How does it happen that a wealthy animal welfare NGO funded by well meaning donors, rich and wealthy people from Europe and North America. And by rich and wealthy, I mean you and me, because by all standards, we are rich and wealthy because we have access to things like running water or don't have to worry whether or if we're going to eat tomorrow. So how does it happen that that NGO takes all that money and relocates hundreds of elephants in Africa to the place when some of the world's poorest people live? As a result, people get killed, life and livelihoods are being destroyed and those people live in terror. Today we're going to examine this crisis and we're going to confront some uncomfortable questions. This is Conservation and Science podcast where we take a deep dive into topics of ecology, conservation and human wildlife interactions. And I'm Tommy Sierafinski and I always strive to bring you diverse perspect perspectives on environmental stories. And that means that sometimes you may hear voices, views and opinions that you may not necessarily agree with, which is okay because we need more dialogue and understanding and less division and fighting. In other words, I'm trying to make you listen to people you might have not listened to otherwise. Today, our guest is journalist and communication specialist Jens Uhlik, who you may remember from episode 193. And Jens is just back from Zambia when he was looking at this situation on the ground. Jens, welcome back to the show.

Thank you. Thank you for having me here. Yes, I was back from Zambia a few weeks ago. I was there on a trip with very, very short notice because we have an ongoing situation in Zambia where ifaw, ifaw, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a big animal rights NGO here in the west, decided to go into a big, big translocation process, moving more than 250 elephants from one national park in Malawi, where there was probably too many elephants, to another national park in Malawi where there haven't really been a lot of elephants for the last 50 years. There was a small population left, but the elephants left in this park, it's called the Kazungu national park, had been there for so long that they have adapted to the situation with farmers all around the park. So the farmers never saw these elephants before. So what happened was that I fought. This organization went into a cooperation with the Malawian authorities. They got all the permissions. IFAW has this big vision of a project called Room to Roam, meaning that they want to connect large areas of wild habitat for elephants with corridors so that the elephants can move freely all over southern Africa as they used to do thousands of years ago. And on paper this is a beautiful idea if you're an elephant. Of course the problem is that of course the population, the human population of Africa has literally exploded over the last many decades. So now there's a lot of people living in these potential corridors for the elephants. And people and elephants are not a very good mix. Elephants are hungry and as every other animal they will search food whenever they can. And to be honest, they can also be a little bit grumpy. So they attack people if people are standing in their way.

Yeah, and I. Sorry to interrupt you, but I was watching not long ago a film about similar situation, conflict with elephants in India. And my takeaway was like, my God, those elephants are assholes that like, they really like, you know. And you can confirm that or not, but I heard from some people who, who live in Africa that then some African languages, the word for elephant is the same word used for enemy.

That could very well be. I mean at least that was certainly the impression I got from talking to the locals in Zambia and Malawi now who are deeply affected by elephants. So, so I mean basically elephants are like people, we don't like things standing in our way. So, so they're a little bit more consequential than, than other kinds of animals. But you know, they, they, they have the size, the power and, and, and the intelligence to, to, to be formidable enemies of people, especially people who, whose only chance to defend themselves is basically with an empty bucket and a stone making noise. So, so what happened back then was that they, I thought they went out and, and had a big scientific in investigation done, you know, trying to find out whether it was feasible or not to move these elephants and they found that it was and they got all the permissions and then they had a guy who was in charge of the anti poaching unit in Kazungu in the area that they were going to move the elephants to. And he's an ex soldier from South Africa. He very much disagreed with their plans. He felt that they didn't coordinate the translocation nearly enough with the local communities living around the park. This park is not fenced at all. So literally on the border of the park is where the farmland begins. So he was in very much disagreement with Eiffel and it ended in a breakup and they went ahead with the translocation. In the beginning they cooperated with the Malawian authorities as I said before, but also with African parks, another big NGO known for Prince Harry's involvement. And there was a lot of press because this was one of the biggest planned elephant translocations in the history of conservation. So they planned to move 263 elephants. They estimated there was about maybe 100, maybe less elephants in the park at that time whom nobody saw because they never left the park. And the first move was to move four bulls from the other park to Kazungu. And they did. And within 24 hours after moving those first four elephants, two people had been killed outside the park. Now, this was the very, very beginning of everything. And you and I may think, okay, maybe that would make them stop and rethink the whole thing, because clearly these elephants had no idea that they were supposed to stay within the invisible boundaries of the park. And maybe if you moved more elephants, you would just expand that problem, especially.

When the, if that in the, in the park they were already elephants. So that you would, you would like a basic understanding of behavior. You would tell you that those elephants would try to find. They, they will be disorientated first of all, because they were dropped somewhere like, whoa, where we are. And now like, oh, there are elephants already there. Let's not get into the trouble with them. Let's find other place.

Right, of course. And another problem with Kazungu as a destination for these elephants is that the carrying capacity, the available food within the park boundaries are not very big. But just outside you have all these subsistence farmers farming corn, which is perfect elephant food, and it's all around the park. They just need to step out of the park. So why, why would it be so hard to, to foresee these problems? It's, it's difficult to, to, to wrap my head around that question. But as I said, two people got killed. But instead of, you know, pausing the whole thing, now the whole world press were there. You have probably seen some videos and some, some articles with pictures of, of elephants being loaded onto to trucks in 20 thing. But instead of pausing the whole thing, they sort of, you know, put a lid on, on, on the bad stories and, and speeded things up. So within the next 30 days, they moved another 259 elephants into that 30 days.

200 elephants?

Yes. Wow. 259 to be exact. More. And of course, the same thing happened. These elephants run out of the park whenever they want and they search for food where, wherever it is. So these farmers surrounding the park, I have to give you a little bit of background information about what's farming, what farming is like in this area. So typically a farm is, you know, anywhere between 2 and 10 hectares. It's very, very small plots of land. From, from our point of view, the farmland surrounding the park is only farmland. They have been farming this land since the 70s. So they've been there for, like, 50 years. None of these people ever saw an elephant in their life. So what happens is that these people who are family run farms, and they're running these farms with hoes and buckets and spades. That's it. They have no tractors, they have no oxen to pull a plow or anything like that. It's pure manual labor. So the entire family is involved in maybe cultivating three or four hectares of corn. And this is their entire livelihood and their entire food supply for the year. So suddenly, one day in 2022, these people are met by elephants in the field, destroying their crops. Some people are getting attacked, some people are getting killed. It's just chaos, you know, for people who are farming like 3 or 4 hectares and lose, say, 50% of the harvest in a night, some of them lost everything three years in a row. There's no security for these people. There's no compensation from the authorities. There's certainly no compensation from IFAW. So, you know, I drove around there for four days. We stopped 21 times to. To talk to affected people. Not one of them, not a single one of them had one ever seen an elephant before. These 263elephants were translocated into the area. Not one of them had received any kind of help from either authorities or IFAW, or from anybody. On the contrary, what. What they all told us is that when they went looking for help, they were basically met with arrogance. They were basically told, you should make room for elephants because elephants belong in Africa. So, so, so here you have people who are literally never seen actually physical money. These. These people are just, you know, living off the land and they lose everything in a night. So how are they going to feed their kids for the next year? Those are the problems they are facing. And it was. It was just completely heartbreaking to see how much these people actually suffered. So now, three years later, the result is that 12 people have been killed, 10 of them directly by elephants and two more by the consequences of releasing these elephants. Because, you know, you start a whole process when you turn an area upside down like this. So another person was killed by a hippo, which was scared away from the river by elephants. So now the hippo is out of his element, meets a person, and wop gone. And the 12th one was killed by hyenas who are now following the herds of Elephants into the fields, which is something that has been noted in other areas where you suddenly have a big increase in the population of elephants. So there's a lot of consequences here. A lot of houses have been knocked down because in the dry season of course there's no crops in the field, but the people keep last year's harvest, the corn, in their house. So the elephants just come into the villages and knock the house down while people are staying in the house.

That's what I saw in this film from India. That's exactly what was happening.

Yeah. And you know, as human beings we don't mind knocking down a beehive and steal the honey. I guess it's the same for an elephant unless we are the bees and our corn is the honey. But in total, because now, as I told you, this guy who was in charge of their anti poaching unit and who left IFAW on bad terms on his and other locals initiative, they started with volunteers to drive around in the area. They have these cheap little Chinese motorcycles that they drive around on to visit all the farmers and all the families who are negatively affected by these elephants to document the damage. And they write down, you know, the, the, the name of the head of the household, his contact details, how many family members he has, what's the, what's the amount of crop damage and, and, and what's the, what's the economy of all this? What's the value of, of the stuff they lost? And so far in three years, it's more than 12,500 people who are in some way negatively affected by this elephant translocation. And it's just thousands of kids are not going to school anymore because schools are free for sure, but the parent still has to buy school uniforms and school books and stuff like that. And when the family is starving, school books is not the top priority. So, so, so there's that and then there's the fear of actually the kids who sometimes has to walk like 8km to go to school, are they going to bump into a herd of elephants on the way?

So there's many questions and I guess the first one is like, how come the initial environmental assessment, I guess it falls under environmental assessment category. How this could go so wrong? How is, was that like, you know, genuinely they try to do it right and something went wrong or like, or was it botched from the beginning? Like, because that's a, that's a starting point, right? Because you said, oh, they done some.

Assessment of course, and there's, there's obviously a few theories about this. And I can say that I know for sure, but what I was told was that IFAW paid a few hundred thousand dollars to sort of a sister organization in South Africa to make that scientific evaluation before the translocation. And obviously they got it completely wrong. And what I and other people are wondering is how is it possible to get it this wrong? Because, I mean, all this could have relatively easily been avoided. As I told you, IFAW's vision is the room to roam. So they want elephants to be able to move freely. And by now they should have realized that this is not without problems. This is probably never, ever going to materialize because the cost is simply too big. Lots of people are also killed in Botswana and Zimbabwe and other areas where you have elephants roaming the landscape. But introducing large amounts of new elephants in new areas is clearly a recipe for disaster.

Is that organization that were like, first. My first thought is like, oh, how convenient. It's not them who does that. They just hire somebody and then it's their fault. Was that organization, you know, issued a statement or said anything, or like, is it big organization? Is it like, how this.

It's. As I understand it, it's a South African NGO who's basically in the same sort of business as ifaw. On the paper, they are trying to save elephants, which is. You know, I think there's a pattern here because you have done so many podcasts about the situation in Africa, so you have probably come across before that the situation in southern Africa is not that the elephant as a species needs saving. I know that the IUCN classify the bush elephant as endangered, but it's a little bit up to how you define things. Because suppose southern Africa had been an island separate from the rest of Africa. And suppose that there had never been any elephants in the rest of Africa and you only looked at elephants in southern Africa and the population development there. If that were to be the case, the elephants would be classified as least concerned, because in southern Africa, the population has actually been growing even through poaching crises and what have you. So in southern Africa, the elephant is not endangered as it is in western and central and eastern Africa, where poaching really got to them. So this whole argument that we are saving elephants is not really valid in southern Africa because they don't need saving at all.

But you just said that they're in other parts, you know, like in other parts of Africa, Their, their, their populations are not doing some so well. So on paper, right, it makes sense. Let's take those elephants from one place where they're thriving and population is growing and move them somewhere else.

On paper, yes, yes. And in this, in this case, the elephants were moved within southern Africa. So, so even then, on paper it wouldn't make sense. But, but say somebody got the brilliant idea to move 10,000 elephants from Botswana, where they are complaining about way too many elephants, to western Africa. So why, why are people not doing this? There's many reasons. Elephants are difficult to move logistically. They have a very low survival rate if you have to drive them for, for hours and hours or even days. So it's not going to be a super successful project. You're going to lose a very large percentage of the elephants you try to move. Another thing is that in western and central and eastern Africa, there are elephants left, which means that if you move a lot of elephants from southern Africa, you will genetically pollute what little is left in the other places, basically eradicating the western African and the Central African and the eastern African elephant as a sort of local subspecies, if you will. So that, that's a very big problem. A third problem is that of course there's a reason why the elephants are endangered in western, central and eastern Africa, and that is severe poaching. And unless you solve that crisis, you would basically just be paying millions and millions of dollars to feed the poachers, because the poachers are still there. They might have killed nearly all the elephants, but if we just supply them with more, there's no reason to believe that they won't be poached as soon as they arrive. So this is why these ideas of translocating elephants over thousands of kilometers will probably not work.

You know, what strikes me is something that we said on the podcast many times, and even in the context of like uk, Ireland or other, you know, like Europe, that translocation and reintroductions, that should probably be the last thing that we do. Like we tried everything else, we address the issues, why the problems happen in the first place, and there's a last resource. So that kind of like strikes me as a sort of like a thing that listeners to this podcast should heard about many times, as well as genetic diversity issues and genetic, I suppose, specificity and adaptations to the region, which are also kind of like not only for elephants, but of, you know, any other animals that you can, that you can think whether these are wolves or bears or elephants. Listen in, there's like a many articles written and I know that you written article as well. We're gonna link them all in the show notes so people can Dig in and read a little bit more. In one of those articles there was phrase used conservation imperialism, which is this idea that, you know, we want to feel good about ourselves and so we go into this poor country and like I said, people, you know, on one hand the governments are very keen on getting some money. On the other hand, people on the, on the ground, they're like you, you mentioned from your visit there, they're basically left to their own devices. Nobody gives a damn about them. How, you know, I'm just in terms of those organizations themselves and we hear like right now there's like environmental NGOs are under attack. And you know, and I'm not dismissing that because there are truly bad things happening. But in this case you gotta wonder like what are the motivate, what are the real motivations? Because you mentioned like, you know, there were people on the ground who said, hey, this is not a good idea. Like this anti poaching guy who was a part of our organization. And again like you said, like they move to olefans and the next day things are going, going south. So you get a question, what is really behind the motivation of actions like that?

Well, first of all, I would stress that in my point of view there's a very big difference between different animal rights NGOs and environmental NGOs and what have you. So it's not all the same, but there's definitely a type of NGO which are typically animal rights organizations. This is entirely my opinion that has developed a business model which is on one end a little bit fraudulent. This is where we live. So these people call the old ladies, they know exactly which buttons to push. Does this old lady feel especially obliged to save kittens or puppy dogs or is she more into baby elephants or whatever? So they raise a lot of money from very good hearted people who are actually believing that donating $50 or whatever is going to help this organization save the baby elephants. So that's one end of things. The other end of things is that of course they need to do something. At the other end in Africa or wherever, they're working to prove that they are actually doing something in order to be able to go out and present these success stories and raise more funds. In this case, I have seen nothing to imply that this is a different story. All I've seen is that this must be about the money because you know, you, you can go in and look into to IFAW's figures because they, they're registered in the US and due to US legislation they have to have Some transparency about how much they.

Over $100 million.

Yes. And the translocation of these elephants, as far as I could find out, cost them less than $2 million.

That's a healthy margin.

That's a healthy margin. And you know, I looked into. Typically the management of these organizations have extremely nice salaries. They make a lot of money. In contrast to one of the widows I met down there who was 23 years old, had a child who never met his father because he was killed while she was pregnant with their first child. And she now has to live, you know, as, as, as a, as a farm worker and makes maybe $300 a year. And they couldn't even, you know, she approached them and all she met was arrogance. She didn't even get $100 in, in funeral aid. I mean this is where we are at. And then you have the president of the organization making at least $500,000 a year, probably much more than that. I'm not really a socialist, but in cases like this, when poor people met with such arrogance, I, it, it, I have to say it pisses me off. Sorry for my freight.

No, no, it is. And, and you know, like this is another, well, like a common herd thing. And this is something that again, you know folks, I, it's, it's. I don't want to sound like I'm dunking on the environmental NGOs. You know that the members of environmental NGOs were many time in this podcast and some of them are doing tremendous works and some of them are great friends of the podcast. But in situation like situations like this, especially when you're talking about the organization that is like it's a corporation, it's a corpo. It's not like a. Yeah, like people try to do something good. Like it is like a proper, like a corporation. You got, you gotta, you gotta question, you know, and, but okay, let's, let's put that aside for a second. Let's say that we try to do the best, you know, best out of the situation. As I understand as I read around it, like things as simple as fence could potentially fix the problem or at least mitigate the impact a little bit. And they said that they're building fence, that they built like however many 91km of fencing in Kazungu, an additional 40 is being completed. And is, is that, is that the case? How does it check out with what you found on the ground?

Well, they are building a fence on the Malawian side, but to me it makes no sense whatsoever because we're Talking about a fraction of the perimeter of the area. So what's happening after they build that fence is that the elephants comes to the fence, they turn around and they walk to the end of the fence. And now they have a lot more and human wildlife conflict where the elephants can get into the field. So, so the, the practical solution here would be a proper electrified fence around the entire park combined with a ranger force who is ready to actually come when, when distressed people call them to, you know, get elephants back into the park whenever they break the fence. Because we also know that you cannot build an elephant proof fence. So if you build a good fence, the elephants will not come out as often, but they will still come out and they will still need to be chased back into the park.

It's hard to build a wolf proof fence.

Yes.

You're talking about elephants.

Yes, exactly. No, and, and, and you know I strolled along that little piece of fence they built in Malawi and buffaloes run through that fence the same, the same. The night before I went there, herd of buffalo just plow through that electrified fence. Probably either they were, they were speeding and just ran into the fence, but they got through or it was not properly electrified. Which is another huge issue in the area. They have power outings all the time. And of course on, on the, on the farms they typically have no power at all. So, so it's, it's this is this.

This, this is this disconnect right when we, when often when we. Again I'm gonna repeat myself. We discussing these things sitting in a comfortable room in front of a computers and we, and we just oh, you know, you gotta get a fence and you're gonna electrify this fans and there are solutions. We just need to implement those solutions. And, and I'm going back to this film in, in India about the elephants that was, they also had like this idea that they have some poles with cameras and they're emitting sounds that scare of the animals and whatever. And the same problem like hey, who's gonna service this thing? Because again like this fence, like even if you have this thing there electrified and assuming you have reliable or somewhat reliable source of, of electricity to power that thing, this needs service, this needs people maintenance. That costs money. And like if you build a fence around the entire national park, how many thousands or hundreds kilometers that would be.

Like who I think is, I think it's in, I think it's in the order of 5, 600 kilometers or something like that.

Yeah. So is a FAW. I thought are they have some Money to the ongoing maintenance. Maybe that's a question or the whole idea from the start was like one and done. We're just going to grab the elephant, drop him there, done checked out, moving on to the next thing because again, it should be project.

It seems that the hit and run strategy was what they actually aimed for. You know, building an electrified fence around the entire park. I'm not a fence maker, but I asked around, so it would probably cost less than $10 million. Compare that to fundraising of $120 million the year after they translocate the lady. The elephants. They would have spared themselves a lot of trouble, you know, just by demonstrating that they actually care. I mean, the signal value of investing in a fence to actually do something to prevent human wildlife conflict with these people would have made a difference, but they didn't. So it's truly a stuck situation there. And the locals are very clear. None of them will accept any damage to their crops whatsoever, even if they're compensated. They, they have reached that point because they have tried to cooperate now for, for three years and have received nothing in return. So, so that they're fed up. They literally say we hate elephants. And they have long ago started to, to killing elephants, started to kill elephants in retaliation. Which brings me back to another point. So was this good for the elephants? Have I4 achieved anything for the elephants? They moved 263 of them, at least 40 has been scared way into Zambia. They are completely out of the area. They're gone. And close to 50, at least 50 other elephants have been killed in the fields. And wherever we went, you know, people were starting to say, we're going to start killing more elephants. We know how to do this. We can use poison, we can use our homemade firearms. We realize that if we shoot them in the gut, they will run back into the park and die in there. Nobody will know. So they are having these thoughts because they feel that this is the only way out for them.

I heard they also eating those elephants because like if they lost their crop and they have nothing to eat, here's this. There's a lot of meat when you kill an elephant. So that's, that's also out of necessity.

Yes. So after I left three or four weeks ago, I know of at least four elephants that was shot on the Zambian side by Zambian authorities in the fields. And they are immediately chopped up and eaten, of course, because they, they need the protein. But you know, my takeaway from all this when I think about nature conservation and these elephants is that Maybe a few elephants will remain in the park when they learn that they are being killed all around the park, which was the case with the very small population that was in there before they moved all these elephants there. So maybe there will be a small surviving population within the park. But, you know, most of those elephants that they moved will be killed outside the park. They will, on the other hand, raid a lot of crops and kill some more people before this problem calms down. So, so who won anything here? The elephants are losing, the locals are losing. Now IFAW is probably unexpectedly also going to lose because now there's going to be a lot of public attention on this that they didn't count on how they reacted.

Like, what is their response? Because surely there is, there has to be some response from them. So, like, how does it look from their perspective? What's their official stance?

I, I wrote to them after I wrote my initial article about the situation. I said, do you have any comments? And I will send this article off to the, to the media within a week. And I got an immediate response from there. She was the head of sponsor relations in the US saying, oh, thank you for contacting ifaw. I have given this to our legal team who are very much into the case and they will come back to you with an answer. And then nothing happened. So no answer. And the article was sent out. Then a couple of days later, I got an answer from the legal team. And that answer was, well, we definitely talked to the locals before we released these elephants and they were completely for the project and looking forward to being able to get some alternative streams of income from tourism in the area and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, but, and it's very, you know, they, they can say that. But again, I talked to 200 people on the ground in 21 different locations. I didn't meet one person, one, not a single person who was consulted or felt that their community had been consulted before they translocated these elephants. So I don't know if they held some, some, some meetings in the capital of, of Malawi or somewhere else Very, very far from the people who are actually struggling with these animals now. But they certainly didn't talk to any of the locals. And another reaction I've seen from IFAW is quite recently in a local media, local Malawian online media, where they're literally saying they're talking about all these victims as alleged victims and we haven't heard of any problems. And they're talking about that South African journalist Ed Stoddard, who was there a year ago and who wrote an article right now about the court case that his alleged visit to Zambia and Zimbabwe, as if all these things didn't happen. So I find that strategy very, very peculiar and extremely arrogant, to be honest.

This is mind boggling. This is mind boggling. How does, how does like, how this was even allowed? Like, like, was there anyone who should have stepped in and say like, all right, stop. Like even after the first four bulls were relocated, you would expect that. Okay, we, let's assume we dealing with the unscrupulous organization that just wants to harvest money and they're just gonna want to tick the box. Are they doing something? Was like, how come there wasn't anyone who would say ho, ho, ho, stop.

You know, I learned when I was there that the, the office in charge of these things in Malawi is compared to what we're used to with authorities here in the west is extremely small and extremely underfunded. So, so their, their entire financial turnover, you know, you couldn't keep two persons on a salary for that here in the west.

So is it just a matter that those NGOs are so powerful and so wealthy that they essentially going to those countries and do what they want?

I have a feeling that, that unfortunately it's very possible, very likely. I'm not claiming that this is so, but it's very possible and very likely that, that they have paid their way, that there's there's some, some degree of corruption involved in this as well.

So okay, so we are, we are where we are. So what is the, like what is the current situation and more importantly, what is the way forward? You, you mentioned already about a lawsuit, so you might say something about that if you have some information. And more importantly, what's going to happen to those people? Because this is, I don't see any solution because IFAW says like, well, we done everything random. This is all just alleged victims. Fine. And elephants are there. So is the situation. Until those people will actually kill all their 260 elephants, it's not gonna be any. But like where are we, Jens, right now and how the Next, you know, six to 12 months might look like.

I honestly fear that the realistic solution to this is that the elephants will be killed one by one. A better solution would be to erect a fence around the park. I don't think that neither the Malawian authorities or the Zambian are going to prioritize that money for a fence. So the only solution I see is that IFAW steps in and assumes responsibility and says let's get this Fence up because everything is possible. It's just to, to pay for a fence that would.

What are the chances that they're going to do this?

I have no idea. I have no idea. I would say, you know, if I, if I, if I had a potential influx of money of $100 million a year and I had to save that by investing $10 million in a fence, I think that would be a no brainer. But again, they haven't done so for, for the last three years. On the other hand, they haven't had this negative public attention on the organization during that time. But the elephants, I mean, bottom line is that the elephants will not be roaming those rural areas in three or four years from now. Either they will be stopped by a fence and team of rangers or they will be gone. That's unfortunately the forecast for the elephants. Of course there will be a lot of problems along the way. A lot of more farmers will be injured and killed and a lot will lose their crops, which is just sad. So I don't really see a happy ending to this story unless EIFAW or somebody else steps in and make the necessary arrangements with a crop of fence and of course a team of rangers, which also cost money and of course some kind of system to compensate people for their losses. And this is also, you know, this has a greater consequence because obviously the rest of Africa is also watching here. So projects like this will become much, much harder to go through with in the future. Because that's another thing I noticed on the ground there. These people may be poor, but they are definitely not stupid. Poor people in Africa are more and more sick and tired of organizations from the rest of the world, mainly the west, coming in to just tell them what to do and they have to suffer the consequences. I was looking at some of the videos that was released when they translocated the elephants. It was a video produced by African Parks Professional Video Teams. Beautiful video. You saw they loaded these elephants onto the trucks and sedated them and in the field and what have you. But what they noticed, the Africans noticed, was that in some of those video shots you had upwards 30 people. There was maybe one black guy. And in Malawi, you know, there's not one white guy for every 30 black guys. So it just, you know, it tells.

Yeah, like that tells. That tells everything. That tells everything. Jens, Listen, I think we can say now that IFAW is getting sued. Do you have any, like, is there anything good can come out of this? What are the potential consequences for them? You know, because like people are Complaining, oh, big tech, they're not accountable and whatever. Like here you have like an animal welfare organization. It seems like they're untouchable as well.

Yeah, they certainly took, made their precautions because, because you know, they're pointing their fingers towards the Malawian government saying, you gave us the permission to move these elephants, now this is your responsibility. But IFAW has the funds to actually fix this, or at least partly fix it. So what I'm hoping is that the world will realize that this business model is actually a bad throwback to colonialism and that we cannot run conservation projects in the third world like this. So I'm really hoping for IFAW to learn a lesson in court. They may not lose the case due to legal stuff, details and stuff like that, but at least we will get a lot of attention on this type of conservation and on this type of business model. Because, you know, this is another thing that really bothers me and probably everybody else who's really into practical nature conservation is that those $120 million, which is a huge sum of money in conservation that was donated in one year partly because IFAW presented this translocation as a huge success. They could have actually been used for conservation somewhere in the world instead of just lining some pockets in the US for some guys with a clever business model. I think it's about time that we start looking critically on this way of using animal welfare and conservation and the environment as, as, as, as just a clever way to, to, to raise a lot of money.

Maybe the great place to wrap this up would be to ask. So I ask you a question in, you know, for our viewers and listeners. What should they, like, what should they do? How they should pay attention when they want to do something good, Right? Because this is all starts from people wanting to do, having good intentions, right? And we all know what's paved with good intentions. So if you are that person who has some disposable income and wants to, you know, help elephants or help nature or do whatever else, and obviously the easiest way, and sometimes the only way is to take that money and donate somewhere, watch like what due diligence should they do, what should they look for? Or what are the red flags to not end up financing disasters like this?

Well, it's not an easy question to answer because my immediate thought is that you have some environmental nos like WWF who tries to be transparent and who, who actually makes a difference on the ground, but they have had their problems in, in the recent past as well. Same kind of problems with ranges making life hard for, for, for locals around the, around the parks. I think that what we all need to do is to be a little skeptical and look a little bit further into these organizations. And one rule of thumb is that animal rights organizations are not created for conservation on a species scale. Animal rights organizations is always about the individual animals rights. And I haven't seen a single example of an animal rights organization who's actually making a positive difference for the species on the ground, the habitat, the local communities, all those things. So what I'm advising my friends to do is to definitely avoid the animal rights organizations if they want to donate for nature conservation, but they not advertising.

Themselves as animal rights. Right. Like I thought, it's like animal welfare.

Exactly.

I know. You know, like my politically incorrect opinion is that if you say animal welfare in the name, that's red flag straight away because that's the most convenient way of masquerading animal rights. But that's just my opinion. But you know, sorry to interrupt you.

But I think, yeah, it's difficult. And obviously their whole communication to raise funds is, you know, continuously adjusted for maximizing the results. This is a part of the business model. They are really, really good at fundraising. They're really good at saying the right things and convincing people to throw some money on the table. It's definitely not an easy situation. And I would hope that a lot of journalists, who has nothing to do with our world of conservation and animal welfare and hunting and all that, somebody completely from the outside took a hard, hard look at all the different NGOs because transparency is not really their thing. The NGOs, they are doing whatever they can to be as untransparent as possible, masquerading the bad stuff they do as something entirely different. So what I'm really hoping with this case, because it's such a clear case, is that there will be, there will be more attention to this, you know, on a broader scale because people, people feel that, that they're doing something good by being on the animal side. But in, in my point of view, when, when the NGOs develop into business models that, that are basically just about accumulating money, then. Then it's actually worse than nothing. Much worse than nothing.

Well, absolutely. And folks, if you like this type of, of conversations, don't forget to subscribe to my newsletter. The link is in the description of the show and links to the articles and you know, for some other reading are also in the description of the show. Jens, what are the words of wisdom that you would like to leave us.

With today, what I saw now in, in, in Zambia and Malawi really, really underlines for me that the only way that we are going to coexist with large wildlife like elephants or bears or tigers or what have you is local acceptance. If the people who are going to live with the animals cannot accept it, then forget about it, then they will find a way to make these animals disappear, just as we did in Europe and, and the States. So in the future, I think the most important thing in conservation is finding ways to gain local acceptance. Can be done in many ways, but if you do not involve the people who you expect to live with the animals, it's a lost cost, it's not going to work.

And this is exactly the same everywhere in the world. This is exactly the same with wolves in Ireland or the uk. This is same with tigers in India, same with elephants in Africa, same with all the elephants. Because you have this perception, rightfully so, that people who want this thing to happen and making these things to happen, they do not live with the consequences. And when that perception is there, it's over. I think that's just, of course, and.

It'S a little bit special when we talk about third world countries to say that, because in that situation you have Westerners like us, who has these grand ideas of how they can live with the tigers in India, how they can live with the elephants in Malawi. And we know that this wouldn't be possible in the UK or Germany, but still we expect the poor people in the third world to accept the consequences that our people are not ready to accept. And that is racism. It boils down to simple, crude racism. And it's racism from an angle where you wouldn't expect it. Because green people, what have you, they should be anti imperialistic, anti. Yeah, anti colonial.

Unless that, unless that makes them feel good. I think that exactly because.

And, and just goes to show that, that they think, as probably all people in the world think, that their cause, their pet cause, is just much more important than anything else, including black people in Africa.

And, and you know, Jens, and folks listening and watching this, I think that this is another conversation that we had here that makes me one step closer to making a dedicated episode about NGOs and US as a conservation investors, meaning how we pick the environmental organizations that we wish to support and being very, very careful in scrutinizing whether the money that we pay, are they really going to support the causes we care or are they going to support something else. Jens, thank you so much for this conversation. It wasn't you know, like a pleasurable conversation, but I think it was very important so people hear and know. And again, folks, subscribe to my newsletter. I will be reporting on the developments on this situation, how the court case will go and what's going to happen again. And yeah, Jens, thank you.

Thank you for having me.