Joey Abely

October 17, 2018

Dr. Drown

English 122

Why would people invest this much just for animals?

Have you ever been in a point in your life when you look back on prior decisions you have made and wonder; am I doing the right thing? In Africa there was a huge problem of illegal poaching and killing of animals which made it time for an action plan. They reached out to help for scouts to help out with this problem. These scouts knew that they had to lay everything down on the line including their own lives just to protect these animals. What would perplex people to do this?

Illegal poachers in the Africa area were shooting and killing animals such as elephants and rhinoceros for their tusks which contains ivory that can be sold on the black market for top dollar, making poaching an easy and rewarding job for these thieves. This was becoming a serious problem because the elephant and rhino population was going from populous to endangered to almost extinct, “Mark, look over there!” I stop the truck and we walk to a thin grove of trees near the edge of the dead woodland. Five elephant skulls, bone white and half the size of bathtubs, are scattered about the area with pelvises, leg bones, ribs, shoulder blades, and other remains. Horrified, we notice skeletons lying everywhere: one here, five over there, six there. “The bastards!” I kick the dust. …Now we understand why we have not seen a single living elephant, or a sign of one, in the eight days since we entered the park.” (Goldberg page 22). This shows us that although in a protected park, elephants and rhinos are still being poached to the point where they would go unseen by groups for days. This is a serious problem and in the quote you can see how upset the Owens’ were due to the matter, maybe driving them closer and closer to giving all they got for these animals.

To stop the poaching, American conservationists came in and gave strict orders to the park scouts saying, “Later, he orders his scouts, ‘If you see poachers in the national park with a firearm, you don’t wait for them to shoot at you. You shoot at them first, all right? That means when you see the whites of his eyes, and if he has a firearm, you kill him before he kills you, because if you let him get—if you let him turn on you with an AK-47, he’s going to cut you in two. So, go out there and get them. Go get them, O.K.?”’ (Goldberg page 5). This was a serious problem that Owens and a group of scouts were set out to fix. They were given a camera team who followed them around through the park documenting and filming everything that unfolded on their journey. Owens dad was also a part of this endeavor. One day near the end of the documentary Owens let his dog out into the woods and a little while later he went out back to see his dog come back whimpering with blood gushing from his body and one of his legs missing. Immediately Owens went out and found the poachers and he shot and killed them. It wasn’t until a few days later that law enforcement found the bodies of the poachers hidden under leaves near the scene of the incident. With people laying down their lives to commit the poaching and prevent it; is it really worth It? The argument twists in two directions without definitive answers due to people’s opinions varying. For the people saying no their argument would be that the animals are not as important as humans so why would we waste human lives trying to protect these creatures that wouldn’t live as long as the average human anyways. But for the people siding with no, were these orders really necessary? The author of the article The Hunted Goldberg visited the park recently after the scouts were done with their mission and what he saw was unbelievable, “During my last visit to the park, I witnessed something extraordinary: a male black rhino at close quarters. The rhino was enormous—the scout I was travelling with put his weight at more than twenty-five hundred pounds—but he seemed unbothered by the presence of humans. A pair of well-armed and attentive scouts were standing by, essentially as personal bodyguards.” without the scouts there and minimal poacher activity these rhinoceros were thriving and not afraid of human contact at all. Which seems pretty weird for a massive animal like this to be so tame. This would drive the people who made the argument against killing the poachers to say that there could have been another tactic to drive these poachers out of the park. Even the cameraman was interviewed on how he felt about Owens and he responded, “I asked if he had considered alerting the police in Lusaka that he had witnessed a killing by an American visitor to Zambia. He said, “That was way above my pay scale. I was working for ABC. It wasn’t my business to do that.” Everson would not say how he got back to camp after the shooting, but he said that he did not see Christopher Owens again.” (Goldberg page 26). This shows that even the cameraman on set did not agree with what Owens did and that was the whole mission all along.

Given these arguments it is extremely difficult to come to a conclusion about why people would risk their lives for that of an animal. It seems foreign in my opinion for someone to risk their life for an animal that they were never personally affected by. People who enforce animal laws and people who make laws about protecting these animals and the people should care the most about this matter and the outcome of a horrible situation involving human death for the salvation of animals.