The People - Forest ranger

Forest rangers wanted: Poachers welcome to apply

From wildlife trader to ranger

To put it bluntly, Son Hen was hired as a ranger with WWF's Srepok Area Wilderness Project "to put him out of his job." You see, one of Hen's main qualifications is that he is a former wildlife trader.

The wildlife trade poses possibly the greatest threat to the rich biodiversity of the Dry Forests of eastern Cambodia. Local markets abound with dried bush meat and trophies of horns and antlers are mounted in village homes, while pangolins and freshwater turtles are smuggled abroad where they are sold at lucrative prices.

Trading illegally - the bucks are big...

Hen wasn't always a wildlife trader. He used to sell legal goods such as fruit and vegetables. But then he saw that the wildlife traders were making a lot more money, and he wanted to get in on the action. He started trading monitor lizards, snakes, and horns, which he bought from hunters from nearby villages. During his four-year stint in the wildlife trade, he sold two tigers both for $1,000 making him a profit of $400 each. He also traded three leopards, which he bought for $150 and sold for $220. He figures he made $300 a month, a vastly sum in one of the poorest countries in the world where the average wage is barely a dollar a day.

...and so are the losses

But business was getting bad. Sometimes he lost money like when wildlife died on him. And there seemed to be less and less wildlife available as the number of animals decreased and the police presence increased. Hunters were afraid they would get caught and so was he. Twice he was stopped by the police, who seized his goods and fined him heavily.

Converted to conservation

So when the opportunity came, Hen decided to convert to conservation, where he could apply his first-hand knowledge of the trade to stop it. That opportunity was provided by the project's mandate to create alternative livelihoods for local people who over-exploit the forest and to tap the depth of knowledge trappers, hunters and traders have of the biodiversity of the area.



The government would have preferred WWF to have employed government staff, but to create a sense of ownership, officials were finally persuaded to let local people be hired. "So we looked for people who know the forest and most importantly, want to be in the forest," says the project's technical advisor, Martin von Kaschke.

Creating jobs for the local community

There was no need to advertise. The news of jobs spread by word of mouth and in some cases, Lean Kha, the head ranger, himself a former hunter, approached people he thought could do the job. To illustrate that local communities can benefit from conservation, people from each district in the area were hired.

"Then you have people in the community who, like all of us, talk about our work. They go back and tell everyone what they are doing and what conservation is. They serve as a community extension team," adds von Kaschke.

Reading the signs of nature

A number, maybe the majority of the half dozen rangers hired so far, are illiterate, but this doesn't bother von Kaschke who sees it as no obstacle. Maybe they can't read a book, "but they can read the signs of the wild," he says.

The terms of reference will change as the project progresses. Right now the rangers are establishing headquarters, maintaining and cutting trails, conducting patrols to collect data on wildlife and looking for signs of poaching. They are receiving some basic training in recording data and using the global positioning system. As well, they are learning from each other, especially from Kha who is an expert tracker and knows the forest intimately. Eventually, they will work as tourist guides as well.

Committed to conservation

When asked why they chose to be rangers, most admit they like the steady income of $100 a month, despite the long weeks away from their families. But they also state their commitment to conservation. Von Kaschke recalls one ranger admitting he had "'killed something of everything in this country.' He knows what he was seeing 20 years ago and that things are very different now."

Hen has a vision for the future. He wants to conserve wildlife "so there are just as many as when I started selling them."