Poached Eggs
The story of people who poach and collect rare eggs, and the people who hunt them down.
Securing wildlife against poachers is a difficult problem, especially when the defenders are poor countries with not a lot of resources.
Comments
alanm • July 25, 2013 7:48 AM
Great read. Those guys are crazy.
Here in South Africa we have a poaching problem too, notably rhinos and abalone. In both cases there’s been an escalating arms race between poachers and protectors – usually with the poachers winning. Bribery and corruption doesn’t help, but in addition to that the protectors have a hopelessly large area of rough terrain to cover and are up against poachers that are often more mobile and better armed. Rhino poachers have gone as far as deploying helicopters and cross country vehicles of infantry armed with automatic weapons and armour-piercing ammunition. Anti poaching forces have had to respond in kind, as well as other novel ideas: pre-emptively removing rhino horns, dying them blue or poisoning them are the most notorious.
Give me the birders any day.
Mandy • July 25, 2013 9:46 AM
Oh common, you can’t tell me this story didn’t make you think there was a gentleman wearing a tophat and monocle going around collecting the world’s rarest eggs and making the world’s most expensive eggs benedict?
Figureitout • July 25, 2013 12:01 PM
Mandy
—Dave Chappelle did that for a 4 million year old egg then cut off the head of a newborn t-rex b/c he’s “baller”.
Security wildlife is difficult b/c if you secure it is no longer “wild”. China also apparently has a robust ivory market. They could always use armed drones like what is starting to happen.
MingoV • July 25, 2013 6:29 PM
“The story of people who poach and collect rare eggs…”
Aren’t you supposed to collect the eggs and then poach them?
guess.my.name • July 26, 2013 11:23 AM
Kind of like information and secrecy. Crazy how people are about things that are so meaningless.
Cops take their jobs so seriously, intel/war contractors take their secrets so seriously, spies live in a wonderworld where they get the most boring of data that is so exciting to them, leaders gloat and cherish their clever intrigues when anyone else in their position do the same things and they are so predictable and mundane.
Old fogies who “saw what you couldn’t believe really goes on” — what is it really? Meh. But the story sounds good. Only, compared to fictional shows, it is “meh”. Same old boring, mundane stuff simply dressed up as something better or more interesting.
All and everything in that as nutty as egg thieves and cops.
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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
Darryl Daugherty • July 25, 2013 7:04 AM
The problem is often not the relative poverty of the country in question, but the connivence and corruption of the very people putatively tasked with doing the protecting. Too often they are actually acting as enablers in the illegal wildlife trade, only acting against those that don’t pay bribes and protecting those that do.