By Vicky Flynn | Communications Manager
As a source country for high-value species like tigers, Thailand's rangers have been facing an increase in armed poachers willing to do anything to secure precious wildlife products for the illegal trade.
"The traditional five-man anti-poaching teams regularly encountered gangs with up to fifty or more poachers and, in 2015, at least seven rangers in Thailand lost their lives during such encounters," reports our man in the field.
Emerging from this crisis came the concept for a highly trained, mobile, rapid response unit of rangers. Working closely with the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation (DNP), our funding helped create a new unit called 'Hasadin' (elephant in Sanskrit) that is deployed throughout the forest complex that is home to over 300 wild tigers. The unit now responds to urgent, large-scale enforcement issues where existing enforcement was lacking, providing added protection for precious tigers and a strong, zero-tolerance deterrent to would-be poachers.
"We feel empowered by the training we received," says one of the rangers. "We now work more efficiently, more safely and achieve higher success rates."
In their first operation the Hasadin unit successfully arrested five poachers and emerged with a haul of illegal products, chainsaws, weapons and poachers provisions. Critically, the success gave the team a renewed sense of pride and of hope and boosted morale.
While the teams are making encouraging progress there is still a lot ot be done in the fight to save Thailand's wildlife. But, with your help, we can continue to provide more training and better equipment to build capacity and expand the units so that these amazing men can in turn protect the tigers that we love.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
