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| Erica: Welcome to the Rising Lioness podcast on All About Animals Radio, a place dedicated to
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| animals and all those who act to protect and advocate for them.
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| Hi, I'm your host, Erica Salvemini, and I'm thrilled and honored to be here representing
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| | <h2 id="mp-itn-h2" class="mp-h2">In the [[Headlines:Animal News|news]]</h2> |
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| All About Animals Radio, using my voice for the animals. Thank you for joining us for what
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| intends to be a thought-provoking and soul-inspiring series where we discuss topics aimed at understanding the importance of the relationship between empathy, animal rights, and our peaceful coexistence with the animal kingdom. And now on to our show.
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| Hello, hi you guys! How are you?
| | <h2 id="mp-otd-h2" class="mp-h2">From the [[Portal:Library|library]]</h2> |
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| Craig: Pretty good, thank you.
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| Leitah: We’re well.
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| Erica: Good, good. It's so nice to have you here. For our audience, I just want to
| | <h2 id="mp-other" class="mp-h2">WikiAnimal Projects</h2> |
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| say today we're welcoming two actual personal heroes of mine, Craig Spencer and Leitah
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| Mkhabela. I hope I said your name correctly.
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| Craig is the executive director of TransFrontier Africa, founder and manager of the Black Mamba's anti-poaching unit, director at Wild Animals Tracking Solutions, warden and ecological advisor at the Belulé Nature Reserve in South Africa. Craig has initiated marine anti-poaching in the southern coastal regions of Africa as well as several poverty relief initiatives.
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| In 2013, Craig founded the Black Mamba's anti-poaching unit. The Black Mamba Initiative currently employs 36 women from the local tribal communities.
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| Among many other prestigious awards, Craig and the Black Mambas have been recognized as the best rhino conservation practitioner in Johannesburg in 2015 by Game Rangers Association of Southern Africa as well as the UNEP Champions of the Earth award in 2015. Craig is also founder of the Bush Babies Environmental Education Program which aims to educate children from local schools as well as their families about the environment and animals in order to help them grow into environmentally conscious adults and citizens of South Africa.
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| We also welcome Leitah Mkhabela, supervisor to the Black Mamba's as well as sergeant ambassador and media liaison for this elite all female anti-poaching unit that is the Black Mamba's.
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| Welcome Craig and Leitah. Thank you so much for being here today.
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| Craig: Thanks Erica.
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| Erica: Of course, of course.
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| Craig: Can I just make one quick correction there? I stepped down as the head warden of Baluli just before the pandemic and I now concentrate just on the western section which is called Olifants West Nature Reserve. So I'm the warden of the Olifants West section, no longer the warden of the bigger Baluli landscape.
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| Erica: Very good. Thank you for that correction. I will also correct the bio on the profile for that.
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| Craig: Thanks Erica.
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| Erica: Of course.
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| It's my great honor and privilege to speak with you both here today about this critical time in
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| our world as well as for wildlife conservation and also to discuss the remarkable work of this
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| fearless group of dedicated women who are preserving wildlife in South Africa today and for its future.
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| And I also want to congratulate you for this wonderful work you've been doing now for 10 years.
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| It is your 10-year anniversary, is it not?
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| Leita: Yes
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| Craig: Yep
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| Erica: That's amazing, good work. And there is so much to discuss and I'm so in awe of both of you and your work. I could literally ask you questions till the sun went down and it's only 9 a.m. here in the New York City area. So with that, we'll just jump right in.
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| Craig, I thought I'd start by asking you, what was the moment for you when you decided that Black Mamba was necessary? Did you wake up that morning and decide I'm going to have Weetabix for breakfast? And by the way, I think I'll form the most badass elite group of superhero women to defeat poachers and save wildlife. In my mind that’s how it happened.
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| Craig: It was a similar story. We were sitting around the campfire at night and we were having a little bit of rum and to drown our sorrows because we had just lost our first rhinos to poaching.
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| So, the poaching started in about 2010 in this neck of the woods. And then when we were approached to ask, you know, do you have any potential solutions? Can you assist, etc.? I said, we can try, but we're going to do it differently because the old traditional model hasn't worked up until date, you know, in trying to shoot the problem of the landscape. We've created rifts, blah, blah, blah.
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| There were a lot of things that we thought as ecologists and scientists and anthropologists and so on, that had to change. We thought, you know, we've got to address this in a different way. We needed a different set of tools in our toolbox.
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| And we sat there, and Captain Morgan is the brand of the rum, and it was very inspirational. And we came up with the idea that we needed a multi-generational impact because this is the thing, you know, people in my position only get into a decision making capacity towards the end
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| of their career. So your impact is actually really small. And you think, oh, you know, I’ve won one small.. I've won the day! But, I've handed this problem over to the next warden who comes along and then the next one and the next one. So there's no consistency. There's no continuity, blah, blah, blah.
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| So we said, okay, what's our single biggest resource? It's not diamonds and gold and oil and all the other wonderful things that you find on the African continent. It's the young women. And there's a multi-generational investment that you can make here. And they're already the primary caregivers in the communities. They're really fitter than all of us put together because they have to collect water in water cans on their heads, you know, and they have to go and collect
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| firewood in the bush and look after the kids and the elderly and the sick in the community. That's the kind of spirit that you're looking for! That's the ethos that you're looking for, that caring, nurturing attitude. That's what we want! We don't want people jumping out of helicopters with Belgian malinois’ strapped to their chest and night vision goggles because it's cool. We want people protecting wildlife because they care. You know, there's a big difference there. So hence, these ladies. I’ve said enough.
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| Erica: Beautiful. Beautiful. Leitah, my next question was going to be for you. How did you know that this was your calling? What was that moment like for you?
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| Leitah: So when I grew up, my granny used to work in Kruger, a long time ago, and she was sharing more information about the animals, the animals behavior and how she encountered animals. So that's where I fell in love with animals.
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| By that time I'd never been to Kruger. I'd never seen animals. So as I was in my high school, that's when I learned that in South Africa, we are losing rhinos through poaching. So remembering what my granny told me, it brought me back to that I am that woman who wants to protect the iconic animals of South Africa. And then what I like most about this is that it took a man to realize that women are the best people for this.
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| So when I heard about the post, I just came straight and applied and I got a job and we are here doing our best.
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| Erica: It's beautiful. You're giving me chills telling me this story, both of you. It's just amazing. It's something. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your stories and it would be a dream to come and ride along with you someday. So I'm going to squirrel that in the back of my head.
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| Craig: Erica, we joke about it. You just mentioned coming along with the Mambas on a patrol, you know we've got these commercial lodges that operate in the area and people pay so much money to come and stay in a commercial lodge and go on a game drive to see the big five. They (The Black Mambas) get to see it every time they go out on a patrol!
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| Erica: That’s amazing. I'm a single mom. I have two boys. They're the lights of my life. They're everything to me. But if that was not my life and it was something totally different, I would be locking the door, packing my stuff up and I'd be begging you to let me join the Black Mambas.
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| Craig: That’s a great one. We touch on this and I'm going to adlib quite a bit, so just stop me dead in my tracks if I'm shooting my mouth off. But you know, something that we are striving to get back, something when I entered this industry 27 years ago, the attraction was that you were surrounded by peers and there's this kind of a pseudo kinship model where everybody in conservation enjoy the sunsets, we loved the sound of the elephants trumpeting and the hyenas calling at night and making a fire. You know, you just love every change of season and that's the impala rutting. I can't wait to see how the lamming is doing. Those are the people that you wanted to surround yourself with in the bush. And then when the rhino poaching came back again, because I mean this is a cyclical thing, it's not new. Anybody that's been as long as I have in the conservation arena here in Africa has been through the civil touch. And we have now modified unwittingly, I think, recruitment policies, budgets, everything to put more and more money into fortification models of guns and bombs and helicopter fuel and police dogs and so on and so on and so on. And those people have all reached retirement level and left. So now we are attracting soldiers, ex-soldiers, people trying to duplicate the lifestyle of soldiering or law enforcement and so on so that we've lost a certain kind of ethos. And I'm not bashing the one side, I'm just saying that it's really sad for me that we've lost the other side. Who do I sit and enjoy my coffee with in the mornings now? Soldiers with war paint on twitching to get out there and go and shoot something. It's a negative kind of energy that has been replaced on the landscape.
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| Erica: Too much aggression.
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| Craig: Yeah! You know, nature or a game park, whatever. It's supposed to be a happy place. It's supposed to be a place where you can let your soul dream about ancient wisdoms. You see an elephant that's clearly going to outlive me on this landscape and carrying its baby for 22 months. I mean, the wisdom in that animal, you know, and we just drive past now without even waving and taking our hat off and bowing in its general direction.Nonsense.
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| Erica: We’re taking it for granted. It should never be lost on any of us. Nature, wildlife and Mother Earth all heals us and we should be healing them back.
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| Craig: Yeah! Exactly. And as noble as it might be to rush around and just purely do anti-poaching, we kind of lost the ethos. You know, we've lost the whole reason why we have national parks and things in the first place and what intrinsic values they have and spiritual values and so on.
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| We lost it. So I want that back. So that's a kind of hidden story that I've never really told
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| anybody because that's around the campfire. But when you gave me your introduction earlier,
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| I thought you would understand more than anybody else. And these guys bring it back.
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| Yeah.
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| Erica: It's like the motherly nurturing instincts of women, you can tap into Mother Earth. I mean, that's basically what you're doing. You're working on her behalf. You are in the service of the Earth kingdoms, the animal kingdom more specifically. It's amazing. And it should be that way. We should be leading with our hearts to protect and preserve humanity. You know, where's the humanity in the work that we're doing? And if we lose that, if we lose our humanity and we're just putting on more war paint and holding guns, then we've lost something. And we have lost something, haven't we? But we're getting it back. The light is coming back and there are more people who do want more of what you're doing,the conservation, the saving of animals. And, you know, we don't want to just have them in picture books for our children to see, our grandchildren and great grandchildren to see one day. I can't imagine that. That's just a concept. I won't even, I can't imagine such a terrible thing.
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| Craig: Erica, you've hit the nail on the head. You know, if we lose the spiritual connection,
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| because it's now a war zone, it's, and I think it's so subtle that we don't actually notice
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| that it's happening. When a tourist comes in through this gate, it's following your family
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| halfway around the world. You've burned a lot of carbon, whatever it might be, you're really
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| feeling slightly guilty for that. You know, and then you arrive at this national park and the first
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| person you meet is a militarized soldier with a sniffer dog that treats you like a criminal.
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| And thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not. You know, you don't notice it at the time,
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| but I can promise you that this kind of negativity from the minute you climb
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| out of your car for the first time is all around you. There's rules in place and now we've
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| militarized and I think it's really super sad that we've taken that spiritual value away because it's
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| throwing water on the fire of your spirit the minute you arrive.
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| Erica: Yeah, It malfunctions the whole purpose of our existence.
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| Craig: Like a blocker kind of thing, you know, and we've got to realize that what you said earlier is so very true. Conservation is something from the heart, it's philosophical. It is, you know, you've got to be able to plumb the depths of your soul to grasp the significance of
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| the work that we do. Science is a tool that we use. It's a tool in our toolbox, just like soldiering
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| and guns and police is also tools, but the real conservation comes from the heart, it comes from
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| the soul. It's just like a musician, you know, you can go to a, you know I have lots of friends, go and study music and art, then they get a certificate at the university but they still can't draw and they still can't plunk on a piano. So it doesn't make you a musician, that comes from the heart!
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| Erica: It's all the stuff that connects us to source and that doesn't make it religious to say that, it's just what is.
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| Craig: It's spirituality, yeah, we can separate the two, religion from spirituality. And I needed that. I needed a very short lag period to get it back and these guys brought it back.
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| Erica: That's right and you knew it. It was your calling, Craig, as well as for Leitah and all the other wonderful women, you know, you couldn't do one without the other. It's like yin and yang. You all fit and it's perfect because all the pieces have come together.
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| I would love it if you could replicate what you've done here with the Black Mambas. I feel this is something that should be looked at. You know, I do animal advocacy work because I love it and it's my passion. I am a volunteer doing this podcast because I just feel like I need to do something. So I talk to different people around the world and in Australia, for instance, where the kangaroos, an iconic animal that everybody knows as emblematic of Australia, are all being killed. Australia is annihilating the kangaroos and the government has given approval for this. The kangaroo product industry is doing this, and they're all going to be annihilated. The kangaroos will be gone. Something needs to be done to stop this before it’s too late. This is where I think of the Black Mambas. I wish you were on every continent. To me it's a no-brainer. I don't know, maybe I'm the crazy one, but I just think..
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| Craig: You're not crazy. Erica, we need to change our attitude towards our consumptive activities and I'll tell you something you touched on, domestication of animals is probably one of our
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| biggest failures in life, you know, in our evolution and we went through about 125,000 years of
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| domesticating wolves and cattle and so on, you know, for our convenience. I think it actually
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| had mutual benefit for the wolves because they could eat our scraps. Sure, they knew what they
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| were doing. But the irony is that when you look again in the Western Hemisphere, we now, I mean,
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| in the Northern Hemisphere, we now carry little pink poodles around in our handbags that we've
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| gotten from the animal as a tool in our toolbox to this over-pampered chocolate cake eating
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| purple washed poodle in a handbag and yet there's thousands and thousands of homeless animals
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| running around that are mistreated, chained under a tree in the blazing sun, not given water and
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| food and everything and we've had to put institutions in place, special prevention of
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| cruelty to animals, special legislations, courts that deal with it, lawyers that specialize in it,
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| volunteers, NGOs, etc. to try and rectify this thing that was, you know, that we started.
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| And they're mass euthanizing all of the unwhacked animals.
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| It drives us crazy and later we think about it a lot.
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| Erica: I'm in the pet industry and have a love-hate relationship with it. I own a pet spa and I take care of many pampered babies. Actually what it turned out to be was me taking care of all the special needs pets. But why are there so many special needs pets? There are designer bred animals that cost thousands of dollars but behind the scenes, if you pull
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| the curtain back, there's a breeding industry that is quite dark. You know, are there some reputable ones out there, sure. We're still not honoring or respecting the animal's choice.
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| And that's really where it needs to start, isn't it? It needs to start in the communities, with the people, training them, helping them understand it is about education. There is no judgment. It's just what's become of humanity. This lack of empathy is what we have become but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way. There is a point where we all have to say, okay, let me have just a moment of self-awareness here. It has to start at some point and then continue it on. And if
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| we all have self-awareness every single day to ask the questions like, why are we still doing it this way? Should I do it this way? Where's my moral compass in this? Let me find and tap into
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| my moral compass and do this for every situation in our lives. This is what we should be doing.
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| Craig: And you know, this is the last thing I'll say on the,
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| on the domestication issue. But I want to close with this. How can I ask the people in the local
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| communities that can barely put food on the table to respect the fact that the big, fat wildlife
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| is running around here and they shouldn't touch it? These animals here, they're fine. They're very
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| happy. Three million hectares for them to run around on. It's the size of several small European
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| countries, you know, in South of Bog. They're fine. It's the animals on the other side. And if I can
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| bridge that, that disconnect where the donkey just pulls my cart, the dog chases jackals away from
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| my chickens, you know, so if I can bridge that and say, actually these animals still feel stresses,
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| they still need attention and love and cuddling and all that kind of thing, then it will be much
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| easier for me to say, you know, it's really unfair to bludgeon an animal to get cut its face off for
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| its horn because it's, it's not nice. I don't know if you understand what I'm saying, but let's get it
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| done at home with the domestic animals. Then it'll be much easier for me to save the wildlife. And These ladies will have an easier time in their community of convincing their peers as well.
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| Erica: There's a disconnect with empathy. I also do energy work and so I am tapped into people’s suffering and that transcends down. If everyone at some point wanted to heal themselves, because I do believe we all have a responsibility to heal ourselves, we could then look at what we are doing. Yes everyone’s got trauma in life from one degree to another. What that trauma looks like for each of us individually matters. We may not be responsible for what happened to us, but we are responsible for becoming better versions of ourselves. Imagine if everyone healed their wounded inner child. Healing our trauma frees us to enjoy life once more. Then we can be kind to one another and ultimately have empathy for animals. Whether it's donkeys or monkeys in cages in the meat markets of Cambodia, we could begin to have empathy to feel and understand that animals are sentient beings who have the ability to love and have compassion.
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| Craig: These things will feel the same stresses, the same social pressures, the same anxieties, et cetera. They might process it
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| differently, but I promise you they don't deserve to put under the pressure that we do. And that
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| goes for our food as well. Let me tell you, we want to eat these things and we must treat them with
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| respect. Otherwise we have a bunch of hypocrites sitting here in the African bush trying to protect wildlife. And yet they, we go out there and do these other terrible things.
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| Erica: Like you said, it's all linked.
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| So, all right, let's ask some fun questions. The, listeners want to know how are the ladies trained? And either one of you can jump in and explain, like, is it, is it like military bootcamp? I was going to ask, Do you wear fatigues? I see you wearing fatigues and I know that you're unarmed. So how does that, how does that work?
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| Leitah: So I will first explain why we are unarmed. It's because
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| we cherish life and we don't want to use bullets to win this war. We want to use education and
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| knowledge. Like as you were saying that we have to teach people from the village about loving the
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| domestic animals before the wild animals. So that's what we do. We send message back home
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| and we teach them whenever I go on my leaves, I'm still not on my leave. I look at what's happening
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| in the community. If I see someone's dog is sick, I tell them what to do, where they should go to
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| help that animal. And we have went through a hard training. If Craig said we're going for that
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| training, I'm not going, no. So, but the training was worth it. For the whole 10 years, one of the
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| black members has been killed by poachers and we've just came across rhino poachers and we always
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| come across, um, bushmeat poachers. All of these, they, these people, they come inside the reserve
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| with weapons or, um, anything that can kill or harm a person. But none of us has been into,
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| in an accident like that, in an incident like that. So, uh, the training was very much worth it.
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| We went for three months training. We stayed, uh, 12 days in the bush with less water. You wake up
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| early in the morning around four, you have to cook and finish. And when someone comes there,
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| the musk and talk that you were there, you were cooking and then you go out and start working,
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| learning about, um, animals taking the bush itself, the poachers, how to protect, uh, the iconic
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| animals. And then until late at night, you come back and you have to wait, uh, like we're sleeping
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| in a bomber. We did, we, we did a bomber with a nobthorns. We're protecting ourselves from the
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| Big cats so they don't come inside. And it was something from me as a lady who was just coming
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| from the village. I knew nothing about the bush and now I have to create a house with a nobthorns and make sure that the cats don't come and eat me. And we are used to, and we are used to waking up from the chicken sound. And now you wake up from a lion roaring. So that was something different but it was, uh, it was a good experience that we have gained. And from being a village girl to a professional black mamba, we have changed a lot. Our mentality have changed. Our understanding has changed. So it was like a soldier training. You have to run five kilometers every day. Um, you have to do push-ups. Um, you have to learn about teamwork, leadership, and disciplines. We're involved if you do something wrong or your colleague do something wrong, you're all involved
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| in, you know, we were learning how to be a team in a, in a big five area because we have to pro
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| to protect off. You have to go out with somebody whom you can believe that if they see a lion,
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| they will stop me and we have to think what should we do. So for the whole 10 years, none of us has
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| been harmed by animals or by poachers because we are still in that level of the training that we
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| got. And we continue getting schools, different schools now, and then skills about media. Um,
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| | |
| what happened when we encounter, uh, like, uh, elephants, lions. So it was a lot and, uh,
| |
| | |
| it was worth it. I remember when I go home, uh, the first time I came here, when I told my mom that,
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| uh, I've sent out my CV and I got a job, I have to go and train. Uh, the job is to be, um, a black
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| Mamba, but I'm going to be a ranger working in the game resolve. And she was like, are you, uh, are you going to be with a man who will be holding a weapon? Because that's the mentality that we grow up into that only a man can be a ranger, not a woman. So they believe that you need a man by your side who's holding a weapon to protect you. And, um, the first day on my training, we were passing with spray texturing with our, uh, kit bags and we were drilling, we were shouting, left, right, left with our pageant behind us. And we had, um, there were a few guys that texted drivers.They were like, what are those girls doing? We have seen men run away from the training of project. They're not going to do it. And one thing that will happen to them, they won't be able to give birth. It's going to destroy their body. So, you know, it's, it's sinking. Is it, is it true? Because we didn't know what's going to happen to us in the booths, the training that we're going to face. We just been told about it, but you haven't done the practical. So we went there with that mind of mine. And now I'm scared. I think my mom was right. I'm not the right person for this. And then we went
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| through the training on the last day. We all told our subject, can we go back and start again?
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| Because it was like, wow, the training was amazing. It changed us in a lot of a different way,
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| the impact that we had. And when we go home, we're very skinny. So my mom just saw me and like, what happened? What did they do to you? So I started explaining to her what was happening. And she was
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| like, trying to believe me. But, and then I came back to start working. And when they start seeing that, oh, this thing is working, the ladies are now in uniform. Everyone is talking about them. And we got recognized from the United States for the champion of the earth. We started being the role models in our community. Everybody wants to know about the black mambas, how we are doing it. Because for so many years, it has been men with weapon. And now what are women doing in the bush without weapons? And they seem to be doing very well. And the shocking thing was that we are patrolling the boundaries of Balula where there's a busy main road. So many people are seeing us and
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| they're hooting some of them stops, what are you doing? We just saw lions from that side. Are you guys gonna make it? And you know, now people are admiring us. And the truck drivers when they drive and see lions, they will stop and then he's watch out the lions that's like everybody's warning us when the alliance outside the reserve, people stop us and tell us when there are elephants outside of the reserves. And then we're going to have a human and wildlife conflict, people will stop you and tell you black mambas, we have seen an elephant, we need your help. So many people have seen what the black mambas are doing. And the training that we went through, we thought it was bad training, but it was a good training ever that I went through for 10 years. We're all still fine without weapon. And we're doing very well. And we think it's best if you can ask me if I want to use a weapon. No, I want to continue doing it the same way that we are doing it now because we are able and we change that reaching always for them to move. And then we continue with our patrol.
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| Craig: That was well put. Thank you Leitah. You know, the significant thing, Erica is that we chose the military training style of paramilitary training, because this is an industry norm.
| |
| | |
| into the anti poaching arena, there's a prescribed curricula, if you like, before you can be
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| registered as a security guard and blah, blah, blah. So we had to do that anyway. And obviously
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| we spiced it up a bit. But the the thing is that it builds a kinship. And so now the sisterhood
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| | |
| of the black mambas, you know, if they all had to go through this, and the training is very brutal,
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| it's very hard, especially the sickness stuff. It's 40 plus degrees Celsius outside of these
| |
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| you get very little sleep. And it's basically the equivalent of basic training in the army.
| |
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| But they're not. What we realized is that all of our training facilities
| |
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| in the entire country are designed to train men. So the facilities were not suited for women,
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| that includes open air bathrooms, communal showers. And if you have a mixed group,
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| and it's really not economical to take a group of five people at a time and train them, because
| |
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| then you must book up the entire training facility for five people, you would normally have 20 or
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| 30 people on that course. So now you've got five young women from a local tribal community
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| intermingling with a whole bunch of other hairy men, you know, and it's never going to work.
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| I mean, what the hell? So, you know, we had to rearrange just about everything.
| |
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| We've had four intakes now, and every time that we do another intake, we've improved and we've
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| streamlined and we've built better facilities and better and better and better. The survival training
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| | |
| that Leida was talking about now is in the bush for a week. You know, and you've got to share a
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| little you make a little tent thingy, a little bivouac out of sticks and sawn branches to protect
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| you from the lions, as you said, and the leopards and so on. You can't ask a young woman, their
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| fathers and their brothers and their boyfriends would never accept that they will sleep in a tent
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| and share a sleeping bag and that with another man or another guy from an incident. Forget it.
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| You know, so we have to be very aware of integrating women into this arena means change has to start at
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| the bottom with everything from the facilities to the curriculum. And we also have to be aware
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| that they have a very important function to play in the household. So for me to take them away for
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| three months, who's collecting the firewood, looking after the grandmothers, looking after
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| all the sisters kids, so the old sister can get a job and so on. You know, there's a lot of things
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| that you have to take into account.
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| Erica: That's intense and amazing. I had a feeling that this was the kind of training that you were all were doing. It kind of makes sense that it would have to be that intense since you're putting your lives on the line for the animal and you're coming up against some pretty dark people who are willing to do anything to get that horn, or whatever animal it is that they're trying to kill.
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| I have a question for you. I don't remember where it came across to me but I heard
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| that the black mambas are incorruptible because they’re female. I don't know if that's
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| | |
| part of the reason you chose the Black Mambas to be all Female. If this is true is it because women are dedicated nurturers and one might even say it's the women’s uncompromising convictions that allow them to take on the poachers and win.
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| Craig: You know, we've got a saying here that no poacher can be successful unless somebody is helping him
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| on the inside. And I stick with that. After 27 years of doing anti-poaching work in Africa,
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| I can guarantee you that a poacher will not succeed unless there's somebody inside helping
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| them with information, opening and closing a gate or 2D tracker coming on, whatever.
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| It might be and it's bloody stressful. So we have a process that we go through. We call it
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| honesty verification and that includes polygraph testing and screening cell phones and so on and
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| so on. And in how long has it been? Ten years. This actually marks our 10 year anniversary.
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| Erica: Congratulations!
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| Craig: Yeah, and none of the mambas have ever failed that process. But yet I've had such a high turnover
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| of the men. You must remember, perhaps I should have qualified in the beginning, when we started
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| | |
| with the black mambas, I already had 40 armed ranges, paramilitarized armed ranges protecting
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| the wildlife here and they were all men. Okay. Through the polygraph process, you have such a
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| high turnover, you're training all the time new people to take the place. You're catching them
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| out red-handed. They're breaking the rules and it's not just whether they're helping poachers
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| along. It's silly things like when the lions kill a giraffe, that's going to feed that lion pride
| |
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| now for a week or more. But when you look again, the guys have gone, they chased the lions away and
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| have harvested all the meat of the giraffe cats. You can't be a conservationist protecting that
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| and then at the same time irritating. You need to remember the one guy, climbed up the tree and
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| stole the leopards. The leopards killed a small antelope, it's called an impala, and he pulled it
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| up into the tree and the range, the anti-poaching ranger saw this and thought, hang on a minute,
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| I'll take that, thank you very much, and chased the leopards away. So all of this kind of
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| interference and then we found that the men were also chasing the rhinos to chase them out of the
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| area that they were patrolling in because they didn't want to go to sleep at night. They didn't
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| want the stress of having to look after them and getting shouted at on the radio for sleeping and
| |
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| so on. So I was like, no, hang on, we're supposed to be conservationists, where's this conservation ethic, where's this ethos, it's gone. That doesn't happen with the women, it never has because there's no ego here. And there's no shortcuts, and I think there's also a huge responsibility on you in the household to provide as a breadwinner, and you must know that if you pay one salary in South Africa, eight other people in that village benefit directly from that. So that's the national statistics here. So I think that pressure, that's a social pressure that the women feel when they
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| go back home, they provide us and they care give us.
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| Leitah: So as you mentioned that we are the mothers of the ed, it's quite easier for us to know where the rhinos is, and we can also see that the women
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| know where the rhinos is, and don't tell anyone about it. Because the same way I would protect my child, that's the same way we protect the rhinos. And we inside the reserve, like I spent 21 days inside, waking, and then 10 days off. So I want to protect, or I'm protecting the iconic animals for the next generation. I don't want my kids to go up seeing the rhino in the pictures, I've taken so many pictures, I don't want them to only see it on those pictures or magazines, I want them to see the real rhinos. And we don't go to bottle stores and drink and share information, because when you're drinking, you get drunk, you don't know what you're talking about, you might be telling the right information to the wrong person.
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| Craig: I think it's quite significant, because there's a level of responsibility
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| that the women carry, that I think the men sometimes lack. They also might have got away
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| with so many indiscretions and things in their community, just being men is very patriarchal
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| at the end of the day. And sometimes information slips out, you go to the bar, you drink like
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| Leila was saying, you know, and you're working in the game reserve, yeah, the rhinos, of course,
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| you know, and don't worry about it. So information might not be given out with ill intentions, it's
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| just that it's irresponsible, and the men don't see it as such a lot of the time. What else could
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| you say on this?
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| Leitah: I think in our villages, when you're a man, and you're not able to provide very
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| well for your family, you lose your dignity a bit, even when there's a gathering where we where
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| people are talking about the village, what they can improve in the village, sometimes when you
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| want to say something, people don't take you serious, because you don't have cows, you don't
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| have a big house. And so that kind of a man is if someone can approach them and say, I want you to
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| | |
| go inside the game reserve and kill a rhino or you working as a ranger, I think I can boost your
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| salary with 50k. If you can tell me where the rhinos are, I will do everything myself, you won't
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| be involved. They sometimes easily to agree with that, because they have never had a chance to hold
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| 50k or 100k. And that's it. I'll be able to buy cows and build a big house for my family. So
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| those kind of things makes them agree to something that they know that they shouldn’t be doing.
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| Craig: I think it's very, very significant. What Leitah just touched on now, Erica, is the massive
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| socio economic pressure on the majority of the people in South Africa, probably in most of the
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| sub Sahara African countries. We forget very quickly that there is a hierarchy in these
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| communities. And there's this human dignity that's lost when you don't have access to resources and
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| whatever. So it becomes very attractive. And then we also reeling from how many 60 years of apartheid.
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| And we're expecting in one single generation for this to be fixed. And here's a bunch of
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| white people sitting on this side wearing camouflage army uniforms, placing the lives
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| of an animal above the lives of the people in the village next door. The memory hasn't even started
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| to get old yet. What was going on here for so many decades. So we can't be now sending a message back
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| to the community. I think it's so rude to expect to defend this landscape and its wildlife for our
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| | |
| gratification so that we can go on holidays and set up campfires and go to fancy lodges and do
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| safaris and so on and so on. In order to do that, we're going to go to the community and ask the
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| young men to come and be trained up to protect it against their uncles and so on and so on. Then we're
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| going to pay them some ridiculous salary and then expect them to love it or appreciate it or whatever
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| | |
| the word is, to develop the ethos. No, we've got so many injustices to rectify before we can sit back
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| and relax.
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| Erica: Agreed. Absolutely. Yeah, that's a lot of work. And we can't just sit back and rest in
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| our laurels. It's a lot of work and a lot of dedication.
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| Craig: And you know, there's trauma. There's historical trauma. There's childhood trauma. And these are the fathers bringing up children
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| now. You know, from that apartheid time, there was a huge loss of human dignity and so on and so on.
| |
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| And we're dealing with that. There's no safety nets in this country. If I place a gun later
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| into a team's hands and they have to use it in the line of duty to defend an animal from poachers,
| |
| | |
| somebody gets shot or whatever it might be. We don't get a box of chocolates and a stuffed toy
| |
| | |
| the next day. You're back on duty or you go to jail. You know, there's counseling and
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| look at this person who has to take…
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| Erica: You have to swallow it and keep on moving, don't you?
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| Craig: Traumatized through the work. It's got to be the other way around. You know, you tuck your kids into bed with a beautiful story about the elephants at the water hole and the babies that were suckling from the mother and so on and so on. Not, oh, your mother's GI Jane, you know, with a shaving head and wall paint on her face and it's so cool because I carry a gun. I don't want that on my conscience.
| |
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| Erica: No, the other way is much nicer. Tucking them in and telling the lovely stories about the animals is a nicer way to be.
| |
| | |
| I do animal advocacy work and I'm on a lot of these social media platforms talking about this work and I'm often baited by trollers who come on wanting to fight with me. They do it to the other animal advocates too. Many are so-called conservationists or scientists or economists who are claiming that trophy hunting is the better way, that it's actually good for the land, it's good for the people, it's good for the economy, the ecology and it's controversial. I wanted to ask your thoughts on this and how do we combat that when we're constantly baited.
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| | |
| Craig: Erica, it's such a critical discussion and, you know, in all of my years, I did that, you know,
| |
| | |
| that was part of our economic policy. It was one of our financial tools in our toolbox and it was
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| | |
| big five animals as well, elephants and buffaloes and so on and so on and it took us quite a long
| |
| | |
| time to realize that this is all smoke and mirrors economically. If in 27 years I would not have
| |
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| started an NGO called Transfrontier Africa to build schools and plant vegetable gardens and put shoes
| |
| | |
| on children's feet and look after the animals and the donkeys that take the kids to school and
| |
| | |
| put boreholes in so that people have got access to water because these are all the things that
| |
| | |
| the trophy hunters have been claiming to be finding. I've been a freaking warden and a
| |
| | |
| conservation practitioner, that's all I ever hear from them and yet I had to start an NGO and do it
| |
| | |
| myself and I refuse to prostitute the animals on the landscape that I am ordained to look after
| |
| | |
| for the sake of that. It's a kind of a perverse way of justifying an archaic practice to say that I
| |
| | |
| have to kill animals to build schools. What absolute balderdash is this? Firstly, you're
| |
| | |
| bailing your government out of its primary responsibility, okay? When Leitah gets paid her
| |
| | |
| salary, she gets taxed by the government and the government is proud to read out its annual budget
| |
| | |
| of how much money it's going to pump into schools and hospitals and social well-being and all that
| |
| | |
| kind of thing. Then the trophy hunters come in and say, well, we'll bail the government out,
| |
| | |
| we'll just plug a few elephants and a lion and a blah blah and all this sort of thing.
| |
| | |
| And yet nothing ever changed. Where's that money going? We're still driving around 20,
| |
| | |
| 30 year old Land Rovers and bouncing around with no air conditioning and what have you.
| |
| | |
| So there was another angle. If I'm going to lose animals to poachers and I want to try and get the community on my side, to not harbour poachers and to see poaching as a criminal activity,
| |
| | |
| then I can't be allowing some big Texan guy or some guy from Germany or what have you to come
| |
| | |
| and shoot the animals here and then at the same time tell that community you can't come in here
| |
| | |
| and touch a thing because I'm going to put you in a body bag if you do. So what message am I sending
| |
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| out? This is a white man's playground. We come here, we can do whatever we like and if the black
| |
| | |
| man comes anywhere near this place, we shoot you. And in fact, I'm not going to do the shooting
| |
| | |
| because I'm too busy celebrating killing an elephant. I'm going to get your children to
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| | |
| shoot you and pay them a minimum wage. It is the most perverse way of justifying conservation that
| |
| | |
| I've ever met. I can say this as a qualified, with all my academic background and what have you,
| |
| | |
| somebody who has practiced this for 27 years, so I can proudly say that on the landscape with the
| |
| | |
| Black Mamba's work, we have not tolerated trophy hunting for now 10 years. And we've gone over to the non-consumptive industries, spoke about commercial lodges in the past. They're not angels out there right now. The lodges have a big footprint. They have a lot of service providers
| |
| | |
| coming in and out, air conditioning repairmen, whatever it might be. There's a lot of wastage,
| |
| | |
| there's a huge energy consumption, there's a lot of garbage that is generated, refuse that we have to deal with. There's vehicles driving around harassing the animals, so on and so on and so on. But for every vehicle that goes out, there's 10 people on that car that are going back with this wonderful spiritual experience of seeing a lion roar and watching a baby grow. And so
| |
| | |
| it's not just one elite guy that can come in here and kill for fun and get out, because it's very
| |
| | |
| expensive to shoot an animal. Very, very expensive. I'm not talking about your aeroplane tickets and your fancy lodges and all that sort of thing, that's very expensive too. But to buy the rights
| |
| | |
| to kill that animal is very expensive. Now if you've got that kind of disposable income,
| |
| | |
| that's right, go freaking skiing in the Alps.
| |
| | |
| Erica: Yeah, I know it's disgusting, I agree.
| |
| | |
| Craig: You cannot convince me, Erica, you cannot convince me because I've had to do it, and it's the hardest part of any conservationist's life. The irony of it all, I will stop ranting after this last statement because I am going to rant about this and unlock it, it's very dear to me. The irony of it all, just like communism and socialism, it looks fantastic on paper. And it wasn't for the human
| |
| | |
| construct, it might actually be justifiable. But when you are in a third world environment with
| |
| | |
| borders that are so porous and such loose morals and a moral compass that spins like Captain Jack Sparrow's pocket watch, then how can you possibly expect a practice like that to deliver the goods that is written in some Marxist manifest? Because that's what it boils down to, it boils down to a regime that looks good on paper, that cannot possibly be implemented and self-regulated
| |
| | |
| inside the countries. Why do we not tolerate this kind of thing in the Northern Hemisphere?
| |
| | |
| Because it won't fly, but let's go down to Africa.
| |
| | |
| Erica: Well, I don't mean to interrupt you, but it's interesting you say that because just recently I learned that they are now creating these canned hunting ranches and farms. I know that about 16 or so that I know of at this point exist in Texas. I'm sure they are in other places too. People should know that this is happening right in the United States, this stuff exists now. And they have big game animals that shouldn't be there. There's zebras running and antelope running around. These animals don't exist in nature in Texas. They don't belong there. And these big fat cat dudes with all this money, like you said, disposable money, they they don't know what to do with. Invest! Become a philanthropist, give your money to worthy causes. There's so many poor
| |
| | |
| people in the world. There's so many things, good things that you can do with your money. This is how you're choosing to spend it?!. And then they have the audacity to say that this is good for ecology and for conservation? How and in what world can that possibly be true? And how istis this legal?
| |
| | |
| Craig: It's all smoke and mirrors to try and perpetuate that part of a rich person's lifestyle.
| |
| | |
| So they hide behind the banner of conservation all the time. They wave that conservation flag
| |
| | |
| willy-nilly all over the show. Just like the Japanese, we're very happy to wave the research
| |
| | |
| flag when they wanted to continue to kill whales. So there's no difference to me. There's no
| |
| | |
| difference to somebody going to a homeless person and harvesting his kidneys to save some rich dude, probably because that's wrong as well. And we've got rules and things in place to protect the homeless from that sort of thing. And I just think it's ridiculous that you would take animals from Africa, move them across to the United States of America so you could breed them, so you could perpetuate this practice. It's, man, it's part of our evolution. We put somebody on the moon. We communicate around the world on a thing this big. We can access as much information as we like at the click of a finger. Hiding behind this thin veneer of conservation all the time to justify
| |
| | |
| these practices. And yet we have evolved so far that we've put somebody on the moon. We are
| |
| | |
| exploring galaxies with probes and so on and so on. I can access, and it's all thanks to this
| |
| | |
| little appendage on the end of my hand. And I can use this to phone my mother and tell her how much
| |
| | |
| I love her. I can use this to take a needle and stitch up somebody who might be bleeding to death.
| |
| | |
| There's so many good things I can compose the most beautiful music with this finger and so on and so
| |
| | |
| on. And yet I will choose to use this same thing to pull a trigger and kill a big animal. It makes
| |
| | |
| absolutely no sense in the evolution of the human mind and the way that our value systems have
| |
| | |
| changed over time, that that surely has got to be such a small sector of our society that we are
| |
| | |
| trying to please and appease. That we are prepared to change legislation and hold international
| |
| | |
| conferences to appease this minuscule little sector of our society. I say, hang on a minute,
| |
| | |
| when did democracy become about the smallest part of our society? Because if you put this to a
| |
| | |
| popular vote, I promise you now they're going to lose. And yet here we have debates and
| |
| | |
| debates. I have to fly around the bloody world to have the same rent that I'm having to you now.
| |
| | |
| And you know, the statistics, nobody's listening to statistics. Science has never changed
| |
| | |
| management opinion in my time. You know, I'm a great advocate of science and I employ a
| |
| | |
| master of scientific team here. I was one myself. But the bottom line is that it's the lobbying
| |
| | |
| that is going to win. So those guys lobby harder because they've got the bigger bucks and they
| |
| | |
| align themselves with the National Rifle Association, Safari Club International, etc. etc. So
| |
| | |
| it's politicized. Okay. It's globally politicized. They go to the African states and they're
| |
| | |
| convinced. They say, listen, nobody's listening to us anymore. All right. So let me get a puppet
| |
| | |
| figure from an African state and bring them across to say what I need to say. Now it's coming from
| |
| | |
| an African person from Africa. Now you have to listen, you know, but the only people that
| |
| | |
| are benefiting from trophy hunting or the outfitters and the trophy hunters because money moves in that
| |
| | |
| circle. Yeah. I've been banned from just about every meeting for having these rants.
| |
| | |
| Erica: Oh, well, I can appreciate that. And I applaud you for getting banned from those meetings for doing so.
| |
| | |
| Craig: Yeah, they can't ban me twice. So I can say it again.
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| Erica: How do we combat this? With people in high government levels who are okay in all of this? I know it seems kind of an absurd question, right? How do we even contemplate such a thing? The people with the money and power, they all work together don't they?
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| Craig: That's right. That's what it boils down to at the end of the day. Money begets money. And,
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| you know, it's very influential. Money is more influential than numbers, people numbers,
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| and democracy is supposed to work on people numbers, really, you know, but it doesn't.
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| It works on the size of your wallet. But, you know, I go back to, I'm going to do a bit of
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| backpedaling now. If this was a utopian world, then there might be beautiful wilderness areas
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| out there that you can say, I'm going to helicopter some guy in to shoot some crusty old thing,
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| put it out of its misery and make enough money to protect that wilderness for the rest of our lives.
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| But, you know, because we humans that crusty old thing then becomes a young teenage thing,
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| because they can't find the crusty old thing and the hunters only got one more day left. And,
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| you know, so the rules and the boundaries just start expanding all over the show.
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| And that outfitter doesn't want to lose his income and, you know, blah, blah, blah. So no, it's not going to
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| work. It cannot work because we are human beings. And we've proven that time and time again.
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| Why would we prop up a failed model? We know it's failed. I mean, trophy hunting has been
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| going on in our landscape for decades, long before I was born. And yet the communities that they've
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| been propping up are still living in abject poverty.
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| The thing that really upsets me is that they
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| want me to protect the wildlife here from poachers guns. And to fund that, I must prostitute some of
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| the animals out to save the rest. It's like burning your furniture to warm your house. Yeah. So we had
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| to find a different model. And then I must just put more and more money into building bigger fences,
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| getting more helicopter fuel and so on. Because my local communities next door are going to look at
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| this lot and say, what a screwed up situation. The apartheid ended years ago, but we still are
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| being told, put a foot on the side of the fence, I'll blow you away. But that guy can come in because
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| he's got enough money. Why don't you give me the hunting permits? If there are permits available
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| for animals to be shot legally, why can't I have them as the chief of this village and then decide
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| if I want to sell them or burn them? You know, why can't I make that choice? But we say, no, no, no,
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| you guys, you stay one side. I'll make all the decisions of who dies and who lives on this
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| landscape. We've digressed horrendously off topic.
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| Erica: Well, let's take it to a more positive aspect. And so if there's people listening to our show today, either on podcast or YouTube, and these regular people just have a few dollars and they want to donate to your worthy cause. Is there a way that they can do that?
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| Craig: There is indeed. They can go onto our, Our website.
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| Erica: We'll have all your links attached to our profile. People can go on your Facebook and Instagram.
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| Craig: So thanks, Erica. You know, I should mention that we got,
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| you know, we've been around now for 10 years and nine of those 10 years was subsidized by the
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| government of South Africa through the national park order, the department of environmental affairs.
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| So we got quite a nice subsidy and it was more than 30% of our entire budget because they believe so
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| strongly. It was only because of COVID-19 and various other things that the subsidy stopped. So now we live
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| 100% off the goodwill of the generous people out there, the donations and so on. But I do want to
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| just, you know, I don't want to forget to mention that the government really stood by us for a long
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| time because they do believe in the women empowerment model and I like to think that we've influenced
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| policy at the highest possible levels. You know, all the neighboring parks and the national parks
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| that are going in a similar direction, the women are finally getting a place in the conservation
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| arena. So the value system is going to shift.
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| Erica: Yeah, that's great. Amazing work and bravo to you all for making that happen and obviously it's proven that women can and should have a place in
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| conservation and you're making incredible strides in making that happen. So wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for your good work. You know, Craig and Leita, it's not often in our lives that
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| we're fortunate enough to come face to face with their heroes and you really are that to me. I am honored to be able to sit here and chat with you about all of these things and it's not lost on me that this is a great gift. So I want to thank you both so very much for taking time out of your busy schedules and everything that you’re doing and all of your good work to be here with us today.
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| Craig: Absolutely, Erica. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for stimulating
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| Round of questions.
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| Leitah: Thanks Erica. Thank you so much for inviting us.
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| Erica: And my hope today in having us
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| all together to talk about these things and speaking about your critically important work
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| of protecting Africa's wildlife and supporting environmental education through community outreach is to hopefully impart some wisdom and inspire passion within the hearts and minds of other wildlife advocates who are listening or watching on YouTube. And, to remind people that we can all make a difference, every single one of us, each and every day, no matter how big or how small, you know, our collective voices together can carry the weight,
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| to create change and create miracles in transformation. We all have that ability, one at a time, together. So that's my hope. You've both inspired me. I'm humbled by you both. I hope that many others will be inspired by listening to our show today. And I want you to both know that you have a standing invitation anytime to please come on the Rising Lioness show again. And with all about Animals Radio, they'd love to have you on. So thank you. Thank you very much. I hope I get to see you again.
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| Leith: Yeah, you have to visit us. Yes. And then I'll take you out on patrol.
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| You're always welcome.
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| If that's a legitimate invitation, you might actually see me. I might
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| actually take you up on that because that's on the top of my list. I really want to do that.
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| Craig: So it'll be great. And then we do another podcast in the bush on patrol. That is a dream. I would love that.I'm going to talk to Val about that. So maybe you'll see me.
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| Craig: She can set it up.
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| Erica: All right. Well, thank you guys, Until next time. Namaste and have a wonderful day and be well. Thank you.
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| Craig: Thank you very much. Erica. Cheers. Bye
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