ryerson University in Toronto. (While Dimanche’s prediction is warranted, many otherÌęreports on social media of wildlife thriving as a result of quarantines .) If the animals can manage to survive, the pandemic might be an opportunity to improve wildlife tourism. “Destinations and tourism operators everywhere have a unique chance to restart a tourism that will be better planned, better managed, one that will be sustainable, with stronger policies,” Dimanche says.Ìę

The post A Tourism Lull May Be Good for Animals—but Not for Long appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

On the evening of April 5, 2017, an Emirates Boeing 747 freighter landed at Wattay International Airport in Vientiane, Laos, and waited on the tarmac for several hours. Its dead-of-night mission involved receiving a sizable consignment, loading it quickly, and ferrying it ten hours back to Dubai, all without attracting undue attention. Emirates had certainly sent the right plane for the job. A 747F is one of the world’s largest commercial freighters, capable of schlepping of cargo. The cargo in this instance consisted of 16 elephants. Whether those elephants could arrive at an airport and board a plane undetected remained anyone’s guess.

The air was hot and humid that night and full of acrid smog, because rice farmers were burning their fields before planting. Laos is a mostly rural country: mountainous, landlocked, and poor, a socialist backwater overshadowed by powerful neighbors like China and Vietnam. It’s also become a global hub for wildlife trafficking, a place where politically connected kingpins make millions smuggling ivory, rhino horn, and other dead-animal parts around the world. In 2013, when the United States on the criminal network of Vixay Keosavang—a.k.a. “the Pablo Escobar of wildlife trafficking,” —Laos made no move to arrest him.

But the nighttime run on April 5 didn’t involve Keosavang, and the wildlife being trafficked was still very much alive. As the Emirates jet stood by, the elephants milled about in a forest outside Vientiane, waiting to be loaded into wood-and-metal crates and then packed into large trucks. The elephants ranged from Mae Ma, a nearly three-ton, even-tempered female who’d worked most of her estimated 37 years in the logging industry, to Do Khoun Meuang, a small, spastic four-year-old male who could dance, stand on his head, and perform all manner of other tricks on command. The deal to send these elephants to the Middle East had begun a year earlier, when Dubai Safari Park, a spanking-new facility in the desert, dispatched middlemen to Laos to locate handlers, known as mahouts, willing to sell. Their job was made easier after the Lao government in 2016, an environmentally friendly move that put captive elephants and mahouts out of work. Desperate elephant owners needed to unload their animals fast. Dubai Safari paid $25,000 to $30,000 per elephant, and ultimately $2 million changed hands.

Curiously, at the airport, the waiting jet lacked something on its fuselage that other Emirates aircraft proudly display—a mural of elephants, rhinos, gorillas, and other animals, along with the words united for wildlife, the name of an alliance formed by various conservation organizations and the Royal Foundation, overseen by Britain’s Prince William. Upon the unveiling of one jet newly adorned with the mural, Emirates CEO Tim Clark , “As the world’s largest international airline, we believe we can make a difference to help break the supply chain of the illegal wildlife trade.”

In the end, though, a mural-free plane was probably for the best. At some point during the shadowy 16-elephant deal, amid the mahouts and the middlemen, the fixers and the fixed, the local officials and goodness knows who else, a problem arose. Someone didn’t get their cut. Complaints were made, grievances filed, investigators summoned. Everything crashed and burned. The trucks never made it to the airport. Government officials confiscated the elephants before they could be packed into their crates. The prime minister himself, Thongloun Sisoulith, declared the transaction “contrary to the law of Lao People’s Democratic Republic.” He instructed his minister of foreign affairs to inform the UAE that Laos would not part with its elephants.

The aircraft returned to Dubai empty, a jumbo jet without any jumbos.

Had the story ended there, I would have been satisfied with its abject weirdness. But it didn’t end there. It took a 180-degree turn and shifted into overdrive. Twelve of the 16 elephants, having dodged a one-way ticket to the Arabian desert, ended up at a halfway house of sorts in northwest Laos, the (ECC), where four of them were selected to join a pilot study that could determine the fate of the species in Laos. This is no small thing. Laos traces its history to the 14th-century , which means “land of a million elephants,” but now the country has only 800. Around half of these are wild; , and the nation’s conservation plan hinges on releasing them into the wild—a strategy imperiled by sudden demand from wealthier countries. In the past three years, at least 100 of Laos’s captive elephants have been illegally trafficked out of the country, bound for foreign zoos and safari parks. The UAE and other nations are culpable in this, but the main perpetrator is Laos’s mammoth neighbor to the north, China.

Amid about the slaughter of African elephants for ivory, this very peculiar aspect of the global elephant crisis has gone virtually unnoticed. I had two basic questions about what was happening. One, is it even possible to successfully reintroduce captive elephants into the wild after they’ve spent their entire lives in the company of humans? And two, how does one go about heisting the world’s largest land animal? Finding the answers would require making two very different but related journeys—one into the untamed jungles of Laos, to track the release of the four elephants once bound for Dubai; the other into the freakish netherworld of Chinese zoos, to find out where the elephants are going and how. Neither journey would be easy.

Two years after the Dubai debacle, I’m slogging through the jungles of northwest Laos with American biologist Chrisantha Pinto of the ECC. We’re searching for Mae Ma, Do Khoun Meung, and three other formerly captive elephants, all of whom Pinto and her team released 24 hours ago. They’ve since vanished deep into the tangled recesses of a half-million-acre preserve called . Pinto wants to check on them, and so, with her team of hardened mahouts, we’re bushwhacking through the undergrowth and clawing our way up painfully steep hills.

Pinto worked with these elephants for months, trying to shape five unrelated animals into a herd. This had never been attempted before. In the wild, herds consist of related adult females and their offspring. It was unclear if Pinto’s elephants, initially strangers to one another, could develop the bonds of trust and mutual dependency that are critical for survival. Pinto’s study involves letting them wander Nam Phouy for three months—a “soft release,” she calls it—and tracking them down daily to note herd dynamics and movement. As we slosh through the mud, she tells me, “If we can provide the government with data that shows releasing them is the best thing for them, there’s a good chance we’ll get to release them permanently.”

Pinto is young, 25, and originally from California, with long dark hair and a tranquil demeanor that seems perfect for watching slow-moving megafauna interact for hours at a time. Her decision to liberate the herd had not been made lightly. She rattles off all the scary questions that arise. Will they be able to find food and water? Will they raid someone’s rice crop outside the forest? Will they stampede through villages, flatten homes, and squash people? Will they end up—depending on available technology—shot, poisoned, electrocuted, or blown to bits by pissed-off villagers? What if poachers slaughter them first? “If we screw this up, if something bad happens,” she says, “that could jeopardize ever releasing ele­phants again.”

Laos has no room for error when it comes to these animals. We are living through the Sixth Extinction, Pinto reminds me, an era when humans are causing the loss of species at breakneck speed. Asian elephants epitomize this biodiversity free fall. A species that once roamed southern Asia from Turkey to eastern China now . The main problem is habitat loss, along with a related phenomenon, human-elephant conflict. In India, such conflict annually causes 400 human fatalities and 100 elephant deaths. In Sri Lanka, the numbers are 70 and 200, respectively. In Bangladesh, when some 700,000 Rohingya Muslims arrived in late 2017 after fleeing genocidal violence in neighboring Myanmar, their refugee camps obliterated huge swaths of forest along a main migration route. The elephants responded by . Fortunately for the elephants, the Rohingya had no weapons.

Since 1988, Laos’s wild elephant population . If no action is taken, Pinto predicts that by 2030, wild elephants will disappear from the country altogether. In this bleak context, Laos’s 400 captive elephants become absolutely critical. They provide a second-string team of sorts, in terms of breeding and potential introduction into the forest. The ECC is in the process of taking over management of Nam Phouy, and when that happens, the plan is to work with surrounding villages to halt illegal logging, hunting, and agricultural encroachment. Once park boundaries are secured, the release of captive elephants could begin in earnest.

We reach the top of a ridge, and the four mahouts with us read the landscape as if it were some centuries-old manuscript. They point to a bare patch of swirled dirt in an alcove of bushes where they believe one of the elephants slept last night; the other four appear to have slept a couple of hundred feet away, beneath a tall tree. There was a fire here overnight, they surmise, motioning toward a smoldering swath of blackened earth on the other side of the ridge. It’s burning season again in Laos, and the fire must have raced up the slope from a rice crop outside the park. The elephants would have been terrified.

The mahouts mountain-goat their way down the ridge, with Pinto and me dirt-surfing and butt-sliding after them. We land in some bamboo at the bottom of a ravine, and soon we’re hearing trumpets, chirps, and rumbles. There’s loud, percussive splintering, and then our elephants lurch into the open. They stare at us like, “Oh. It’s you. Crap.”

We, on the other hand, are delighted to see them. But we count only four elephants. One is missing.

The release of captive Asian elephants had been tried before, in Thailand, with mixed results. The liberated elephants survived, but they plundered nearby crops, despite abundant food in the forest. Nobody killed them, because the Queen of Thailand herself had released them, as part of the Queen’s Initiative, and few people had the cojones to harm the queen’s elephants. (Laos, alas, has no queen. That’s communism for you.) No effort at herd formation had been attempted prior to release, and the handful of animals essentially scattered in different directions. The project did produce one useful tidbit for Pinto—when a mother-calf pair was subsequently released, the previously released females joined forces to safeguard the calf.

To create her herd from scratch, Pinto focused on the youngster, Do Khoun Meung, or DKM for short. After the Dubai deal imploded, Mae Ma basically adopted DKM, while another elephant, Mae Noy, assumed the role of doting aunt. By the time these three arrived at the ECC, they were inseparable. This was the nucleus of a potential herd. Pinto added Mae Bounmy Nyai (MBN) and Mae Khian, who had previously been a mother, and Pinto hoped to leverage her maternal instincts. DKM was at least five years old at this point, and until he reached age ten, adult females would consider him a baby in need of care. In socialization sessions, Pinto noted that whenever DKM was upset, all four females did what any good elephant mother would do—feel his genitals with her trunk, the elephant way of gauging stress. Beyond motherhood, Pinto hoped Mae Khian might also provide leadership for the herd. She had previously been a logging elephant, and between gigs her owner let her wander free in Nam Phouy. She knew where to find water and the sweetest bamboo. Pinto figured the others would follow her lead.

Still, despite that careful preparation, one of her elephants is now missing. The absent herd member is MBN, the introvert of the bunch, the one always hovering nearby, but separate from the group. She’s probably the one that slept alone last night. Also, the mahouts inform Pinto that before yesterday’s release, when DKM tried to play with MBN, she rejected his overtures. This outraged Mae Noy, who responded by slugging MBN in the face with her trunk. “She’s timid to begin with,” says Pinto. “If Mae Noy hit her, it makes sense she would go off on her own.” But the mahouts mostly blame the fire. Alarmed by the flames, the elephants likely scattered, with four going one way and MBN the other. She probably fled in search of water, so we hoof it toward the Nam Sing River.

The mahouts move through the understory like Jedi, accessing unseen information and plotting less than obvious courses that lead repeatedly to coconut-size turds, shattered vegetation, and other evidence of MBN’s panicked flight. At $4,000 a pop, satellite collars are prohibitively expensive, so for now Pinto’s project depends completely on the mahouts’ ability to locate five elephants each day in a mostly untracked wilderness more than twice the size of New York City.

“They know the forest like you know your neighborhood,” says Mike Falshaw, the other ECC staffer with us. Before their release, the mahouts had ridden the elephants for 11 days, Falshaw joining them on foot, from the ECC to Nam Phouy. At one point Falshaw used his GPS to determine the best route to a particular village, calculating that the journey would take all day. The mahouts said screw that. They didn’t know the area, but they plunged straight into the bush and reached the village in four hours. “I have a GPS here and here,” one of them told Falshaw, pointing to his head and then his heart.

We reach the Nam Sing, and despite my best efforts, I can’t manage a dry crossing of the river, and I end up immersed in water to my belly button. The mahouts find this extremely funny. They whip out their phones and shoot video. In the midst of this soggy commotion, MBN pokes her head out from behind a bush on the far shore. We’ve interrupted her leaf munching. For an elephant who’s just survived a forest fire and lost her herd, she looks pretty Zen. She soon turns away and resumes grazing, unimpressed with the folly of humans.

During the trek back to our camp, Pinto speculates on her basic assumptions. “We think a calf can keep them together, but maybe MBN just doesn’t like kids,” she says. “This is the most freedom they’ve ever had, and it will be interesting to see personality traits come out. Maybe they won’t remain a cohesive herd.”

At camp we find that two of the mahouts who stayed back today have constructed a 50-foot-long lean-to to protect the tents, a picnic table with attached benches, and another table for meal prep. The other mahouts unload what they gathered from the forest—herbs, hearts of palm, and three-inch-diameter bamboo segments that will become tall skinny pots for boiling water. For our dinner, a couple of them wade into the Nam Sing to catch frogs.

“They look at this place like a supermarket,” Falshaw says. He’s from Liverpool, with the requisite Scouse accent and pale complexion. Having spent weeks at a time in the jungle with these guys, he’s slowly morphing into a mahout himself. He speaks Lao, can handle a machete, and, most important, doesn’t mind the diet. When I explain that my meals in Laos before this trip included blackened whole baby birds, ant-egg salad, pureed fish entrails, and even dog (I’d been told it was goat), he’s blithe about my trauma.

“Have you tried rat?” he asks.

“They don’t put that in soup, do they?” I didn’t want an answer.

“Oh no,” he says. “You’d never put it in soup. That would ruin the flavor.”

As we discuss culinary matters, a tractor rumbles by near camp hauling a 50-foot log. We had seen the tractor several times over two days, extracting logs one by one. When the ECC assumes control of Nam Phouy, Falshaw will work with the government to run the park, and he plans to halt this onslaught. For now he’s biding his time. “I could call up district leaders, but then that guy would know it was us,” he says. “He might come here with a bunch of guys and beat the shit out of us, and we could survive that. But if he puts a bullet in one of those elephants, that would be a blow to the ECC, a blow to the country, a blow to everybody.”

When I wriggle out of my hammock the next morning, one of the mahouts tells me that he heard rustling last night. There’s a wild male elephant lurking in this corner of the park, a colossus our team has mixed feelings about. On one hand, nobody wants him barreling through camp. “If the elephant had come,” the mahout says, nodding toward our fire, “I would have chased him away with flames.” On the other hand, Pinto would love for our females to mate with him. That’s the practice in Laos, to leave captive females chained up in the jungle when not working in order to breed with wild males. It’s one of many traditions that constitute the age-old culture of elephant husbandry, or mahoutship, the art and science of keeping, training, and riding elephants.

Nobody knows when this culture began in Asia. Elephant capture started at least 4,500 years ago in the Indus Valley, where soapstone carvings of elephants in chains have been found. Care and training developed over centuries, with knowledge passed down from father to son. Traditionally, most Lao villages had at least one elephant for plowing and carrying firewood. Elephants became symbols of prestige across Asia, with kings using them as ceremonial mounts and offering them as gifts to seal political alliances. As the only men who could control these giants, mahouts gained prestige, becoming confidants to kings. But then the French colonized Southeast Asia in the late 19th century , an industry made possible by ele­phant towing power. Mahouts began living in the jungle for long stretches. Their visibility faded, along with their status.

There’s an important religious component to the human-elephant relationship in Laos, intertwined with the country’s tradition of devout Buddhism. Only humans and elephants have 32 souls, many Laotians believe, and shamans play a central role in spiritually taming elephants. This process is a community event, and while decidedly less than gentle (a baby is forced kicking and screaming into a pen and then thwacked repeatedly with a wooden stick), it includes a baci, a ceremony designed to corral any of the elephant’s souls that might attempt to flee as it transitions into the human world. In all matters elephant, shamans wield tremendous influence. Recently, a new ECC staff mahout quit abruptly after his local shaman advised him that the elephant he was hired to work with would certainly kill him.

This morning, Pinto and I could use a shaman. After finding MBN grazing in the same spot as yesterday, we slosh up a stream to locate the other elephants, only to be blitzed by great armies of leeches. They inch up our boots and squirm beneath our socks. Noticing our anguish, one of the mahouts calmly slices off two segments of bamboo, fashions a couple of tubes, fills them with stream water, and adds a pinch of salt from his pack to each. He hands these to us, along with bits of vine to use as a sort of gauze. When we daub the leeches with the salt solution, they drop off.

This works well until we begin an ascent up a near vertical slope that requires grabbing vines and branches with both hands. About halfway up, Pinto stops suddenly and drops her pants. I don’t look, but apparently a leech has fastened itself smack to her groin. She unleashes a cry of great distress: “I look like I’m having my period!” One of the mahouts, waiting for us atop the ridge and observing our travails, turns to another and says, “I think foreigners are better at things like swimming.”

When we find the herd, young DKM charges out, straightens his trunk, and flares his ears, a clear warning. Then he quickly scampers back, and all three adults step up to shield him from view. “That’s something very much a wild herd would do,” Pinto says, encouraged. The elephants are in an area with very little water, however. When they get thirsty, they’ll either head back to where MBN is, which would be great, or they’ll head toward a stream in the opposite direction, where there’s an army garrison and, worse, crops for the soldiers. That could be a disaster. After much debate, the mahouts mount the elephants, and we head back to the original release point, where we’ll regroup and cut them loose again. Pinto is disappointed. She’ll have to note the intervention in her data, but safety-wise it’s the right move.

Pinto is only a few days into a three-month experiment, so it’s impossible to draw any conclusions. But around the fire that night she is contemplative. Maybe MBN doesn’t need a herd after all, not if she continues finding food and water on her own. As for the others, they’re operating as a unit so far. “They’re forming real bonds,” Pinto says. “Forming a real family. It’s amazing to see.” Falshaw is just happy that little DKM is frolicking in the jungle. For a year leading up to his scheduled trip to Dubai, DKM had been trained daily to be a performer, to execute rote stunts for paying crowds. “He was doing circus tricks,” says Falshaw. “Now he’s wandering free in the forest.”

The optimism of Pinto’s team will amount to little if Laos’s captive elephants disappear into China. While Pinto continues monitoring the herd, I leave her and embark on my second journey, starting in the Chinese city of Kunming. There I meet Karl Ammann, a 71-year-old Swiss national with shambolic hair and droopy eyes who shuffles about and mumbles like Columbo, making him easy to dismiss. In reality, Ammann is Ìęwho has documented animal trafficking around the world. Deploying a tech arsenal worthy of 007—button cams, lipstick cams—he has investigated everything from the bushmeat trade to ivory trafficking, leading Time magazine Ìęa “Hero of the Environment.” He’s also something of a pariah in wildlife-conservation circles, due to his incessant badgering of officials at , the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, the United Nations watchdog group that Ammann considers a paper tiger.

For the next few days, my work with Ammann will require a personal transformation that goes well beyond deleeching and defunking after a week of camping in the jungle. As I cleared customs in Kunming, I assumed a whole new identity. I am no longer a journalist—I am a freewheeling international businessman looking to start a new zoo in southern China, in Guangzhou, with my “partner” Ammann. We’ll be visiting various animal parks in the hope of purchasing an elephant like DKM—young, well trained, guaranteed to delight our future visitors. We’ll negotiate with anyone, anywhere. Our venture is a ruse, but it’s not so unusual as to arouse suspicion. Zoos and aquariums are sprouting all over China. The masses have disposable income now, and the demand is tremendous.

In the wake of the Dubai scandal, Ammann’s sleuthing uncovered two distinct players in the elephant-export racket. One is the Mekong Group, a Chinese company that owns zoos in Yunnan province. In June 2017, in an otherwise empty field in Xayaboury, Laos, Ammann came upon an unusual sight involving representatives from this company. At least 30 elephants stood in a row, and while inspectors reviewed the specimens, the elephants performed tricks. Ammann learned that the elephants were under contract to the Mekong Group, that it was paying mahouts to train the animals, and that, depending on skill level, it would pay $25,000 to $50,000 per elephant. Digging deeper, Ammann found documents indicating that the Mekong Group had been importing Lao elephants for years. For example, in 2015, one of the company’s safari parks, Wild Elephant Valley, imported 11 ele­phants. Legally this was suspect. For starters, Lao law bans the selling of elephants abroad. Second, in the few instances where CITES allows international trade in endangered species, that trade cannot be detrimental to the species overall in the exporting country, and the animals being traded must originate from an approved breeding facility. Even before Pinto began her research showing the critical importance of Laos’s few remaining captive elephants for the country’s overall population, a host of international scientists had declared that continued export threatened extinction of the species in Laos. And while the CITES documents filed in the case of the 11 elephants claimed they were captive bred, Laos has no elephant-breeding facilities, approved or otherwise.

The other elephant exporter Ammann discovered is called Soutchai Travel, a company based in Vientiane. In December 2018, the husband and wife owners of the company told Ammann over the phone that they could sell him a male elephant for $20,000, a female for $150,000, and a baby—which Chinese crowds love most—for $200,000. Soutchai would then transport the elephants through the border town of Boten and into China. The company could arrange a three-year lease, after which the fee would have to be paid again. When Ammann pressed him on this, Soutchai said, vaguely, that rental terms could be negotiated.

To Ammann, the notion that elephants were being leased, not sold, was intriguing. Maybe this was the loophole through which buyers were sidestepping the law. Like the Soutchais, the Mekong Group had styled its elephant transactions as multiyear lease agreements, according to the Laotian elephant owners Ammann interviewed. But none of those owners possessed copies of the contracts, and Ammann sensed that none of them expected to get their elephants back. He could find no instances of Lao elephants ever returning from China.

In his phone conversation with the Soutchais, Ammann said he wasn’t yet ready to buy. He had more due diligence to perform. In fact, he had heard that some elephants had just been exported to China a month before the call. Did the Soutchais know about this? Yes, they confirmed, seven of their elephants had just gone to China. But they wouldn’t say exactly where.

By the time I connect with him in Kunming, Ammann has information that at least four of those seven elephants might be in the city of Guiyang, at Guizhou Forest Safari Park. If we went to Guiyang and confirmed this—and also that the animals had been sold rather than leased—we would have proof of elephants being trafficked out of Laos.

One of the glaring differences between Chinese zoos and those in the West is the nature of the relationship between paying customers and animals. Zoogoers in China expect a performance. As Ammann and I stroll through Guizhou Forest Safari Park, we see several people observing six grizzly bears across a moat. They’ve purchased food for the bears, mysterious beige cubes; when the bears wave and clap, the people chuck cubes at them. Later, Ammann and I board a small bus painted like a zebra and completely encased in stout wire mesh. The driver steers us into an enclosure of Asiatic black bears, and a mob of them press against the bus demanding food. A woman up front distributes skewers of raw chicken, and we poke these through holes in the windows. The bears inhale the meat. Next we visit some equally demanding tigers, then lions. In a few days, Ammann is headed to north China to investigate a notorious tiger farm in Harbin, and he plans to ride and film a similar bus where patrons can buy a live cow to feed the tigers. “I’ve seen videos,” he says. “The cow is in a trailer. A hydraulic lift raises one end, the cow slides down, and all hell breaks loose. You can hear the thing screaming.”

The most popular performers at any Chinese zoo are the elephants. Ammann and I squeeze into Guizhou’s elephant amphitheater for the preshow festivities. Kids pose for photos atop the jumbos and take rides, their parents going nuts with cameras. But soon the arena is cleared, music swells, and nine elephants march out. They rear up and stand on their back legs. They stand on their heads. They stand on stools and spin around. They suck water from pails and blast it on everyone in the first three rows. The crowd loves this. Techno music blares. The mahouts roll out soccer balls, and the elephants kick them into a goal. The show ends with the performers dancing manically before waving goodbye with their trunks.

After the show, Ammann and I wander backstage and into a long concrete room, where we meet the head trainer, a Thai man named Samrit. We’re building a zoo in Guangzhou, we tell him. We’re curious about obtaining elephants. Would he mind if we look around? Not at all, Samrit says, he’s happy to answer any questions. The zoo has 11 elephants, we learn. Two are outside, and the other nine occupy stalls in this room. In one stall, an elephant stares at the floor and shakes his head back and forth, classic behavior of a stressed-out elephant.

All these elephants are from Laos, Samrit says, as we move down the row. And yes, these last four arrived the previous year. Pretty much all elephants imported into China come from Laos, he says. If we want, Ammann and I can even buy an elephant from this zoo, Samrit says. A baby would cost around $100,000, an adult $80,000. Unfortunately, we can’t buy any of the elephants we see here. They’ve already been sold to a zoo near Shanghai called Dream of Dragon, and they’re scheduled to be transported next month. They’ll be replaced by more elephants from Laos.

This raises an interesting question. If Chinese zoos are leasing elephants from Laos, how can those elephants then be sold to another zoo? I had a hard time seeing how such an elephant would ever return to Laos.

As we leave, Samrit encourages us to contact him with further questions. We do. We have Thai and Chinese speakers talk to him multiple times on the phone, and he even sits for a three-hour chat in a restaurant. The big takeaway from these conversations comes with Samrit’s clarification of the lease issue. The interaction goes like this:

Us: When we buy, we are the owner? Or we’re just leasing and have to return the elephant?

Samrit: The owner, but it is declared in the documents to be a lease. It is very difficult to declare as a purchase in the documents. They have to declare to be leased from Laos for 10 to 20 years.

Us: After 10 to 20 years, we have to return the elephant?

Samrit: No. It is just a document.

Us: After 10 to 20 years, we will return the elephant?

Samrit: Absolutely not. You bought the elephant and own it.

He goes on to say that no one has ever returned an elephant on the basis of a rental contract.

On multiple occasions since the Dubai incident in 2017, Ammann informed both Laotian officials and CITES authorities of the evidence he was uncovering of illegal elephant exports. He also sent them Chinese media accounts openly celebrating the arrival of Lao elephants in zoos. Assuming these had been “leased” in the fashion described by Samrit (and repeated by a second source who acquires elephants for the Soutchais), the steady flow of elephants out of Laos was disturbing. In 2016, two had arrived at Zhengzhou Zoo, at least six at Dongguan Zoo, and four at Changsha Ecological Zoo. In 2017, four showed up at Ningbo Youngor Zoo and twelve at Guizhou Safari Park. Ammann harangued CITES officials over their unwillingness to invoke Article VIII of the Convention, which allows Laos to retrieve the elephants and forces China to investigate involved parties.

CITES officials had acknowledged the problem. , they reiterated that the export of Asian elephants is illegal in most instances and stated, “It is understood that the international movement of some elephants currently under lease in countries such as China occurred in contravention of the national legislation of Lao PDR and CITES provisions.”

Still, CITES officials have done nothing to address the issue. At the recent triennial gathering of signatory parties in Geneva, the trafficking of Asian elephants didn’t even make the agenda. Yuan Liu, spokesman for CITES in Geneva, told me that Laos has struggled to enforce the convention generally, and that the organization’s approach “is supportive and non-adversarial and aims to ensure long-term compliance.” The Lao government, Soutchai Travel, and the Mekong Group did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

There is some indication that Lao authorities might even be abetting elephant trafficking. In a November 14, 2018, e-mail to several people working on elephant issues in Laos, Mark Romley, legal adviser on countertrafficking issues at the U.S. embassy in Vientiane, reported on a trip he took to the Laos-China border. “During our meetings with the government of Laotian officials, the head of the Animal Control Unit said that the previous day 50 Lao elephants had been allowed through the Boten SEZ border checkpoint headed for China,” Romley wrote. “The elephants had been shipped north for a ‘cultural and educational exchange’ that had been approved by the central government. I, for one, would be surprised if Laos sees those elephants again.”

All of this disgusts Ammann. “It’s one thing to smuggle a chimp here, an orangutan there,” he tells me. But moving “whole herds of elephants across an international border is the greatest insult to anyone concerned about wildlife. CITES, Prince William—this is all happening under their noses.”

If the elephants are starting in Laos and, through bogus lease agreements, ending up permanently in China, the only question remaining is: How are they getting there? Romley’s e-mail hinted that government approval might be involved. To find out more, I travel to the Lao border town of Boten. Ammann can’t join me, because he’s headed to Harbin for his tiger project. But he tells me where to find a mahout named Khammoung, a guy he’s met before. Khammoung might have information on cross-border elephant transactions.

As we part ways, Ammann also makes a curious request of me. If I find Khammoung, I will also find the two elephants he tends. Ammann wants me to try to buy those ele­phants. For real. Or he at least wants me to gauge Khammoung’s interest in selling them. Ammann says he knows people in Europe. Rich people. He’ll raise funds to buy the ele­phants and then he’ll convince the ECC to take them as a donation. Elephants deserve a better life than what these two are living in Boten, Ammann says. He assures me I’ll be motivated to make a purchase once I reach Boten and see what he’s talking about.

Long an impoverished outpost in Laos’s far north, Boten became a “specific economic zone” at the turn of this century, and since then Chinese developers have made it an extension of China—recently secured with a 50-year lease—where they envision a residential city, tourist destination, and transportation hub. I arrive to find high-rise hotels and condos along the main street, some half finished. The town is one big construction site, cranes everywhere. I find Khammoung where Ammann said he would be, in the parking lot behind a large purple and white building with a neon sign that says Club Eccellente. The mahout is sitting on a log, whittling, surrounded by piles of broken drywall, nail-studded two-by-fours, and additional construction debris. Three other mahouts lie in hammocks. They’ve created a makeshift day camp from the refuse, with broken furniture arranged around a fire ring and chickens penned in with corrugated plastic. Khammoung grabs an empty bucket labeled machine grease, flips it over, and offers me a seat.

Beyond the parking lot, a red, barren moonscape spreads out in three directions, and in the distance dozens of enormous trucks and earthmovers rumble about. The forest used to reach the parking lot, Khammoung tells me, but now it’s nearly a mile away. The earth-gobbling machines are clearing trees and flattening hills. In their place, two giant Buddhas will soon be erected, one facing Laos, the other facing China.

There’s a nightly show here at Club Eccellente, a “ladyboy” show, Khammoung calls it, a cabaret act featuring trans performers. Later this afternoon, he and the other mahouts will trek to the forest to retrieve four elephants they chained there overnight and bring them to the parking lot. “The people coming for the show like to see elephants,” he says. Technically, Khammoung’s family owns two of them: Joumban, a 34-year-old male, and Mae Seang, a 32-year-old female. In February 2018, after the logging industry waned, his family leased the pair to the Mekong Group, which subsequently transferred the lease to the company developing Boten. Joumban and Mae Seang arrived in Boten with 14 other Lao elephants, but the others were later sent over the border into China. As part of the lease agreement, Khammong is paid to work with the two elephants here at the club.

I ask him how elephants cross into China. It’s simple, he says. He points toward a patch of forest in the distance. There’s a ­buffalo path, an informal crossing through the woods. No one’s watching it. Khammoung says he has been paid to ride elephants down that path to China. The ride takes 30 minutes, and after he crosses the border, another mahout continues on with the elephant.

“It was a service I offered,” he says. “But no one has wanted this service for several months.” Indeed, many elephants exited Laos in the fashion Khammoung describes, but more recently they’ve been concealed inside 22-wheel long-haul trucks and driven through Boten’s legal border crossing. Sources told Ammann that the seven elephants in November had crossed this way. (After my trip to Boten, a Lao news report about a truck rollover on a mountain pass near the town of Kasi includes a photo of a dead elephant. A source confirms that the animal was part of a group of Soutchai elephants bound for China.)

Later that afternoon, Khammoung sets off across the moonscape, making for the trees, and when I see him again, he and Joumban are emerging, almost magically, from a cloud of red dirt. The elephant is nine feet tall, but in the distance he’s dwarfed by the titanic vehicles vaporizing the topography. At the parking lot, the mahouts chain the four elephants to the pavement. Joumban has a fine pair of 18-inch tusks. Mae Seang’s ears are pink on the underside. They stand together like a little old couple, comfortable not speaking to each other.

At sunset the tour buses start arriving and disgorging Chinese retirees into the parking lot. Soon several hundred tourists in sneakers, jeans, and floral-print dresses are taking selfies with the ladyboys from the show, who are dressed in hip-high split skirts, stiletto heels, and elaborate feathered headdresses. Chinese pop blares across the parking lot. Blue, pink, and yellow neon lights begin flashing. The elephants are background props, hulking conversation pieces. People stop by to shoot photos or feed them sugarcane before blending back into the mosh. There’s an hour-and-a-half reprieve when everyone files into the club for the show, but afterward the partiers spill out into the night more revved up than before. Someone builds a bonfire in the parking lot and a conga line forms, lurching this way and that, skirting the flames, romping past the elephants. The singing and dancing continues late into the night.

Trapped in the eye of this storm, Joumban and Mae Seang press their faces against each other. With her trunk, Mae Seang gently touches Joumban’s mouth, his tusks, his eyes. He responds in kind. They wrap their trunks around each other and rub foreheads. What must they make of all this?

It’s one thing to pretend to want to buy an elephant. It’s quite another to actually execute the purchase. And two elephants? How would I explain this to my wife? I really didn’t think Khammoung would go for it. But after the last Chinese partier straggles off, I propose the acquisition, and Khammoung jumps at the idea. He’s tired of living in this shithole. He wants to quit the mahout business altogether, return to his village, be close to his family, rethink his career. When I report this to Ammann, he’s thrilled. He dives headlong into negotiations with Khammoung’s family, which take weeks. He clears everything with Laotian officials. He gets me to write up a description of the wretched living conditions of Joumban and Mae Seang, and with that he goes begging in Europe. I’m convinced he’ll get nowhere near the asking price: $110,000.

But then he does. Four months later, Ammann and a bunch of soft-hearted Euros (and myself, if you count my fundraising letter as an in-kind donation, which I totally do) are the proud owners of two very large, no doubt emotionally scarred elephants that once worked as props in a cabaret act in a Lao parking lot. Joumban and Mae Seang get trucked to the ECC, where their arrival is celebrated. Ammann knows this act will have no bearing on elephant conservation in Laos; he’s actually quite pessimistic about wildlife conservation generally. “The only thing you can hope to do now is improve animals’ welfare,” he tells me. “That’s what I wanted to do.”

When I get back to the U.S., I hear from Pinto. The three-month soft release had gone so well that the ECC received permission to let the herd roam Nam Phouy for three more. A couple of weeks after I left the jungle, the elephants had begun to charge Pinto’s team. “We had to run,” she says. “They were like, ‘You’re too close. Stay away.’ After two weeks, they trusted one another so much they decided they didn’t need us.”

As for MBN, the outcast elephant, she began consistently hovering about 200 yards from the herd, moving in closer to interact with the others about once a week. In her own way, she had remained part of the group. The most striking development involved the wild male. He had joined the herd for several weeks and taken a particular liking to Mae Khian. All in all, the signs suggested that these elephants were reverting back to their wild selves.

Maybe one day, like these elephants, Joumban and Mae Seang will roam free in the jungle. Maybe they’ll go where they want, eat what they want, do whatever the hell they want. Maybe the memory of pavement, chains, bulldozers, and feathered boas will fade. Maybe they’ll live like real elephants.

The post I Bought an Elephant to Find Out How to Save Them appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Since 2008, poachers in Africa have slaughtered more than 7,900 rhinos for their horns, a tragedy driven by demand in Asia for the appendage’s purported—though nonexistent—medicinal properties. If the killing continues unabated, Africa’s 20,000-some remaining rhinos will vanish altogether by 2025. This crisis is not new. In his 2013 book , journalist Julian Rademeyer provided the definitive account of the situation, investigating the Southeast Asian kingpins and middlemen who finance the trafficking and the corrupt African officials who enable it, and exploring the various controversies swirling around it, like the much discussed option of legalizing the horn trade. Alas, little has changed since Rademeyer (and other writers and filmmakers, including me) weighed in. In 2018, at least 769 rhinos were killed in South Africa alone. As far as storytellers are concerned, rhino poaching remains the gruesome gift that keeps on giving.Ìę

NowÌęwe have Save This Rhino, a two-part documentary airing on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű TVÌęfrom the award-winning surfing filmmaker Taylor Steele (available for streaming now on the ; $5Ìęfor a monthly subscription). Unlike Rademeyer, Steele forgoes the big picture and instead keeps his focus narrow. Specifically, he has made an in-the-trenches combat film—and a quite compelling one. SteeleÌętrains his lens on the park rangers, forensic investigators, and vets battling the poachers on the ground in and around Kruger National Park in South Africa, and we are reminded throughout his film that “this is a war.” One park ranger informs us that Kruger “has become a war zone. We have changed from conservationists to paramilitary personnel.” In another scene, Steele’s cameras venture into park headquarters, and we see guys in fatigues pouring over tactical maps, tuning up helicopters, and sorting through machine guns and night-vision gear. We are told that the placeÌę“feels like a military operation, not a wildlife reserve.”Ìę

This is a radical shift for Steele, a Californian who has spent his career making gorgeous films at the intersection of surfing and music, featuring the likes of Kelly Slater, Rob Machado, and Jack Johnson. Those three featured heavily in , a critically acclaimed 2018 HBO documentary that achieved mainstream success and likely provided Steele with enough clout to finally break out of the surf-film genre. Save This Rhino showcases Steele’s hallmark landscape visuals in the form of sweeping aerials over the semiarid bush, glowing African sunrises, and, in one inexplicable instance, a cheetah perched in a tree. We also get gruesome footage of bloody carcasses and traumatized baby rhinos. When it comes to wildlife poaching, you can’t have beauty without brutality.Ìę

Part oneÌęof the documentary focuses on the poaching problem, part twoÌęon potential solutions. The film’s two protagonists, Kevin Pietersen, a South African cricket star turned conservationist, and Matt Wright, the Australian host of National Geographic Channel’s , are spurred into action after meeting an orphaned baby rhino named Arthur at a sanctuary called . Poachers have recently shot Arthur’s mother inside Kruger and hacked off half her face with an ax to get her horn. Rangers found Arthur whining next to his mother’s body, with deep gashes on his back and one foot, indicating that the tyke tried bravely to fight off the poachers. We see footage of a blindfolded Arthur with an IV drip being stretchered after the attack,Ìęlifted from a helicopter into the back of a pickup, andÌętransferred to Care for Wild. Petronel Nieuwoudt runs the sanctuary and has saved 61 orphaned rhinos since 2012. She tells Pietersen and Wright that baby rhinosÌęare often found trying to nurse from their dead mothers. After feeding Arthur from a plastic bottle and steaming over photos of hisÌędismembered mother, the duo vows to dig deeper into the murder in hopes of better understanding the rhino crisis.Ìę

Their journey leads them to the crime scene inside Kruger, where Wright holds the sun-bleached skull of Arthur’s mother. They learn that two gunshots were heard at a nearby ranger station the night of the murderÌęand that a pair of suspects was ultimately apprehended a few miles away. They also discover ten other rhino carcasses in various stages of decomposition in a 200-yardÌęradius of the crime scene. Kruger is a blood-soaked killing field. LaterÌęthey come across a group of women and girls doing laundry and collecting water in a river inside the park. Their village abuts Kruger, but since it lacks running water, they enter the park through an opening in the fence three times a day. Clearly, these people need water to survive, but the compromised fence is like an “Entrance” sign for poachers. Four million people live along the edges of the park.Ìę

In part two, Pietersen and Wright bounce from one possible solution to the next. They go on night patrol with Kruger’s heavily armed rangers and learn that more than 100 rangers have been killed by poachers hereÌęin the last decade. They observe vets dehorning rhinos on a private reserve, a painless process designed to make the animals less attractive to poachers. But the real ray of hope occursÌęwhen they visit another private game park next to Kruger that has been conducting a high-tech pilot program funded by Cisco Systems. By layering several technologies together—a long-range radio system, magnetic sensors to detect guns and axes, acoustic fiber to detect fence tampering, closed-circuit and pan-tilt-zoomÌęcameras, thermal imaging, an 8,000-volt fence—the park had reduced its response time to intrusions from 30 minutes to less than seven. It had gone 436 days without a rhino being poached.Ìę

Still, all the technology in the world won’t stop poachers if local villagers aren’t on board. Pietersen and Wright spend time at Nkambeni Safari Camp, a community/private-sector tourism venture on land owned by the Nkambeni people inside Kruger. The project provides employment, education, and running water to the community, and other villages near Kruger view Nkambeni as a successful model. Pietersen talks to one school teacher in the community who expresses cautious optimism. “I think if there were job opportunities, it would drastically minimize the poaching in Kruger,” she says. “But you can never take away the greed from some of the people.”

The post How the Battle to Save Rhinos Became a Full-Scale War appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

David Haskell's Bradford pear tree stands at the northwest corner of 86th Street and Broadway on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and when we meet there one afternoon in July, he mentions that he hasn't spent quality time with the tree in nearly three months.

The previous occasion he visited, he and his girlfriend, Katie Lehman, were traveling by car to Maine from Sewanee, Tennessee, where Haskell is a professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of the South. They parked on the street, made their way to this corner, and proceeded to loiter, since there’s nowhere to sit. It was late in the day. Trucks and buses barreled down Broadway. Sirens wailed. Pedestrians flowed past the tree, faces in their phones, while below ground the Seventh Avenue Express hammered by. The tree’s fallen white blossoms whirled in the evening gusts, and dis­carded wads of gum littered the dirt at the base of its trunk. For an hour and a half Haskell watched. He listened. Then he and Lehman got back in their car and drove to Maine.Ìę

“It was amazing sharing the tree with Katie, introducing her to this creature I’d spent so much time with,” Haskell tells me now. “To be able to wrap other people into my relationship with the tree, and the tree into my relationship with other people—it’s very enriching.”Ìę

Introducing me to the tree, then, is a ­pretty big deal.Ìę

“This is it,” he says, beaming.Ìę

We eyeball the tree.

“Yes,” I say.

It’s not exactly beautiful. It’s not exactly ugly. It reaches maybe 30 feet tall, with an oval canopy of dark waxy leaves and a gray trunk streaked green with algae. A couple of diseased limbs have been ­removed, leaving pitted nubs. It grows in front of a Banana Republic, between a newsstand and some newspaper boxes, and nearby there’s a flight of stairs leading down to the 86th Street subway platform. At the base of the trunk, some well-tended pink and white periwinkles share a patch of dirt with two cigarette butts, half a grape, a plastic drink lid, and a couple of straws. Locked to the short iron fence that surrounds the trunk is a blue ­bicycle missing its seat. Another Bradford pear sprouts from the sidewalk 30 feet north of this one, then another one north of that, then another. There are six of them on this block alone.Ìę

Haskell’s tree is utterly ­average.Ìę

He is not offended by this assessment. In fact, it’s one of the reasons he includes the Bradford pear in his book, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors, which comes out in April. “This tree appeals to me because it’s a regular street tree,” he tells me. “There are some trees in Manhattan that are famous, like the 9/11 Survivor Tree. People actually travel great distances to see that tree. No one travels to Manhattan to see this tree.” Except Haskell. And now me.

He had invited me to spend a couple of days with him here. I couldn’t say no, not after what he had accomplished in his first book, The Forest Unseen, a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize and a book that E. O. Wilson called “a new genre of nature writing, located between science and poetry, in which the invisible appear, the small grow large, and the immense complexity and beauty of life are more clearly revealed.” Haskell believes that we live in a world of countless untold stories hiding in plain sight. In Forest, he selected a square meter of forest floor and visited that spot almost daily for a year. That’s the entire book, all 288 pages of it, him staring at the ground. But Haskell leveraged three remarkable strengths—vast scientific knowledge, prodigious literary gifts, and a deeply meditative approach to fieldwork—to extract from that patch of dirt characters, relationships, drama, and universal themes.Ìę

If Haskell could do that in a quiet corner of the forest, I wanted to see what he could come up with on a loud street corner in America’s most frenetic metropolis.Ìę

Wednesday 7:03 p.m.

An attractive blonde in a short skirt walking three terriers stops under the tree to untangle her leashes. I focus on the woman. Haskell focuses on the dogs. One white puffball ­refuses to budge when the woman prepares to resume walking. She coaxes the dog. She jerks the leash. “He’s saying, ‘This is a cool tree,’ ” Haskell says, meaning literally cool. She’s not hearing him. The woman drags the pooch off down the sidewalk.Ìę

Haskell strides over to the tree, bends down, and touches the pavement. “Feel that,” he tells me. The sidewalk is cool, despite temperatures in the nineties. We then walk out to the median in the middle of Broadway and feel the shade-free pavement there. It’s a good 20 degrees hotter than under the tree. “On aver­age, it’s seven degrees warmer in New York City than it is just outside the city, partly because of all these hard surfaces absorbing heat,” he says. “But trees change the weather in a city. They have a significant cooling effect. They save a lot on air-conditioning.”Ìę

7:06 p.m.

Foot traffic is light, probably due to summer vacation. On a normal weekday at this hour, Haskell says the pedestrian flow would nearly flatten us.

“It’s typically a sea of humanity?” I ask.

More like intersecting rivers, he explains. “You’ve got one coming out of the subway and people flowing north and south. There’s a sinkhole with water bubbling up and being drawn back down.” There’s all this fast ­water, and then the area around the tree is a quiet pool to the side.

It’s illegal to obstruct pedestrian trafficÌęin New York City, Haskell tells me, so if people need to stop they will duck under the tree. That links the plant to the city’s sociocultural power dynamics. Haskell calls the area around the tree “gendered and raced space.” Over two years, he has seen dozens of folks stop under the tree to check phones or ­adjust bags. Three-quarters were women of a ­variety of races; of the men, none were white. Most white guys dominate the middle of the sidewalk, yielding to no one. It’s white male privilege, he says, played out on the streetsÌęof New York.

7:22 p.m.

Haskell peers into the canopy. “Note the lack of insect damage,” he says. A native species would support a riot of caterpillars and leaf miners, munching on leaves, fattening up for predatory birds and spiders. But the Bradford pear hails from China, and Haskell explains that as a foreigner it deploys formidable chemical defenses against local herbivores. This tree ended up here for the same reason Bradford pears ended up across the eastern half of the U.S. in the 1960s—­horticulturalists, smitten by the tree’s snowy blossoms, desired an attractive, bug-resistant species for burgeoning suburbs and city beautification projects.Ìę

Government officials now classify the tree as a “woody invasive.” In 2015, when the Million Trees NYC project realized its goal of planting a million new trees, not one was a Bradford pear. “There was an article spread on Facebook describing them as evil,” Haskell says. He’s appalled by this. Obviously, native trees are better for the ecological community. But vilifying the Bradford pear denies the full story of our tree here. For starters, it denies what Haskell calls “ancient biogeographical connections,” meaning that while this tree is considered a foreigner, it’s really not. Millions of years ago, the forests of eastern North America and East Asia were connected, which explains why Bradford pears thrive here. Secondly, human priorities and needs change. “We loved these trees once,” Haskell says. “Now we view them as a massive problem. Isn’t that more about us and our values than it is about this tree?” What will our needs be in 100 years? Corn, he reminds me, is an exotic species. Due to human need, it has decimated most midwestern prairies.Ìę

Haskell is 48, tall and lanky, with a prominent nose and a bearing that is both slightly formal and slightly awkward. His most distinguishing feature is his accent, which is impossible to place. He was born in England, raised in Paris, and educated at Oxford and Cornell, and he spent the past 20 years in Tennessee. As he has mentioned to journalists before, wherever he goes people tell him: “You’re not from here.”

The Songs of Trees is similarly global. The book focuses on 12 individual trees around the world. Along with our Bradford pear, the lineup includes a balsam fir in the backwoods of northwestern Ontario, an ­olive tree at the Damascus Gate in the old city of Jerusalem, and a giant ceibo deep in the Ecuadorean rainforest, a tree that requires a plane, a bus, two boats, and two days to access. There’s a bonsai white pine, two feet tall, that spent its first 350 years in Japan before arriving at the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., in 1976 as a bicentennial gift. There’s a cottonwood sapling in downtown Denver that’s been repeatedly reduced to wood chips by beavers. Haskell’s hazel tree in Scotland is 10,369 years old. It exists as fingernail-size bits of black charcoal stored in carefully ­labeled plastic bags in the Edinburgh offices of a commercial archaeology firm.Ìę

For two years, Haskell visited all these trees multiple times, spending dozens of hours with each. Day and night, through rain and snow, he watched and listened over long, contemplative stretches. Some sessions were less contemplative than others. One time in Ecuador, having climbed ten stories up metal ladders attached to the trunk of his ceibo tree, Haskell was taking in the endless biodiversity around him when a bullet ant stabbed him in the neck. “The pain was like a strike on a bell cast from the purest bronze: clear, metallic, single-toned,” he writes. Dazed, he flailed at his attacker, only to have it carve a chunk out of his left index finger with its powerful jaws. “Unlike the stinger’s purity,” he continues in the book, “this pain was a shriek, a fire, a confusion. Over minutes, the sensation ran across the skin of my hand, a cacophony and panic that soaked the hand in sweat. For the next hour my arm was incapacitated.” ­Similarly, he arrived at his olive tree in Jerusalem on one occasion to find its branches “hung with medical equipment and fluorescent safety vests,” the gear of Palestinian medics antic­ipating violence associated with ­Nakba Day (the “catastrophe” of the founding of Israel). Haskell watched from the tree as security forces slammed into surging protesters, headlocking and dragging several into an armored truck. Still another time, he wandered at night through the dunes of St. Catherines Island off the Georgia coast during a terrifying tropical storm, unable to locate his sabal palm:Ìę

Tonight I discovered that the tree had fallen. Every wave soaks the upturned rootball, and ocean water drowns fronds that, a few days ago, stood atop a nine-meter-tall trunk, lush and vigorous. The fronds were talkative, full of rustle and snap. Now, I hear in them only the detonations and bellow of the sea’s quarrel with the land.

Through all this Haskell extracted stories, tales of conflict and cooperation, of life and death. Consider just one example—ants and fungi. High in the crown of the ceibo lives a parasitic fungus, Ophiocordyceps, that specializes in invading the body of an ant, consuming it from within, and then somehow commanding it, in its final throes, to anchor itself with its mandibles onto a leaf. From this dangling carcass, infectious fungal spores fall onto the ants beneath. But in other instances, ants and fungi enjoy symbiotic relationships. Below the ceibo, fungi growing inside leafcutter colonies receive a steady supply of fresh leaves and in turn provide meals for the ants. These stories, or “songs” in Haskell’s parlance, reveal biological networks—trees networked to ­other trees, to other plants and animals, to the physical world, to the ancient past. Human beings are very much ­integrated into these networks, whether the particular tree is ­located deep in the Amazon or in the heart of Manhattan.Ìę

“Muir said that if you want to experience nature, get the hell out of the city!” Haskell tells me, yelling to be heard over a doubleÌęaccordion bus roaring down Broadway. But the very notion of nature stands as a barrier between people and the rest of the community of life, he insists. Cities should be viewed as no more or less natural than a mountain stream running through the so-called wilderness. Noting the urban chaos surrounding us, Haskell says, loudly, “This city is the product of a species that evolved, an advanced primate, Homo sapiens.” In Haskell’s view, Manhattan can’t be anything but nature.Ìę

We’re starting to draw looks. The guy running the newsstand momentarily leaves his post and stares at us. Then he swigs some water from a bottle, spits it out under the tree, and goes back to selling papers.Ìę

7:26 p.m.

The Seventh Avenue Express throttles through the subway tunnel two stories beneath us. We feel it under our feet. We also watch it on an app on Haskell’s phone, three rippling lines registering the vibration along three dif­ferent axes. Pressure waves are traveling from the rumbling subway cars into the steel and concrete tunnel, through the ground, and into the iron railing that surrounds the tree and on which Haskell’s phone rests. The acceler­ometer inside his phone captures the movement. Our tree is experiencing the same ­vibrations as the railing.Ìę

In response to decades of train reverberation, the tree has pumped major resources into anchorage, he explains. It has fattened and stiffened its roots with more cellulose and lignin. It hugs the earth tighter than most trees in the forest. Hillside trees do something similar, growing stronger roots along whichever axis the wind typically blows. “This tree is taking the vibratory energy of its environment into its body,” Haskell says. The city ­actually becomes part of the tree. In his book, he explains this by subverting Nietzsche: “What does not kill me becomes part of me, erasing another boundary. Flexure of a tree brings within what was outside. Wood is an embodied conversation between plant life [and] shudder of ground.”

7:31 p.m.

A monster dump truck thunders past, grinding its gears. “Did you hear that!” Haskell yells. “Yes!” I yell back. How could I not? “No,” he says. “The sparrows.” The birds are flitting about the tree’s upper branches, swooping down occasionally to fetch crumbs. “I’m hearing the sparrows even though that truck just went by,” he says. “If you planted a spectrogram, it would pick up all the low frequencies, like that truck, and the house sparrows would register above that.” Sparrows and starlings, he explains, move their calls into higher registers to communicate over the urban rumble. Most bird species can’t adapt like that. They lose their acoustic social networks and disappear from urban areas. But sparrows and starlings, along with pigeons, occupy 80 percent of the world’s cities. “Their environment has changed them,” Haskell says.

7:33 P.M.

Haskell considers our Bradford pear. “That tree isn’t an indi­vidual,” he says. “It’s a community.” The same could be said for the seemingly autonomous people zipping by—the bike messenger, the woman texting, the guy with the groceries. Just as Bradford pears and house sparrows have incorporated the city into their beings, so too have people, insists Haskell. “We’ve been yelling and contorting our faces to communicate over the noise,” he says. In his book, he cites other examples. “Pitch and genre of music change our perception of food and wine. A Tchaikovsky waltz 
 evokes a feeling of sophistication on the tongue that is absent when dining with a soundtrack of rock ­music.” Or consider any of New York’s street food, he says. It’s almost always salty or spicy, otherwise you’d ­hardly taste it over the city’s noise and smells. What we think of as inner thoughts and judgments, Haskell says, are very much shaped by external networks. The same rock band performing on this corner would sound louder performing at the same volume in a national park, because we expect national parks to be quieter.Ìę

When he was a boy, Haskell would often sit still near the pond in his backyard and just look at things. “It was my disposition as a kid,” he says. His family moved to Paris from London when Haskell was three, after his father, a physicist, joined the European Space Agency. His mother was a biologist. When Haskell was six, he wrote this story: “Once upon a time there was a golden tadpole and one day he started to grow his hind legs and then he was getting very excitedÌębecause he was growing his front legs and then a few day’s after his tail went in and he was a frog.” His mother, Jean, was impressed. “Most people think the tail falls off,” she says. “But his ­story was absolutely biologically correct.”

At the British School of Paris, Haskell fell in love with Shakespeare, Philip Larkin, and many other poets. But the British education system soon demanded specialization, and he spent his last two years at the school and his time at Oxford immersed exclusively in biology. He wrote his thesis, “Parasites and the maintenance of sexual reproduction in blackberries,” under the tutelage of William Hamilton, one of the foremost evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. At Oxford, Haskell also learned a fair bit from a pet rat named Bisquit. Watching the rodent range freely about his apartment, he observed that rats “are all about social bonds with others. Bisquit had only humans, but rats in the wild live in complex social networks. What one rat learns gets transmitted through the network. A rat community is like a scaly-tailed, hairy super-brain, figuring out where and what is safe.”

At Cornell, Haskell studied ground-­nesting wood warblers. In his Ph.D. research, he found that the reason chicks don’t attract predators with their cries for food is that high-frequency sounds ­travel only short distances in the forest. It was also at Cornell that Haskell learned to meditate. He described what is now a twice-­daily 20-minute practice to me this way:Ìę“I sit, and the mental flotsam passes by, sometimes sweeping me into its tangles, sometimes drifting by observed but notÌęentered. I started because I had a sense that my inner disorder needs a practice of trying to pay attention.”Ìę

After grad school, Haskell took a position at the University of the South, commonly ­referred to as Sewanee. It was a dream job for an ecologist. Perched atop the Cumberland Plateau, Sewanee encompasses 13,000 acres, 91 percent of it undeveloped forestland. Physically, it’s among the largest universities in the country, with the highest diversity of plant species of any campus. Haskell could stroll out of his office and in minutes be in extraordinary old-growth forest.Ìę

In time, Haskell became known at Sewa­nee for his Yoda-like connection to ­nature. “One day I walked out of the science building, and David mentioned that the tree frogs were peeping,” says Marvin Pate, ­formerly Sewa­nee’s director of sustainability. “It was so subtle. I never would have heard them. If I had, I wouldn’t have known what they were.” Another time, Haskell was hiking through the forest with a ­former student, ­Leighton Reid, who directs res­toration-­ecology projects around the world for the Missouri ­Botanical Garden. “He hears something and asks me, ‘Are those katydids?’ ” recalls Reid. “I could barely hear anything. At most it was white noise. And I pay attention to things. I’m in the forest all the time.”Ìę

Haskell hated the boundaries between ­academic disciplines and felt scientists needed the arts and humanities. “He’s a serious biologist, so there’s that scientific side of him,” says Jim Peters, a philosophy professor who co-taught “Ecology and Ethics” with Haskell. “But science as purely objective reasoning, he doesn’t believe that. Science can help us understand, but it’s not pure infallibility. David has an interdisciplinary mind.”Ìę

Haskell sometimes canceled class so that his students could experience distinguished visitors on campus, of any discipline. They watched Buddhist monks create a ­mandala. They listened to pianist ­Jeremy Denk play a concerto. Haskell’s “Food and Hunger” course was a multi-subject free-for-all that incorporated two of his passions, meditation and horticulture. (On one acre, Haskell grew most of the vegetables he consumed, along with raising goats, ducks, chickens, rabbits, and bees.) The course explored the ecological aspects of food production, alongside the historical and social aspects of poverty in nearby rural communities. Students practiced a form of lectio divina, reading aloud about hunger and then reflecting silently on the text. For Thanksgiving, they prepared a meal for 80 needy local residents.Ìę

7:50 p.m.

Haskell shows me some photos. Strolling here today, he had snapped pictures of several tree beds. One shows a trunk surrounded by carefully placed pieces of broken brickwork and creeping ivy. Another has miniature white plastic fencing enclosing what appears to be marijuana growing around the tree. The photos delight Haskell. “These are stories of how people are connected to their trees,” he says. The bed beneath our tree is tended by the management of the apartment building on this block, the Belmont. Studies show that the survival rate for trees cared for by neighborhoods in the city is 100 percent, whereas trees that are planted by municipal workers and left on their own have a 60 percent chance of dying within a decade. “Literally, the life of this tree depends on its connection to the community,” Haskell says.

It’s a two-way relationship. Haskell ­presses his hand against the trunk and shows me his sooty palm. The tree is filtering the air. Annu­ally, the city’s five million trees remove 2,000 tons of air pollutants and 40,000 tons of carbon dioxide. New York’s tree-planting program now consults maps of asthma hospitalization rates and tree cover in determining which blocks to revegetate.Ìę

8:06 p.m.

The howling starts.

A gentleman with wild eyes and terribly mismatched clothes is slouching across Broadway from the other side, coming straight at a group of women who have just exited a yoga class. The racket he’s producing contains hints of melodic content, but only hints, like someone singing the blues while getting his prostate checked. For their part, the yogis scatter like billiard balls on the break.Ìę

Haskell segues into some ecological play-by-play: “With social networking, you’ve got all sorts of people manifesting in different ways of being. It’s like the interaction between tree roots and fungi. There are a lot of social interactions, but there’s also an immune system. If someone seems threatening, you’re going to close off. What we’re seeing here mirrors what a root is doing when it’s conversing with fungi. It’s open to conversation. In fact, it will die without conversation, without connection. But if you’re open to any kind of connection, you’re going to get exploited. A tree root would get overrun with pathogenic fungi and soon die.”

Haskell just compared the singing drunkÌęto a deadly fungus.Ìę

8:16 p.m.

Haskell’s eyes dart skyward. “That high-pitched call,” he says. “Kestrel.”Ìę

I hear nothing. I look up in time to glimpse a black comma soaring high over 86th Street, heading toward Central Park.Ìę

Haskell’s not an overly emotional guy, but I can tell he’s completely jacked up. In two years of observations here, he has spotted exactly five faunal species: house sparrows, starlings, pigeons, one high-flying red-tailed hawk, and one seemingly lost warbler. Kestrels are cavity nesters, so he wonders if someone has ­erected kestrel boxes in Central Park. “A kestrel is ­another dimension to the story of this tree, but on a different scale,” he says. “It’s like connecting a strand from the tree to wherever the bird is headed. It speaks to my excitement of flight. It’s flying over the city and seeing the buildings from above.”

In 2004, on a cold January morning, Haskell hiked into Sewanee’s Shakerag Hollow, wandered off-trail, and stopped only when he found a flat slab of sandstone to sit on. Internally, Haskell had reached a crossroads. He could continue publishing papers with names like “Phylogenetic analysis of threatened and range-restricted limestone specialists in the land snail genus Anguispira” that few people read. Or he could try something that accessed more parts of who he is. For some time he had maintained a poetry blog, posting a new haiku every day. And of course he had his meditation practice. What if he combined these three strands—science, meditation, and creative writing? What if he did that right here, in this exact spot in the forest? What might he create?Ìę

He had no idea. But it felt right.Ìę

Haskell determined to return to this spot over and over. He would come with no agenda, conduct no experiments, collect no specimens. He would simply pay attention. He would later augment his observations with library research. He began calling the meter-square area of ground in front of his rock his “forest mandala,” supposing that, just as Buddhist monks believe that the ­entire universe can be seen through a small circle of colored sand, so too are a forest’s ecological stories all present in a mandala-size area of ground.Ìę

What’s striking about the essays Haskell subsequently produced aren’t necessarily the passages on horsehair worms commandeering the bodies of unsuspecting crickets, or the role of natural selection in shaping our fear of copperheads. That stuff is wonderfully weird and mind-blowing, as is the scene in late January when Haskell almost gets hypothermia after stripping naked at the mandala to compare his body’s reaction to the freezing temperature with that of the Carolina chickadee. But the project’s real juice flows from his treatment of the least appreciated inhabitants of the mandala—the algae, the fungi, the bacteria. Here’s a passage from the book about lichen:Ìę

Lichens don’t cling to water as plants and animals do. A lichen body swells on damp days, then puckers as the air dries.
 This approach to life has been independently discovered by others.ÌęIn the fourth century BCE, the Chinese Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi wrote of an old man tossed in the tumult at the base of a tall waterfall. Terrified onlookers rushed to his aid, but the man emerged unharmed and calm. When asked how he could survive this ordeal, he replied “acquiescence.
 I accommodate myself to the water, not the water to me.” ­Lichens found this wisdom four hundred million years before the Taoists. The true masters of victory through submission in Zhangzi’s allegory were the lichens clinging to the rock walls around the waterfall.

Nobody had ever heard of Haskell when Viking published The Forest Unseen in 2012, but soon people were comparing him to Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold. The book won a National Academy of Sciences Award, and along with being short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize, it was runner-up for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. “I started reading it and thought, Oh no, another concept-driven book,” says Tom Levenson, a Pulitzer judge and professor of science writing at MIT. “The fear is that the author lays out this very clever premise and it won’t work. And it’s a really constrained premise, one square meter of ground. But he extracts an enormous amount of meaning from that by using incredibly precise poetic language.”Ìę

Forest was translated into nine languages, including Latvian and two forms of Chinese. Ultimately, the book helped land Haskell a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, providing him funding for his next project—­listening to trees.Ìę

Haskell was interested in arboreal acoustics—wind rustling through branches, raindrops falling on leaves, woodpeckers hammering bark—and what they indicate about ecosystem networks. But he also saw trees as characters that could provide access to the stories of different landscapes across the globe. The overriding theme, as it had been in Forest, was connection and relationships, but this time Haskell wanted to explore how humans fit into these networks, both in places where they seemed absent but weren’t (the Amazon) and in places where nature seemed absent but wasn’t (Manhattan). If people were as connected to the community of life as other organisms, what did that say about the kind of environmental ethic humans should have?Ìę

Of course, the idea of listening to a treeÌęis a little weird, especially if you ­stumble unknowingly upon Haskell doing it. In 2013, Rebecca Hannigan, then a Sewanee sophomore with no knowledge of Haskell’s upcoming tree book, attended the school’s island-ecology field camp on St. Catherine's. Haskell was there to teach but occasionally stole away to visit a particular sabal palm, one of his 12 chosen trees. Late one afternoon, Hannigan spied Haskell alone behind the dunes, holding an audio-­recording device beneath the tree. “He was talking into it, then holding it up to the tree, like he was interviewing it and expecting a response,” Hannigan recalls. “It was odd.”

Thursday 8:40 a.m.

“That guy in the green shirt,” Haskell says, “that’s Stanley.” A 70-year-old African-­American man is glad-handing his way down the sidewalk. For most of the year except summer, Stanley Bethea sells children’s books from under the shade of our tree.Ìę

“How ya doin’?” Bethea says, recognizing Haskell. “The tree sure looks good, don’t it?”

“It does,” says Haskell.

Bethea can’t chat long. Kids are clamoring after him. “They get very upset if I don’t speak to them!” he says.

Had he stayed, Bethea could have told us everything that’s blooming in the city right now—the crape myrtles, hydrangeas, hibiscus, everything. “He’s tuned in to the flowering rhythms of this place,” Haskell says. “He’s been around a long time.”Ìę

Ultimately, Haskell contends that guys like Bethea—not academics like himself, or Sierra Club activists, or Washington bureaucrats—are best positioned to make good judgments about landscapes and ecosystems. Bethea is a deeply rooted member of this ecological community, as are the neighborhood folks caring for Manhattan’s street trees. They have a mature sense of ecological aesthetics based on belonging, and their ethic will stem from what they view as beautiful and whole. At his olive tree in Jerusalem, Haskell found Bethea’s counterparts in Israeli and Palestinian olive farmers. At his ceibo tree in Ecuador, it was the Waorani Indians. “Embodied, lived experiences within the community of life seems like a pretty good guide to me,” he says.

8:45 a.m.
A small white butterfly flits by. Haskell is stunned. “I’ve never seen a butterfly here,” he says. It’s nothing more than a garden-­variety cabbage white, but you’d think he’d just spotted an elusive snow leopard. We’re still digesting this historic wildlife sighting when I happen to look up and notice three geese passing overhead.

“No, cormorants,” Haskell corrects me. “Double-crested cormorants! Those are fish-hunting birds. They must be feeding in the rivers.”

Haskell can barely contain himself. There’s a direct connection between the city’s trees and the Hudson and East Rivers, he explains. Roughly half of New York’s sewer system combines sewer and storm runoff, so traditionally, during heavy rains, untreated sewage would back up into the rivers. But trees slow rainwater and divert it into the soil. The city’s increased tree cover, combined with sewer improvements, has cleaned up the rivers significantly. There are more fish now, and thus more cormorants.Ìę

“In two days we’ve nearly doubled our species count at the tree,” Haskell says, delighted. He stares at the sky in wonder. We watch the cormorants fly toward the Hudson, until they disappear behind tall buildings.

The post David Haskell Speaks for the Trees appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

One Sunday afternoon last November, Michelle Barbieri, a wildlife veterinarian with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, received word of a Hawaiian monk seal in distress in a harbor near Oahu's Waikiki Beach. The animal was “logging,” or drifting aimlessly, rather than chasing fish, flopping around on the beach, or doing any of the happy-go-lucky things associated with a nearly two-year-old monk seal. Such reports were not unusual for Barbieri. As the chief medical staffer with NOAA’s Pearl Harbor–based Hawaiian Monk Seal Research Program, she monitors the health of the species’s 1,300 individuals, the most critically endangered marine mammals in the United States, all of them found in the waters around Hawaii. She receives updates from dozens of beach-roaming volunteers who serve as her eyes and ears across the islands.

Barbieri recognized the juvenile female logging in Ala Wai Harbor as RN36, the identifier on the tag attached to her tail flipper. But the volunteers called her Uilani, “Heavenly Beauty,” and she was something of a celebrity. The New Hope Canoe Club had adopted her as its unofficial mascot, both for her goofy antics and for her possible spiritual significance. When she appeared beneath a double rainbow at the club’s outrigger-canoe-blessing ceremony, some called her an aumakua, a deified ancestor providing the team good fortune.

Barbieri reviewed video of Uilani logging and considered the dangers monk seals face: Had someone fed her and made her ill? Had she swallowed a fishhook or been thwacked by a propeller? The next day, Barbieri’s team captured Uilani and trucked her to NOAA’s monk seal facility, where they took X-rays and drew blood. As Barbieri ruled out various maladies—no fishhook, no shark bite, no boat-related trauma—the vet began entertaining her worst fear: toxoplasmosis. The disease is caused by a parasitic protozoan, Toxoplasma gondii, and the resulting body-wide tissue inflammation means excruciating pain for the patient, followed by certain death. There is no treatment. Barbieri had flashbacks to RB24, another seal suffering from toxo a few months earlier. That case delivered a double blow to species conservation. Before triggering massive organ failure in RB24, toxo caused the pregnant seal to abort her late-term fetus.

Three days later, Uilani too was dead. A necropsy confirmed toxo.

The demise of Uilani rattled Barbieri and her boss, Charles Littnan, the program’s lead scientist. Her death was the third from toxo in 12 months—not counting RB24’s fetus—and the eighth since 2001. Those numbers are significant when your population is declining each year in the face of global warming and other perils. Now toxo was nailing females of pup-bearing age.

There was something else about toxo that made it especially creepy, in a Walking Dead kind of way. For starters, the perpetrating protozoa, T. gondii, can sexually reproduce only in the gut of a felid, a member of the cat family. An infected felid excretes the protozoa in the form of microscopic oocysts, and a single felid can poop out hundreds of millions of oocysts, although only one is needed to infect another animal. If a rat then consumes an oocyst, the protozoa can take over the rat’s brain and make it lose all fear of cats. Studies report toxo-infected rats cavorting in cat urine. Cats consume such rats easily, enabling T. gondii to replicate again.

Barbieri and Littnan had no evidence that toxo was zombifying monk seal brains. Rather, the seals seemed to be collateral damage in an evolutionary death match among cats, rats, and T. gondii. But that was another mysterious thing about toxo—plenty of insect, bird, fish, and mammal species could acquire and carry toxo oocysts without manifesting any symptoms whatsoever. Why toxo killed monk seals nobody really knew. Nor did they know why, beyond Hawaii, toxo killed sea otters, spinner dolphins, kangaroos, and even humans. An estimated 23 percent of Americans have had toxo, and in some countries that figure reaches 95 percent. Occasionally, it produces muscle aches and other flu-like symptoms, and even more occasionally it can cause blindness and epilepsy in newborns, behavioral changes in adults, and increased miscarriages in pregnant women. For people with compromised immune systems, toxo can be fatal.

When I meet Barbieri and Littnan in Honolulu after Uilani’s death, we discuss the fact that Hawaii has no native felids. What Hawaii does have is feral house cats, lots of them. By some calculations, Oahu alone has 350,000, but Littnan calls that a “gross underestimate.” His program struggles to accurately count 400-pound seals on the beach. “Cats are small, elusive predators living in the forest,” he says. “And there’s been no systematic effort to count them.” Whatever their number, they produce billions of oocysts, and these wash down watersheds and into the ocean, where seals consume them through the food chain. “There’s a lot we don’t know,” says Littnan. “What we do know is that cats poop and monk seals die. You’re only going to reduce toxo by reducing the definitive hosts—cats.”

It’s dusk when I pull into a county park on the island of Kauai, and cats materialize immediately. A gray tabby approaches warily from the shadows and parks itself 15 feet to my left. An orange cat squats off to my right, stares at me, then craps on the pavement. In seconds this pair becomes six cats, then ten. When Basil and Sue Scott arrive in a small SUV, even more cats slink forward. Basil works as an electrical engineer, and Sue is a retired graphic artist. But this evening they’re in volunteer mode for the (KCCP), a nonprofit that cares for feral colonies on the island, with Basil serving as president. Sue, 71, has short red hair, and Basil, 61, has a salt-and-pepper beard and intense hazel eyes. We strap on headlamps, and Basil retrieves a five-gallon bucket of wet cat food from the vehicle. “Let’s go,” he says.

We troop across a field toward a stand of trees, Sue yelping, “Here, kitty kitty!” Glowing eyes appear everywhere. Had T. S. Eliot been juiced up on meth and YouTube cat videos, even he couldn’t have imagined the circus awaiting us in those woods: fat cats, skinny cats, black cats, spotted cats, darting in and out of the light, tearing through the undergrowth, rubbing against my jeans, sharpening claws on tree trunks, swirling about Basil. I count 50—no, 53. It’s hard to tell with all the coming and going. “There are 45 cats here!” Basil declares definitively, perturbed by my overestimation. How can he know? It’s raining cats. He and Sue begin spooning great globs of food onto plastic plates scattered about the forest. Cats swoop in, boxing each other out, hissing, gobbling up the smelly victuals as soon as the Scotts can slop them onto the plates. They introduce me around. I meet Forest and Badass. I meet Fluffy Tail. “This Siamese is new,” Sue says, examining a recent arrival that’s likely been abandoned. Grub distributed, we exit the forest with a dozen cats still swarming about our feet and parade to the next feeding station, 30 yards away, to shovel out more food.

There are an estimated 20,000 feral cats on Kauai, and Basil insists that the best way to manage them and reduce their numbers is through a practice called TNR—trap, neuter, return. TNR requires caregivers to feed a colony regularly and make sure all members are sterilized, which means trapping each one individually, having it fixed by a vet, then returning it to the colony. Over time, through natural attrition, a TNR colony should disappear or dramatically decrease in size, or so the theory goes. The great thing about TNR, Basil assures me as we schlep through the woods, is that it suppresses not only cat numbers but also cat predation on wildlife, since a fed cat is less likely to hunt. He reckons that 3,000 cats are under TNR management on Kauai. His organization monitors 25 colonies, and he says that 90 percent of those cats are fixed. “It’s hard to get them all,” he admits. “People are constantly abandoning cats. That’s the major problem.” (It might explain why Oahu, with nearly a million human residents, has substantially more feral cats than Kauai, which has just over 70,000 people.)

We visit a colony on the other side of the park, and Basil points to a nearby hotel. The parking lot there is a dumping ground for unwanted pet cats, and they keep streaming into his colonies. “The hotel won’t let us on their property,” he grumbles. “They say they want them gone. Well, they’d be gone if they’d let us spay and neuter!” He’s equally bitter about a grocery store that stopped him from feeding cats in the parking lot. Basil and Sue tried to attract those cats to a neighboring field, but locals ran them off, too. Now they feed the colony by luring cats through a hole in a fence behind an adjacent fast-food restaurant. Basil shakes his head. “These people just don’t get it.”

The other people who just don’t get it, apparently, are scientists.

Three weeks before I arrived, in March, state legislators held a hearing on a bill introduced by Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) that feeding feral cats on state land. Senate Bill 2450 received support from scientists and conservationists across the country. The case they made in favor of a ban seemed compelling. For starters, there’s not one scientifically verified instance of TNR ever eliminating a cat colony anywhere, not in more than 30 years of practice. Then you’ve got the peer-reviewed studies, lots of them, showing that cats continue to hunt even when fed. Add to that toxo’s deadly effect on monk seals and at least two species of Hawaiian birds. Plus, all of this is happening in Hawaii, where 78 percent of extinctions in the U.S. have occurred. More than half the state’s 130 native bird species are gone, and most of those that remain are endangered. “Approaches like TNR are ultimately designed to keep cats on the landscape, not to reduce their population,” wrote Chris Lepczyk, an ecologist at Auburn University, in the Honolulu Star Advertiser. “Cats are neither wildlife nor part of Hawaiian ecosystems; by any scientific standard, they are an invasive species.” And they should be managed, he argues, like rats, mongoose, and feral pigs, all introduced species that have devastated Hawaii’s native wildlife.

But rats, mongoose, and pigs don’t have well-funded support groups. Cats do. On the of the Hawaiian Humane Society, TNR supporters called S.B. 2450 “evil” and insisted that its authors were “involved with the devil.” When state lawmakers invited public comment at a meeting in February, more than 100 cat advocates flooded the legislative hearing room and delivered two hours of emotional testimony. One woman explained that she lovingly cared for 400 feral cats. She didn’t want politicians starving her kitties to death. Lawmakers killed the legislation.

Had it become law, S.B. 2450 would have clarified the muddled legal situation regarding feral cats in Hawaii. On federal and state lands, officials have the authority to euthanize cats that harm wildlife, but with limited resources they target out-of-the-way wilderness areas abundant in high-priority species. They don’t focus on parks and beaches abundant in picnicking families. “You’ve got a big public interface at those places,” one state biologist told me. “You start talking about killing cats, people get upset.” At the municipal level, cities like Honolulu have ordinances against feeding cats in certain parks, but they’ve tolerated TNR colonies pretty much everywhere.

After the senate bill’s death, attention shifted from the statehouse on Oahu to Kauai, where an unusual process was unfolding. The island’s county council had decided to tackle its feral-cat problem head-on, assembling a task force to investigate the issue and then a committee to draft an ordinance based on its findings. With more species of endangered birds on the island than in the rest of Hawaii, species found nowhere else, Kauai has been dubbed Noah’s Ark. A lot was at stake. If Kauai got it right, the ordinance might serve as a model for the entire state.

I arrived on Kauai as the drafting of the ordinance, a year in the making, was careening toward an uncertain end. Everyone was pissed off, including Basil, the committee member at the center of the escalating vitriol. Before I part ways with him and Sue at the park, he tells me that, despite his best-faith efforts, the ordinance process has been a disaster, and the committee had it in for feral cats from the start. He’s not optimistic that TNR will be allowed to continue. But that doesn’t mean he’s giving up. “The alternative is killing cats, and that will build resentment and anger on this island,” he insists, before leaving me with this: “Believe me, there’s a bunch of junkyard dogs out there ready to pounce. We will bare our fangs and make life very difficult for them. My side is famous for that.”

The domestic cat, Felis catus, like all domestic species, has no native geographical range. It goes where we go, and ever since it evolved from the Near Eastern wildcat 9,500 years ago in the Middle East’s Fertile Crescent, it has been on the move. Cats spread across Europe with the expanding Roman Empire as both pets and mousers, and they reached China via the Silk Road 2,000 years ago. With the establishment of European trade routes and settlements in the 1700s, cats began crisscrossing the Pacific on rat-infested ships as indispensable crew members. By the 1800s, cats occupied islands throughout the Pacific. Prolific breeders, with females capable of producing two litters a year—up to six kittens per litter—they quickly metastasized. From the handful that reached Hawaii with European explorers, the population expanded so much that Mark Twain described their abundance in Honolulu in 1866 as “companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats, millions of cats.”

This global diaspora has exacted a gruesome toll. Felis catus has contributed to 14 percent of modern bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions. In the U.S., where the number of feral cats is ultimately unknown (some scientists speculate that the population rivals that of pet cats, roughly 86 million), the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute estimated that cats kill 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals annually. The problem is most severe in warm-weather areas plentiful in endangered species, like California and Florida, although Hawaii’s situation dwarfs all others.

Toxoplasmosis has added a scary new dimension, and not just for monk seals. Starting in 1993, with only 12 Hawaiian crows, or alala, left in the wild, scientists released 27 captive-raised birds tagged for satellite tracking in a last-ditch effort to rejuvenate the population. But 21 of them died over the next five years, at least five from toxo. The remaining tagged birds were returned to captivity. The last known wild alala disappeared in 2002.

To fully appreciate how cats have affected every inch of Hawaii, I spend a day trudging up a ridge through the jungle in a steady drizzle with Andre Raine, the Kauai Endangered Seabird Recovery Project coordinator. There’s not much of a trail, and we need ropes to traverse the mud-slicked vertical bits. But we arrive at the edge of a 4,000-foot cliff in the Hono O Na Pali Natural Area Reserve, one of the most inaccessible spots on the island. It is in these soaring cliffsides that Newell’s shearwaters, an endangered species numbering fewer than 40,000 birds, dig their six-foot-deep, subterranean burrows. Equally endangered Hawaiian petrels dig their burrows atop the ridgeline just above these cliffs. We install motion-activated video cameras at several of these holes, giving Raine the ability to monitor bird activity during the upcoming nesting season.

Later, in his office, we watch footage from last season. In one video, a gray tabby waltzes up to the camera, sniffs around, then dives into the burrow. It drags out a Newell’s chick and, pinning it with its front claws, rips it to pieces with its teeth. The next night it returns and similarly destroys an adult. At one point during this slaughter, the cat stops and looks directly into the camera for a second, its chin smeared with gore, feathers dangling from a corner of its mouth, kinda like, “What the fuck are you going to do about it?” Adding insult, the tabby later moved into the burrow and birthed four kittens. “I have footage of them going into other burrows,” Raine says. “She’s teaching them how to hunt.” In 2014 and 2015, Raine’s team discovered the bodies of 48 Newell’s shearwaters and Hawaiian petrels killed by cats in the reserve.

In backcountry areas like this, rangers target cats with fast-acting kill traps, or they live-trap and then shoot them in the head (methods deemed humane by the American Veterinary Medical Association). What’s never been attempted on Kauai, or anywhere in Hawaii, is an island-wide eradication effort, which isn’t to say that such efforts haven’t been successful on islands elsewhere. They have, on at least 83. Those campaigns rendered islands cat-free byÌęemploying some combination of leg-hold traps, cage traps, dogs, poison, hunting, fumigation in holes, and, according to one scientific article published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), “clubbing with sticks.” The article also notes that 19 campaigns did not succeed, listing such reasons for failure as “staff at the resort hid cats in their rooms” and “unable to kill animals faster than they reproduced.” After many of the successful campaigns, however, bird species returned or were reintroduced to the cat-free islands.

Unlike global warming, deforestation, or any of the intractable problems decimating global biodiversity, scientists actually view the feral-cat dilemma as low-hanging fruit, a potentially easy thing to fix that could help wildlife significantly. Unfortunately, even if Kauai’s rugged terrain didn’t make island-wide cat eradication nearly impossible, the IUCN article notes that, along with funding problems, “social issues appear to be the main factor limiting many eradications occurring.”

To comprehend Basil Scott’s pugnacious opposition to cat eradication, it helps to understand the rapidly expanding national TNR movement he desperately wants Kauai to join. There are an estimated 250,000 practitioners of TNR in the U.S. At least 430 municipalities have officially embraced the practice, including big cities such as Jacksonville, Florida, and San Jose, California. The crusade is led by several well-funded nonprofits like Alley Cat Allies and Best Friends Animal Society, the latter receiving $80 million in contributions in 2015, including donations from industry giants PetSmart and Petco. PetSmart Charities has given tens of millions to animal-welfare groups, and it has supported workshops on how to lobby local governments to adopt TNR.

The message pedaled by this movement can seem enticing to local governments looking to do right by their feral cats. Given that more than 1.5 million cats are euthanized in shelters each year, the mantra on the Best Friends website must seem heaven-sent: “In the long term, TNR lowers the number of cats in the community more effectively than trap-and-kill.” And it calls TNR “the humane alternative.”

Before Scott commandeered the TNR mantle on Kauai, the island’s main feral-cat advocate was a woman named Margaret Hanson, president of an organization called Kauai Ferals, to which both Basil and Sue belonged. In 2011, Hanson appeared before the Kauai County Council and urged members to endorse TNR. Not surprisingly, the council balked. Previously, the county had pled guilty in federal court to failing to protect Newell’s shearwaters, a plea that, among other things, led to a ban on nighttime high school football games, to the seething displeasure of almost everyone. (Stadium lights confuse Newell’s fledglings and cause them to fall from the sky, making them easy pickings for cats.) With those legal troubles fresh in their minds, the council members decided to consider more aggressive action.

The Kauai Feral Cat Task Force first met in 2013, and Hanson was asked to participate. Hanson, 59, a gracious and practical woman, quickly found common ground with wildlife advocates on the task force. This didn’t sit well with folks in her own organization. As it was, she already had philosophical differences with Basil and Sue. Hanson had come to view the Scotts’ approach to TNR as flawed. For the method to work, to make cat colonies disappear, Hanson felt that all new arrivals (abandoned cats, new litters of kittens) must be removed permanently. You had to take them to shelters, some of which practice euthanasia. “Over time, Sue grew more impassioned that every cat needs to be saved,” Hanson says. “She and Basil were running open-air shelters, not TNR colonies. They were stockpiling cats.” Hanson says their colonies were increasing in size, not decreasing.

This tension culminated one day in a vote by the Kauai Ferals board on whether to remove newly abandoned cats from colonies and take them to the Kauai Humane Society, the island’s only shelter. As an open shelter, KHS accepts all animals and euthanizes cats that aren’t reclaimed or adopted. No-kill shelters, on the other hand, don’t euthanize, but they do turn animals away, which can lead to them cherry-picking the most adoptable cats. The no-kill movement works hand in hand with the TNR movement, with groups like Alley Cat Allies promoting no-kill. “Alley Cat Allies says you should remove newly abandoned cats from established colonies,” Hanson says. But “the dirty little secret,” she continues, is that many of those cats aren’t wanted by no-kill shelters. “What happens to old cats and sick cats if the shelter doesn’t take them?” Hanson voted in favor of taking cats to KHS. Everyone else on the Kauai Ferals board voted against. As a result, Hanson quit the organization she had founded. Basil Scott took over and renamed the group the Kauai Community Cat Project.

Meanwhile, the Kauai Feral Cat Task Force issued its final report in 2014. It recommended a goal of zero feral cats on the island by 2025. To get there, it advocated a robust, county-operated TNR program with all colonies registered and monitored by certified managers. New litters and arrivals would be promptly removed for adoption or euthanasia. Registered colonies on private land would need permission from the property owner. After 2020, all colonies would be relocated to private property and then fenced off completely.

The recommendations frustrated Scott. He blamed Hanson for capitulating to the wildlife crowd. “Margaret never argued a single point,” he says. Scott viewed Hanson as more than just a lousy advocate. In his view, she was one of the worst things a person can be—a cat murderer. After Hanson left the organization, Scott alleges that, out of spite, she trapped five cats from one of the colonies she was managing and brought them to the Kauai Humane Society, where four were euthanized. When I tell Hanson this, she produces a weary sigh and says: “Basil and Sue are going to say whatever they want. That’s what they do. I am not going down that hole with them.”

I agree to meet Basil Scott one morning for a run along Kauai’s east coast, although I have some trepidation. Scott’s not the type to do anything less than full bore, and despite middle age he’s trim and taut and competes in masters-level races around the country, having run cross-country for Duke University when he studied electrical engineering there in the 1970s. But he wants to show me something, so he keeps it in first gear as we hoof it south from the Kapaa public library along an ocean-side trail.

“This is all supposed to be critical bird habitat,” he scoffs as we run. “It’s a joke!” We lope past manicured lawns, past hotel gardeners with weed whackers, past ten women on yoga mats on a grassy rise, all of them in warrior pose, gazing out to sea. Scott stops briefly at a putting green. “Do you see any birds in those holes?” he asks, pointing at the miniature flags. “Wedge-tailed shearwaters nest in burrows in the ground. But I don’t see any wedge-tailed shearwaters, do you? Not in those holes. Ha!”

Scott unfolds a small color-coded map of Kauai entitled “Sensitive Bird Habitats 2015.” Included among such habitats is the area where we’re currently running. The map is the work of the committee Scott sits on, charged with drafting a county ordinance based on the findings of the Kauai Feral Cat Task Force (which, to be clear, Scott didn’t sit on, and whose recommendations he despises). The map indicates that most of Kauai is sensitive bird habitat, a notion that Scott finds preposterous. “The conservationists on the committee literally argue that the Walmart parking lot should be designated a wildlife conservation area,” he says. “It’s unreal.”

One of Scott’s main arguments is that feral cats living in remote areas are different than those living in or near towns. The well-fed “community cats”—as Scott calls them—in places like where we’re running simply aren’t the wildlife-destroying menace that their jungle cousins are. Sure, he says, remove the bloodthirsty kitties from remote mountaintops, but leave the town cats alone. If, through some fate of twisted mapmaking, town areas get labeled “sensitive bird habitat” (he acknowledges that our running route and the Walmart parking lot have been so labeled because they are fall-out areas for Newell’s shearwaters), then TNR is needed more than ever. That’s his other big argument—TNR works. Despite what Margaret Hanson says, Scott claims that his colonies have all decreased in size over the years. It’s hard to reduce them more than 50 percent, he admits, because of constant dumping, but you can’t blame that on TNR. “We need a public education campaign on responsible pet ownership,” he says, “not an eradication campaign.”

More curious is his next argument—cats aren’t the main driver of toxoplasmosis. “The parasite sexually reproduces in cats,” he concedes, “but it also asexually reproduces in other species.” For example, he tells me that a couple of years ago, a nearby sewage-treatment plant overflowed into the ocean. “Toxo was in it, because people have toxo,” he says. “That dumped at least a couple of years’ worth into the environment.”

The problem with Scott’s arguments—aside from the pet-abandonment issue, which everyone agrees needs addressing—is that the majority of the evidence doesn’t support them. “Basil’s an engineer, so he knows all the lingo,” says Bill Lucey, who heads up the Kauai Invasive Species Committee and also sits on the ordinance-writing committee with Scott. “But basically he takes a lie and he repeats it over and over. ‘TNR works, TNR works, TNR works,’ like if he says it enough it will come true.”

Consider that analyzed TNR in two Florida county parks for a year, “Trap/Neuter/Release Methods Ineffective in Controlling Domestic Cat ‘Colonies’ on Public Lands,” which appeared in Natural Areas Journal in 2003. Researchers found that reductions in cat numbers were offset by new arrivals, both abandoned cats and strays lured by the food. During the study period, they observed that 47 of 128 cats at the two parks were new arrivals, along with 36 dumped kittens. But rather than conclude that dumping had undermined TNR, the researchers determined that the “high number of cats and kittens that were dumped 
 confirms that the establishment of cat colonies on public lands with unrestricted access encourages illegal dumping of cats.” In other words, the TNR colony likely caused the dumping. TNR fails to reduce cat colonies, the researchers concluded.

Such studies are numerous. Research on a TNR colony in London showed no population decrease after four years. A study on a countywide program in San Diego showed no decrease after ten years. Scientists in Rome found a 16 to 32 percent decrease in population size across 103 colonies after ten years but concluded that TNR was “a waste of time, energy, and money if abandoned cats couldn’t be stopped.” In 2002, after determining that TNR doesn’t work and harms wildlife, the U.S. Navy on all installations.

As for Scott’s contention that colonies near human habitation are relatively harmless, such cats are regularly accused of avian massacres on Kauai. In the summer of 2013, cats killed 60 wedge-tailed shearwaters near popular Shipwrecks Beach, the carnage stopping only after officials removed a nearby feral-cat feeding station. From 2012 to 2015, officials at Hanalei National Wildlife Refuge collected the cat-ravaged carcasses of 237 endangered waterbirds. Many were found at the northern end of the refuge, which is located across the street from a shopping center, a fire station, condos, and a population of strays fed by nearby residents. (Scott says there’s no hard proof linking colony cats to bird deaths in the Hanalei refuge.)

Finally, toxoplasmosis. Like evolution and global warming, there’s no legitimate debate here. Without cats, say scientists, toxo cannot harm monk seals. “Only cats release it in their feces,” says Barbieri, the NOAA veterinarian. “Infected humans, pigs, seals—whatever the species, if it’s not a felid, the infection exists only in the tissues of their body. It does not make eggs and isn’t excreted in the feces of any other species.” To sum up: if I had toxo, a monk seal could get it only by eating me, not my poop.

The Ph.D.’s and other wildlife experts on the ordinance-writing committee explained this to Scott repeatedly in meetings, to no avail. They all complained to me that Scott was clearly using a different playbook.

“He filibusters and obfuscates,” says Hob Osterlund of the Kauai Albatross Network.

“It’s the same strategy climate deniers use,” says Lucey.

“His initials are ‘B.S.,’ ” says Makaala Kaaumoana, of Hanalei Watershed Hui. “Don’t think we don’t use that.”

Scott denies employing any of these tactics. Nonetheless, he could have had a supporter on the committee in Penny Cistaro, director of the Kauai Humane Society and a TNR sympathizer, had he not helped lead a withering—yet unsuccessful—public campaign to have her fired from the KHS. Cistaro has the unfortunate task of overseeing the euthanizing of several hundred cats each year, which she finds gut-wrenching. But Scott, who wants the KHS to end euthanasia, calls her the “queen of kill.” “Basil has made my life hell,” Cistaro says.

In countering Scott’s argument that TNR is more humane than euthanasia, Cistaro and the rest of the committee had an unexpected ally—People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA loathes TNR. It views euthanasia as unfortunate but necessary. In graphic detail, its website lists the tragedies that have befallen feral cats across the country. In Doylestown, Pennsylvania, for example, a feral cat had to be put down after it was found with framing nails in the top of its head. In Elkhorn, Nebraska, a homeless kitten was discovered with its leg frozen to a storm drain. A vet had to amputate the limb. In Pittsburgh, a man was arrested after spraying bleach in the faces of two feral cats and then beating them to death with a hockey stick. This horror show continues on PETA’s website for 56 pages.

As the ordinance committee reviewed the evidence on TNR, Scott could see the writing on the wall. The committee determined that most of Kauai’s 57 known feral colonies were too close to sensitive bird areas. In fact, there seemed to be few places not on private land suitable to relocate a colony. The committee set about establishing the strict rules regarding where and how TNR could occur.

Realistically, though, it didn’t matter if Scott lost on the science. All he needed to do was elicit outrage from his group’s members and those of other pro-cat organizations in Hawaii; ultimately, the county council would hold public hearings on the ordinance, probably in the fall. Perhaps in preparation for that, Scott began providing TNR groupies with red meat. One KCCP Facebook post compared conservationists to Hitler and the killing of “outdoor community cats” to the Holocaust. In a front-page story in Kauai’s daily newspaper, The Garden Island, Scott alleged that the ordinance-committee meetings were being “held in secret.” Although the committee chairperson explained that the group needed freedom to brainstorm ideas, the paper sided with Scott in a subsequent editorial and wondered if the committee was hatching “extreme, drastic ideas.” Then there was the KCCP post alleging that Lucey’s team, the Kauai Invasive Species Committee (KISC), could steal onto private property to confiscate peoples’ pet cats. Facebook mayhem ensued. “They have no idea of the passionate and dedicated cat advocate warriors they are dealing with!” howled one respondent. Others threatened violence. “They come on my property and there will be NO warning shot!!” posted one woman. Another declared, “Over my dead body. Time to get a gun.” That last response came from Martha Girdany, the vice president of the KCCP.

Lucey was furious. His crew works door-to-door across Kauai to identify and remove invasive species of all kinds, and he accesses private property only with owner permission. “These are violent threats from unstable people with guns,” he says. “We’re rolling into people’s yards in KISC trucks. If we get one of these cat folks who’s been up all night reading Basil’s posts, that’s a potentially dangerous situation.” At the next committee meeting he got in Scott’s face. “Don’t you dare threaten my people again, understand?” he said. “You take that post down.” is still up.

Scott insists that all this could have been avoided had the rest of the ordinance committee not conspired against him. He suggests that if I want to see how real collaboration works, I should contact Inga Gibson, policy consultant for the Humane Society of the U.S. in Hawaii. For years, Gibson headed a cat-wildlife group on Oahu. “She was able to get Fish and Wildlife and DLNR and cat people to sit down and say, ‘Cut the crap! Let’s talk in a constructive way,’ ” Scott says. “Unlike our group, it actually got some good things done.”

The idea of positive fellowship between cat people and conservationists seems refreshing, so I take Scott’s advice and seek out Gibson. Her informal group began meeting in Honolulu in 2009. There was no mandate, no pressure, just an effort to find consensus. “We didn’t have a facilitator,” says Gibson, who became the group’s ad hoc chairwoman. “But the meetings were rarely contentious or unprofessional.” For a while, members did find areas of overlapping interest. They agreed on the need for fewer cats on the landscape. They worked on a public-service video about responsible pet ownership.

Then, in April 2012, a biologist named Eric VanderWerf discovered two nests of an endangered forest bird, the Oahu elepaio, in a strawberry guava tree near the head of the Aiea Loop Trail, ten miles from downtown Honolulu. There are 1,200 Oahu elepaio left on earth, and the sparrow-size birds typically occupy Hawaii’s high mountain ranges. VanderWerf was thrilled to find a lower-elevation nest. He was less thrilled to find a cat colony 100 yards from that nest. When Gibson’s group learned about this, it adopted the situation as a case study.

The kumbaya quickly evaporated.

The cat people stressed that rats are the top threat to elepaio, not cats. True, said the wildlife people, but cats kill them, too. One cat advocate suggested feeding the cats more so they wouldn’t hunt. That’s a terrible idea, countered the wildlife people. Cats hunt; that’s what they do. The wildlife people suggested moving the colony closer to a nearby neighborhood. The neighbors might balk at that, argued the cat people, who instead pushed for a risk matrix—a probability model for discerning threat levels to the nest. Is the threat not crystal clear, asked the wildlife people? They wanted the cats removed. The cat people wanted TNR. No, said the wildlife people, TNR won’t work. So the group did nothing.

That July, VanderWerf found the remains of a predated chick in one of the nests, and he hasn’t seen the adults since. He can’t prove cats did it, but he figures there’s a decent chance. The episode infuriated him. “If we can’t agree that was not the place for a cat colony, a stone’s throw from highly endangered birds, then we can’t agree on anything,” he says. Adds Chris Lepczyk, an ecologist who was part of the group: “When it comes to a head, cat people always walk away. They want the status quo. We were used as patsies.” Gibson’s promising cat-wildlife group subsequently disbanded.

Curious, I decide to check out the Aiea Loop trailhead myself. I arrive at dusk. About 100 yards from the trailhead, near some picnic tables, I count 14 cats eating from plates hidden partially beneath bushes. At another spot, a couple hundred yards from the trailhead, I pull into a parking lot where seven cats are hoovering up fresh fish someone has dumped next to a pickup truck. The truck is occupied. I knock on the driver’s side. A woman slowly rolls down the window. She has a long blond braid and a deep tan, and looks to be in her forties. She’s wary. I’d be wary, too, if a stranger beat on my vehicle after sundown in a park. “I had some extra mahi-mahi,” she says, explaining the splattered fish at my feet. When I mention my interest in TNR, her demeanor changes. She becomes chatty.

Her name is Julie Anderson. For 15 years she practiced TNR regularly and quit only recently. She had to. She was spending $300 a month on pet food. She was paying for mange and lice treatments. Her traps cost $90 apiece, and she had 15 of them. She was spending $5 a pop on spay-neuter, and she had trapped and fixed some 500 cats. “It’s super addictive,” she says. “I was on a mission.” She kept thinking that if she could just trap one more cat, the colony would be completely fixed, and it would eventually disappear. Her work would be done. “But there’s never just one more. People would dump more cats. It was overwhelming.” Her partner financed everything. “After a while he couldn’t pay the mortgage,” she says. “We lost the house.” He moved in to her condo. “We thought we would lose the condo, too, unless we pulled ourselves together. All the money was going to the cats.”

Not surprisingly, the questionable behavior of some TNR advocates has caused at least one member of Kauai’s ordinance committee to point to toxo. Research has linked toxoplasmosis to all manner of psychological issues, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, neuroticism, and suicidal tendencies. Toxo increases production of the neurotransmitter dopamine, scientists say, which can promote reward seeking and risk taking. A study this year found that adults with intermittent explosive disorder, which involves impulsive outbursts of verbal or physical aggression, were twice as likely to be infected with toxo. Makaala Kaaumoana, of Hanalei Watershed Hui, says that before serving on the task force and the ordinance committee, she wasn’t familiar with TNR advocates. “Some display very bad behavior,” she says. “Why would perfectly reasonable people in other aspects of their life act like that?” For his part, Scott says that he has tested negative for toxo. He’s simply a fighter, he insists. “I’m like Rocky in those committee meetings,” he says. “But it’s like one Rocky fighting seven Apollo Creeds.”

By the end of the summer, the fight had only escalated. Scott had joined with five national TNR groups to help draft an altogether different, TNR-centric ordinance, one he submitted to the county. Wildlife advocates, on the other hand, had linked their cause to arguably the most powerful cultural force on the island—the return of Friday-night high school football. If banning TNR and removing feral cats successfully lowered colony numbers, the argument went, then maybe stadium lights could shine again. There’d be far fewer cats waiting to pounce on fallen Newell’s fledglings.

One afternoon I visit Scott at his home. He and Sue live with 36 cats—12 indoor, 12 free-roaming, and 12 inside a backyard “cat-zebo,” a ten-by-twelve-foot shelter constructed of wood, chicken wire, and corrugated plastic, with a pastel paint job. Cats lounge on perches and hammocks. Behind the cat-zebo, Scott is constructing a larger “enclosed rescue area,” a fenced facility capable of holding 40 cats. He says that he and others are setting up shelters like this across Kauai. They’re not surrendering the fight, he explains, but they do want a fallback strategy to save as many cats as possible in a worst-case scenario. “You’ve got colony cats that someone has spent his life caring for,” he says. “We can take those cats. Then we’ll tell the county, ‘Now it’s your turn to manage the situation. We tried. Now it’s on you.’”

Contributing editor Paul Kvinta wrote about human-Kangaroo conflicts in December 2015.

The post Hawaii’s Crazy War Over Zombie Cats appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

We spot 40 kangaroos in the distance and creep toward them. “Act like they do,” Don Fletcher whispers. “Put your head down, like you’re grazing. Don’t move straight at them.” Fletcher goes full kangaroo, drooping his head, hunching his shoulders, dangling his hands from his chest and zigzagging slowly forward. He does everything but bounce and eat grass.

I follow his lead. The tactic lands us not only in the center of the mob, but 30 feet from a big male putting the moves on a feisty female. Above us, constellations glitter in the night sky. A nearby lake glows in the moonlight. In the world of wildlife biology, this is a perfect moment.

Then a car horn honks, and the moment vanishes.

Fletcher and I are standing not in the sweeping Australian Outback, with its red-rock mystery and timeless vistas. We’re at the traffic circle where Fairbairn and Limestone Avenues meet, in front of the Australian War Memorial, in the middle of the city of Canberra. Traffic zooms by. Car stereos blare. Someone’s dog barks. To passersby, we’re a couple of downtown vagrants off our meds, pretending to be kangaroos on the memorial’s manicured lawn.

The big male loses interest in the female and wanders off. “It’s not mating season anyway,” Fletcher says, breaking character and returning to an upright position. “I don’t know what the hell he was up to.” He checks his watch, and we climb back into his truck. It’s 10 p.m. “Let’s go.”

We’re prowling the dark streets of Australia’s capital city in search of kangaroos, and Fletcher knows the hot spots. He works for the Australian Capital Territory, the autonomous province comprised of Canberra and vast amounts of surrounding parkland. (Think of Washington, D.C., encircled by 640 square miles of wilderness.) As one of the ACT’s senior ecologists, Fletcher is tasked with helping keep Canberra’s nature reserves healthy. If kangaroos weren’t overrunning these public lands and spilling into city streets, ecosystem health wouldn’t be an issue. But they are, and Fletcher wants to show me how acute the situation is. The war memorial backs up to Mount Ainslie Nature Reserve, and when Fletcher turns onto the street separating the two, there they are—three more kangaroos, frozen in our headlights. Two others pop out of nearby bushes. They stare at us. Then they hop off to the war memorial. More follow, one after another, a bouncy column of refugees fleeing the forest. “The grass has been devoured on Mount Ainslie,” Fletcher says. “They’re looking for better forage.”

Each year, Fletcher has the unenviable task of calculating how many of these kangaroos to kill. The magic number for this year’s is 2,466, from an ACT population of more than 50,000. This is a thankless job, and some Australians have dedicated themselves to never letting Fletcher forget that. This morning I spoke separately to three animal-rights activists, and each referred to Fletcher as Josef Mengele, the notorious Nazi physician who chose victims for the gas chamber. A week earlier, 51 prominent Aussies, including Nobel Prize–winning author J. M. Coetzee, condemning the science behind the cull. And just a few days ago, someone registered not-so-subtle anti-cull sentiment by stuffing the bloody carcass of a baby kangaroo—known as a joey—inside Fletcher’s home mailbox.

“They think I personally shoot all the kangaroos!” he says, driving. “How the fuck am I going to shoot 2,500 kangaroos?” Fletcher has a certain manic energy. At 63, he’s fit and cuts a fairly dashing figure, with intense eyes and salt-and-pepper hair. He likes kangaroos, he insists. In fact, he calls them essential to conserving the Australian landscape. Grazing kangaroos create multiple levels of ground vegetation that serve as microhabitats for many plant species. If you removed kangaroos, grass would grow uniformly and other plant species would disappear. On the other hand, too many kangaroos obliterate ground vegetation and threaten smaller animal species that need healthy grass. This is the case on Canberra’s reserves. Armies of kangaroos have pushed more than a dozen threatened species to the brink. It’s a pretty uncharismatic bunch—the earless dragon, the striped legless lizard, the golden sun moth. Still, a “conservation cull” of a few kangaroos will save these ecosystems, Fletcher says, a fact that escapes the activists targeting him. “I see that joey in my mailbox as a rude e-mail, not a threat,” he says. “Threats from activists? Give me a break.”

We find kangaroos lurking everywhere. At one suburban park, several graze at the edge of a basketball court. At another, a few munch grass near a soccer goal. On the campus of Dickson College, we watch 30 of them gobble up the lawn. This particular mob—the actual term for a group of roos—had to negotiate several city blocks to get here from Mount Majura Nature Reserve, where the grass has been reduced to nubs. Running such a gauntlet reflects their desperation, Fletcher says. Ecologists call it predation-sensitive foraging, when animals living in habitats that can’t support them take more risks to find food. In the wild, hungry kangaroos increase their range despite the danger of encountering predators like dingoes. In this case, the city itself becomes predator—the pavement, the lights, the cars, the dogs. The risks are innumerable.

We watch the Dickson mob in our headlights. For now these kangaroos are lucky. They’ve found dinner and, unlike many of their brethren across the city at this very moment, are not being shot in the head by Fletcher’s colleagues.

I arrived in Canberra five weeks into the cull, and craziness was erupting all over. Polls suggested that 83 percent of Canberrans supported the cull, but a very vocal minority did not. Anti-cullers were risking $5,500 fines to disrupt government shooters, who worked at night when the roos were foraging. Wielding air horns and spotlights, the protesters were running toward gunfire, raising hell, and praying that the shooters would cease fire. On one reserve, a protester had hidden remotely operated speakers that blared the U.S. cavalry charge and “Taps” at regular intervals all night. On another, activists had allegedly destroyed a fence, resulting in the escape and injury of a farmer’s horses from a neighboring paddock.

In today’s Australia, the question of what kangaroos are—pest, resource, untouchable native wildlife—has become extremely contentious. The nation is home to 24 million people and an estimated 60 million kangaroos, and the relationship between man and hopping beast might be the most fraught, love-hate bond between any two species on the planet. No creature is more closely associated with one nation and its people. Kangaroos adorn Australia’s coat of arms, its Olympic flag, its sports teams, and the jets of its national airline. Australians love kangaroos. Except when they hate them, which is not infrequently. Speak to a rancher in rural Queensland and a city dweller in Canberra and you’ll hear the same incompatible rhetoric you might hear about wolves in the American West.

Oddly enough, I understood how kangaroos could arouse such conflicting emotions. I’m not Australian, but the animal and I go way back, for better and worse. One night, in 1987, I was camping with friends in the state of Victoria when we hit and killed a kangaroo with our truck on an isolated road. Somberly, we examined the body, only to have the head of a joey pop out of the pouch, look around, and wonder what the hell was going on. We brought it to our campsite, where it proceeded to burrow beneath my friend’s sweatshirt and snooze. The next day we delivered it to park rangers. I was smitten. And then, a week later, I was abruptly unsmitten. I was doing my business in the woods, squatting, underwear around my ankles, when a large, blurry object came crashing through the bush straight at me. I wasn’t wearing my glasses. Terrified, I tried to run but immediately face-planted. Sprawled on the ground, smeared in my own feces, I watched the kangaroo bounce away. I hated that fucker.

Still, most Americans would probably be shocked to learn that Australia kills three million kangaroos annually. This slaughter is possible for several reasons. First, none of the four harvested kangaroo species—eastern greys, western greys, reds, and wallaroos—are threatened in any way. Secondly, the animal is perfectly adapted to Australia’s wildly fluctuating climate, so during multi-season droughts they survive by, among other things, ceasing reproduction altogether. Then, when conditions improve, roo numbers can expand rapidly, and populations are no longer managed by traditional predators like dingoes and Aboriginal hunters. The vast majority are culled as part of a commercial meat-hunting industry tied to the entrenched notion that kangaroos are pests that compete with livestock for grass. Farmers hire marksmen to thin wild kangaroos from their pastures, and the meat is exported to more than 55 countries or sold to Australian grocery stores and restaurants. (Foodies are increasingly extolling a taste that falls somewhere between venison and buffalo.) Kangaroos are not farmed, which means that, after commercial fishing, this cull is the largest for-profit slaughter of free-ranging wildlife in the world. But whether killing for meat production or to protect biodiversity, nearly all of it takes place in Australia’s vast, unpopulated interior. Eighty-five percent of Australians live on the coast, while most kangaroos live inland, surrounded by a sparse human population with little interest in their cuddly charms. Last June, a town in rural Queensland began culling after kangaroos and parents concluded that they might attack their children. There were no protests to speak of.

Feelings about the kangaroo slaughter in Canberra are more complicated. Located between Sydney and Melbourne, Canberra is the nation’s only large inland city. Nowhere else does a highly educated, urban population of 169,000 people (390,000 if you include the entire ACT) interact daily with thousands of kangaroos. Seventy percent of the ACT is undeveloped public land, and the extensive nature reserves are prime habitat for a roo population explosion. The animals are everywhere. In 2009, Fletcher was finding kangaroo densities of 510 per square kilometer on some reserves, more than five times the desirable amount for healthy grassland ecosystems. The ACT leads the nation in car-kangaroo collisions, with an estimated 2,000 incidents each year. There are even 90 roos living on the Royal Canberra Golf Course, where, though very rare, harrowing human-kangaroo incidents do occur. In one case, a golfer jogged back to the fourth tee box to retrieve a forgotten driver head cover, only to have a startled roo chase him flat-out for 200 yards. His foursome buddies had to brandish their irons to stop the charging marsupial, but not before the terrified man vomited all over the fairway. Now the club hires a veterinarian to stalk the course with a dart gun, tranquilize the male roos, and perform in-the-field vasectomies.

In short, Australia’s capital is ground zero for kangaroo mayhem. While Fletcher’s cull of 2,466 is peanuts compared with the millions that are quietly killed every year in Australia’s boondocks, in Canberra people notice. And they’ve got something to say about it.

Carolyn Drew and I are sitting in her parked car at the edge of the Pinnacle Nature Reserve in northwest Canberra when we hear a gunshot. We rush to investigate, squeezing through a barbed-wire fence and trekking across a field, dodging rocks and fallen branches in the moonlight. After a while, Drew, a spokeswoman for , stops and scans the shadowy landscape of this 341-acre reserve. She has no clue where the shooter is. He could be on a neighboring reserve. Or he could be in a suburban backyard with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and his redneck cousins. “Shine your flashlight in the air, wave it around,” she says. Shooters aren’t allowed to fire if anyone else is on the reserve, and our lights are meant to signal our presence. It feels like a fairly impotent tactic, but we do it. Then we hike back to her car.

It turns out that two nights previously, when I was out stalking kangaroos with Fletcher, his men were here at Pinnacle stalking Drew. She had followed the sound of six gunshots to their source and flashed lights on the shooting crew. The crew gave chase, and Drew hid for three hours behind a gum tree. “There were no shots after that,” she tells me now as we walk. “We stopped them!” Drew is lucky she didn’t get nabbed. She’s a squat, plodding woman, and at 60 she resembles a garden-club president more than the standard-bearer for Animal Liberation. But she’s fueled by fierce conviction. She monitors Pinnacle every night during the cull. Her colleagues watch other reserves. Hunting the hunters seems like a needle-in-a-haystack strategy, given nearly 5,000 acres on nine reserves and only a handful of activists. Still, no kangaroo deserves to die, Drew insists, so she’s here every night, as a witness if nothing else. “Kangaroos are sentient beings with feelings, hopes, and dreams,” she says. “Do you know how they kill them?”

I do. I had discussed this with Fletcher, who insisted that the cull adheres to strict animal-welfare standards. The ACT’s shooters (only one or two work each night, with support crew) must be proven marksmen, and kangaroos must be dispatched with head shots. Surviving pouch joeys are bludgeoned to death with a blow to the head. I’m pretty sure no amount of focus grouping could make this sound less brutal than it is. “This might be discomforting to humans, but we’re only concerned with the joeys,” Fletcher had told me. “A sharp blow to the head is recognized as the most humane approach.”

After 20 minutes on the reserve, Drew and I reach her car and climb in. June is the start of winter in Australia, and it’s below freezing out here. We huddle under blankets and wait for more shots. Drew doesn’t mind this nightly hardship. At one point earlier in her life, she lived in a tent in the forest with her husband, two dogs, and three donkeys. She gave birth to her son in that tent. She spent her days meditating and communing with the forest animals. “Hunters would come, and we felt what the animals felt,” she says. “We were sensitized to their perspective.”

Drew became radicalized about kangaroos in 2008, when the Australian military conducted a cull at the decommissioned Belconnen Naval Transmission Station in north Canberra. There were 650 roos living on one square kilometer of grassland, and officials determined that they were wreaking ecological havoc. Over several days, wranglers herded them into a corral with 12-foot-high fencing, tranquilized them, and administered lethal injections. Unfortunately, this happened in broad daylight, and Canberrans stopped on their way home from work to watch. Like cats, kangaroos refuse to be herded. They ran into poles. They ran into each other. Joeys were ejected from pouches. “Lots of people are still suffering PTSD from seeing that,” Drew says. “The fencing was covered with burlap bags, but we could see the shadows of the kangaroos. The big boys were trying to clear the fence. It was like this horrific shadow-puppet show.” They culled 514 roos. Drew was arrested for throwing rocks. Even Fletcher conceded that it was an unfortunate event. “I don’t think anyone associated with that cull would want to see it happen that way again,” he said.

In 2009, the ACT government announced it would begin culling kangaroos for conservation purposes. A government report concluded that 20 percent of the ACT’s native grassland sites were in “critical condition,” with another 40 percent approaching that. Scientists reported that 19 threatened animal species on Canberra’s reserves require healthy grass to survive. Drew and others didn’t buy it. “Kangaroos have been around forever,” she says. “They’re a native species. They’re going to drive other native species to extinction?” The government insisted this was possible, given that large urban kangaroo populations now lived hemmed in by roads and subdivisions. Officials also stressed that this cull had nothing to do with the commercial kangaroo-meat industry. Only four of Australia’s eight states and territories have commercial culls, and the ACT is not one of those. No one would profit from the ACT cull. The bodies would be buried in an undisclosed pit.

In both 2013 and 2014, activists delayed the start of the cull for several weeks with legal challenges, alleging that the killing was inhumane and based on faulty science. They argued that the annual growth rate for kangaroo populations was around 5 percent, not the 40 percent Fletcher had posited. They said that roo numbers in the ACT were shrinking, not exploding. Urbanization is wiping them out. If the competing narratives presented in court were startling in their differences, they were downright hilarious when the court reviewed the population data submitted by both sides. For example, at Goorooyarroo Nature Reserve, the government counted 1,173 kangaroos; the anti-cullers counted 280. At Mount Majura, the government counted 1,242; the anti-cullers, 80. Ultimately, the court ruled for the government, which had the backing of pretty much the entire scientific establishment in Australia, and when the 2013 cull took place, 728 kangaroos were culled from Goorooyarroo, nearly three times the number that activists claimed lived there. The anti-cullers insist that even if the government’s population estimate was accurate—which they refuse to concede—killing 728 out of 1,173 roos would devastate the population there.

As we shiver beneath blankets in her car, Drew admits that it’s hard, year after year, tramping into the bush in freezing weather at night, risking arrest, and having little to show for it. Since 2009, the government has slaughtered more than 10,000 kangaroos.(Some 1,689 would ultimately be killed in the 2015 cull.) The legal process has achieved squat. And many of her fellow activists, Drew reckons, have simply been too traumatized to return to the fight. In 2012, for instance, in a driving rain, some visiting activists from South Australia discovered the pit where shooters had buried the bodies. Who wouldn’t be disturbed seeing those soggy, bullet-ridden carcasses in the mud? “Realistically, we can’t make much of a dent,” Drew acknowledges. “I go out every night not necessarily to stop death but to challenge the civilization project, which is squeezing the life out of animals.”

The “civilization project” in Australia began about 50,000 years ago, when Aboriginals arrived and found not only the large and small species of macropods that exist today—kangaroos, wallabies, pademelons, and others—but a subfamily of giants called sthenurines. The largest, , stood ten feet tall and weighed 550 pounds. So big was this pouched monster that it was mechanically unable to hop. Instead, it ambled about upright on the hoof-like tips of its back feet and ate tree foliage. Aboriginals feasted on the sthenurines, to the point where none were left when the first British fleet of convicts, marines, officials, and their families sailed into Sydney Cove in 1788.

These first Europeans brought sheep and cattle, but they were reluctant to eat them before herds could be established, making kangaroos essential. Kangaroo grounds were designated for hunting, and wealthy families hired their own shooters. Kangaroo was a key part of convicts’ rations. “They were highly valued,” says Ray Mjadwesch, an ecologist who has studied the history of kangaroo-human interaction. “People didn’t hate them. It took 80 years for that hatred to set in. People had immense pride in kangaroos. They sent them live back to Britain.”

Once the colonies had raised sufficient livestock herds, people killed kangaroos mostly for recreation, mimicking British foxhunting. Well-dressed gunmen on horseback galloped across the countryside with dogs chasing kangaroos. Paintings of the time show frilly ladies picnicking while their men blast away.

By the second half of the 19th century, farmers began complaining that kangaroos were outcompeting their livestock for grass. An article in the Geelong Advertiser in 1867 argued for the “wholesale destruction” of kangaroos. Farmers resorted to battues, highly organized hunts in which lines of men drove kangaroos into a huge stockade that narrowed to a smaller corral. Edward Wakefield, a colonial official, wrote about a battue he participated in on a friend’s sheep farm, where dozens of horsemen armed with clubs pushed countless kangaroos for miles toward an enclosure:

Steadily we rode after them, farther and farther into the enclosed and constantly narrowing space, until the whole surface of the ground was literally covered with kangaroos, so closely packed that they could not leap. Then, at a signal which ran rapidly along the line, all the younger and more active men charged into the mass, striking right and left with their clubs and felling a kangaroo at every blow. 
 I got into the swing and slew and slew and slew, until my arm ached so I could not slay any more. By this time my dirty clothes and my horse were smeared and splattered with blood and we looked as if we had waded through a river of gore.

They killed 40,000 kangaroos and left the bodies to rot.

In 1876, Henry Bracker, a Queensland farmer, initiated a battue that in six weeks killed more than 17,000 kangaroos. Bracker became a folk hero in rural communities and inspired similar slaughters. His effort also prompted a resolution in the Queensland legislative assembly, calling kangaroos “an evil of such magnitude 
 as to demand the immediate and earnest attention of the Government.” In 1877, Queensland passed the Marsupial Destruction Act, a bounty program that by 1930 resulted in the eradication of 27 million animals, mostly kangaroos. By the 1880s, all the states in eastern Australia had bounty programs.

Somehow, despite their pest status, kangaroos still remained part of the proud Australian sense of identity. In 1908, Aussies added the kangaroo to their national coat of arms. During World War I, troops smuggled kangaroos to Europe as mascots. In World War II, they featured in propaganda campaigns. Together for Victory posters showed a boxing kangaroo and an English bulldog attacking a Japanese soldier.

But in rural Australia, the slaughter continued. By the 1950s, with advances in refrigeration, a meat trade developed. Exports supplied markets for both pet food and human consumption. At the same time, budding environmental and animal-welfare movements were materializing in the U.S. and Europe. In 1974, the U.S. banned the import of kangaroo products, citing concerns over welfare and sustainability. Australia responded by instituting strict hunting quotas and a code of conduct that required, among other things, that kangaroos be dispatched with bullets to the head. The U.S. rescinded its ban in 1981, and you can now buy kangaroo leg and loin on Amazon, although some states, like California, still prohibit the import of kangaroo products.

More recently, scientists have challenged the notion that kangaroos compete with livestock for forage, citing a lack of empirical evidence. The linkage is so squishy that no numbers exist on how much damage roos may have caused over the years. Increasingly, ecologists are viewing the kangaroo not as a pest to be managed, but as a valuable product to be conserved through a sustainable-use framework, similar to wild fish stocks. In most Australian states, kangaroo-management plans are now less about property-damage mitigation and more about maintaining healthy roo populations.

Still, as Australia has evolved into an urbanized society, the country’s environmental and animal-rights movements have become stronger, more vocal, and more insistent that kangaroo culling should stop altogether. The Green Party is now the third most powerful political party in the country, and this year its branch in the state of New South Wales condemned the ACT’s conservation cull. Ironically, that cull is overseen by an ACT Green, a cabinet minister named Shane Rattenbury. Rattenbury once coordinated antiwhaling campaigns for Greenpeace. Now he supervises the killing of a couple thousand roos every year in Canberra. The cull has exacerbated the split between the party’s conservation and animal-welfare wings. “The conservationists look at it holistically,” Rattenbury says. “We can’t go back in time and undo development. We have to do what we can to conserve species. The welfare people are against killing animals.” Not surprisingly, Rattenbury receives a daily barrage of Twitter hate. “It’s fueled by inaccuracy,” he says. “I get tweets saying, ‘Stop burying joeys alive!’”

Roos rarely attack people, which is a reassuring way of saying that they sometimes do. Maybe it was bad karma, then, when Rattenbury went for a morning run in 2013 and collided with a roo rounding a hedge. The animal clawed the hell out of his legs, sending him to the hospital. Rattenbury on social media, and images of his diced-up thighs appeared in newspapers around the world.

Politically speaking, anti-cullers have few better advocates than Steve Garlick, a retired ethics professor at the University of Technology Sydney who founded Australia’s Animal Justice Party in 2009. Infuriated at the Greens, Garlick determined that “the only language these people understand is taking away votes.”

I drive out to visit Garlick, who lives just over the ACT border in New South Wales, amid bucolic wine country. But when I arrive, he’s flying out the front door, headed on a rescue mission. Garlick runs , and he’s just learned about a kangaroo lying motionless off a dirt road in a nearby vineyard. We pile into his station wagon and take off. We find the animal sprawled beneath a tree, 30 feet from a rusty wire fence. Garlick feels along the kangaroo’s flank. “Hello, boy,” he says, softly. “He could have tried to hop that fence. Maybe he fractured his pelvis.” Garlick injects it with a sedative and we load it into the car.

“There’s not much you can do for a fractured pelvis,” he says, driving. “You can give them an antipsychotic, which reduces anxiety. We’ll give him physiotherapy.” Garlick and his wife, Rosemary Austen, rescue about 300 animals a year, two-thirds of them kangaroos, most of them injured by run-ins with cars and fences. Except in extreme cases, they don’t euthanize animals.

On Garlick’s property, two modest houses stand next to each other. One he shares with his wife. The other is shared by 60 kangaroos. They’re not all inside at once. Some enjoy the veranda. Others mosey about the backyard. But they come and go through the sliding-glass back door as they please. We enter the living room and find two lounging on recliners, one on the love seat, and one rummaging through the kitchen. One bedroom is occupied by a large wombat, and another serves as a treatment room, where two injured roos lie on cushions. We carefully lower the latest rescue between these two. “There you go,” Garlick reassures it. “Want some water?” He offers the roo a bowl. The roo hisses.

Out on the veranda, ten roos are chilling on La-Z-Boys and piles of hay. Garlick introduces me around. Coco has two torn Achilles tendons. Sally recently had her cataracts removed. Noah is awaiting ankle surgery. Every patient has a name. I meet a wallaroo named Princess Rosalinda. Everywhere, kangaroos limp around with bandages on their legs, tails, or feet. Most will recuperate and return to the wild. The excessively hobbled will remain as pets. A small female named Cheeky sniffs my shoes. A year ago, Garlick found her tangled in a wire fence. “She was the most dehydrated, maggot-infested thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. “Anyone else would have euthanized her.” She lost her toes and now moves awkwardly in little cloth booties.

We sit in the living room to chat. It’s an unusual interview. Kangaroos amble in, sniff about, and leave. One snuggles next to Garlick. Another nibbles my notebook.

In his academic career, Garlick researched the emotional lives of kangaroos. As a result of the culling, he says, those on ACT reserves exhibit anger and hypervigilance. They play less. Many suffer PTSD. If there’s an overpopulation problem, they could clearly be relocated. “We’ve moved 3,500 kangaroos over the years,” he says, referring to his rehabilitated patients. “We’ve got a 97 percent survival rate.” (Fletcher says this solution would only “move the problem somewhere else.”)

Garlick has a plan to end culling, and he’s attacking on multiple fronts at once—legal, economic, and political. He calls the administrative tribunal where the ACT cull was challenged “a joke.” He’s assembling a supreme court challenge. “I’ve got a pro bono barrister on this,” he says. “I can’t stop the cull happening now, but we’ll stop the next one.” He also wants to shut down the larger commercial cull. In 2009, Garlick was part of a group that persuaded Russia to ban kangaroo-meat imports after testing showed elevated levels of E. coli. Russia was the biggest importer, providing the industry $180 million a year. Australian politicians lobbied successfully to reverse that decision in 2012, but in 2014 Russia reinstated the ban after encouragement from Garlick and others on the E. coli issue. “Our worry now is the Chinese,” he says. Australia has a new free-trade agreement with China, but kangaroo meat is not a part of that. Still, with market demand seriously dented by Russia’s pullout, Australia is pressing China hard on the product.

The solution, ultimately, may be political. Garlick’s Animal Justice Party claims a fast-growing membership of 5,000 people, and earlier this year they celebrated their first election victory, sending a candidate to the New South Wales state legislature. Soon that legislator, Mark Pearson, will travel to China to lobby officials there against importing kangaroo. The commercial cull will end when more people like Mark Pearson get elected, Garlick says. “Our leaders walk beneath our coat of arms every day and turn a blind eye,” he says. “Horrific stuff is done under the cover of night, and they support it.” He strokes the roo sitting next to him and adds: “It’s a barbaric industry, run by thugs.”

I wanted to see for myself if the commercial industry is run by thugs, so I contacted David Coulton, a professional kangaroo shooter in rural Queensland who goes by Cujo. Cujo didn’t seem very thuggish over e-mail. He seemed nice. In fact, he gave me some great advice that I wish I’d taken. Whatever I do, he warned, don’t drive the four-hour leg from Torrens Creek to Aramac after sundown. Aramac, Cujo’s hometown of 300 people, sits at the edge of the desert in the middle of nowhere. Just getting to Torrens Creek involved a four-hour flight north from Canberra to Townsville and then a three-hour drive inland. By the time I start down the road to Aramac, it’s dark.

The road is sometimes paved, sometimes not. There are no towns, no lights, no cell reception. An hour in, the kangaroos appear, first the dead ones. They’re scattered along the roadside—whole bodies, stray legs, stray tails, and random heaps of pulpy viscera. It’s nonstop roadkill. The live roos materialize out of the blackness in midhop, springing across my tunnel of vision individually and in pairs, darting one way, then the other, making me swerve, making me slow down, near miss after near miss, for miles. I grip the wheel. I focus. Except when, for a second—less than a second—I look away, reaching for my water bottle, and thump! I nail a wallaby, plow right over it. Dead. The little guy wasn’t two feet tall. He was innocent. I stop. Aside from the wallaby, the only damage is to my spirit. An eastern grey would have totaled my rental, so I’m lucky there. But I feel terrible.

I keep driving. The roos keep coming. In the ghostly half-light on the sides of the road, they assemble in great mobs, watching me, challenging me. I drive for two more hours, bleary-eyed, past darting roos and endless carnage. The road is death.

Cujo urges me not to worry about the wallaby. We’re driving the next evening to one of the properties where he’s in charge of thinning the kangaroos. “Every property in this shire has a shooter,” he says. “A landowner may have no kangaroos one week, but he’ll have tens of thousands the next, and wallabies. They’ll mow down his grass.”

Kangaroos are just one of Aramac’s problems. A drought has gripped central Queensland for three years, turning the landscape brown. Farms are going under. Aramac once had seven full-time sheep-shearing teams, 13 people each. Now one guy shears full-time. Then you’ve got dingoes eating sheep and roos stealing grass. Ecologists may say there’s no evidence that kangaroos compete with livestock for grass, but don’t tell folks here that. This morning a farmer, Louellen Hannay, showed me a dusty stretch of her property and said, “We used to run cattle and sheep in that paddock, but the roos have completely flogged it.”

The Queensland government conducts an annual aerial kangaroo count to determine hunting quotas. This year, Aramac is allotted 800 per week. Cujo, one of four full-time shooters here, hunts sundown to sunup, every night except Sundays and Christmas. He bags 4,000 to 6,000 roos annually. Cujo tells me that officials regularly remind shooters to avoid journalists, but he sees no reason for secrecy. “I welcome media, greenies, everyone,” he says as we barrel along in his white Toyota Land Cruiser, the words Outright Crazy emblazoned across the top of the windshield. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

Indeed, Cujo is an open book. His tattoos size him up pretty well—a wild boar on his calf, two roos on his torso, and Aramac’s postal code on his right biceps. He’s bald, with a bushy mustache. Rather than shy away from controversy, he says the meat industry should be touting its rigorous standards. His gear is inspected regularly by the same government agency that regulates butchers and restaurants. Cujo has his own standards as well. He’s allowed to kill 63 roos a night, but he typically stops at 40. “It’s about sustainable harvest,” he says. “I want my son to live this life.” He insists that kangaroos are superior to any other animal and that the meat can all but raise you from the dead. “It’s the free-range king,” he says. “It’s high-protein, low-fat, no-chemical, super-strength meat. You can’t get cancer if you eat it.”

When we arrive at the property, we lower the hinge-mounted windshield and turn on the spotlight fixed atop the cab. Motoring slowly along, Cujo steers with one hand and operates the spot with the other. A small red kangaroo bounds by. Several more appear, greys, all female. We approach some acacia trees, and a small mob hops out. Cujo stops the truck. The roos freeze in our light, 25 yards away. While still seated behind the steering wheel, he shoulders his 223 Remington and peers through the scope. Crack! The largest roo jerks and falls. The others scatter. We drive up and find the animal with a halo of blood expanding around its head. Cujo drags it to the back of the truck, snips off its right foot with bolt cutters, runs a hook behind the Achilles tendon, then hoists the carcass onto a horizontal bar. He runs a knife from the sternum to the crotch, opening up the roo and removing the innards. He tosses those into a bush.

On his second opportunity, a big red 100 yards off, Cujo misses. He won’t miss again all night. Thirty seconds later, the big boy stops and stares at us again. Crack! Cujo blasts the third roo on a fence line. The fourth and fifth he drops from the same mob, in rapid succession. The sixth he nails 200 yards away. He frees his two dogs, Roxie and Ugly, to find it. Sitting next to Cujo, I soon become numb to the slaughter and transfixed by the accuracy, speed, and efficiency with which he kills. The man is presiding over his own Red Wedding on House Roo.

By 10 p.m. we have eight carcasses, and Cujo announces that it’s time for a “gut-up.” I’m confused. Hasn’t the whole evening been one big gut-up? I quickly learn that there’s a second part to the butchering process. With the bolt cutters, he goes down the row of hanging roos and prunes each left foot with a quick chop. Then, with a knife, he removes the heads and tails. We leave these amputations scattered on the ground, including the eight little heads, their eyes clotted with blood and dirt staring blankly at the stars.

Cujo is just warming up. Several dead roos later, in the middle of our second gut-up, a wild boar sprints through our idle spotlight. Roxie and Ugly tear after the pig. We give chase in the truck, and moments later anguished screams pierce the night. We find the brave mutts with their jaws locked onto the pig’s face, despite its four-inch tusks. The animal is black and hairy, nearly six feet long and maybe 200 pounds. Cujo grabs its back legs, shakes off the dogs, then dives onto the back of the great beast, plunging a knife into its jugular. There’s more screaming, then silence. Cujo is soaked in blood. He guts the boar and cuts out the teeth with his bolt cutters. A trophy. “Pretty nice pig,” he says.

By 3 a.m., we’re back in Aramac at Cujo’s “chiller,” a shipping container serving as a deep freeze. A hundred roos already hang in here. We add 37 more, the largest a red weighing 90 pounds. The processor’s truck comes from Brisbane once a week. Cujo used to earn 45 cents per pound, but then Queensland’s nine processors consolidated. Now he earns 27 cents. I need sleep, so much so that I apparently start hallucinating, or at least Cujo tells me I’m hallucinating. I thought I was looking at 37 decapitated kangaroos dangling upside down from hooks. But Cujo says I’m looking at money. “That’s five, six hundred dollars,” he says. “A good night.”

The next day, I’m leaving Aramac when I notice something more grisly than anything I’d seen here, if that’s possible: five dead dingoes hanging on a barbed-wire fence outside town. Cujo mentioned this, a means of “bush communication,” he called it. In this instance, the community knew that five dingoes were eating sheep on this property, and with the appearance of each carcass, folks learned that the threat level was decreasing. That may be. But as I observe the gruesome display, I have to think that the message is really meant for the greater cosmos, from a desperate people with little sway over powerful outside forces—climatic, economic, ecological. The message is that, despite everything, we are in control.

I drive east into the morning sun, distancing myself from the blood rituals of rural Australia. As I pass miles of roadkill, I think about the fluffy stuffed kangaroo I’ll buy in the airport for my seven-year-old. It will no doubt have a joey in the pouch, and maybe a bush hat or a little Australian flag. It will be bloodless and meatless, and it will chomp nobody’s grass. No one will hate it. Everyone will love it, especially my kid.

Paul Kvinta wrote about rhino poaching in South Africa in the April 2014 issue.

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