Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Elena Montrasio
My greatest dream is to be out of work,
to be thrown on a scrap heap
because guys like me are no longer needed to look after animals like this.
This is Piglet.
I was there when Piglet was born.
He's now four years old.
He weighs close to a ton and can run 35 miles an hour.
Piglets hardly evolved for millions of years.
He's a living, breathing time machine.
He's a direct link back
to an identical relative in a distant past.
At the turn of the 19th century,
there were a million rhino on the African continent.
Today, we're down to 25,000.
These animals and everything they represent
are being pushed to extinction because of human greed.
The use of their horn in the Far East,
which is selling for up to $30,000 a pound.
Why is the rhino so important? It's a keystone species.
A rhino is the hardest animal on the planet to protect.
It's the animal that poachers are willing to go to the greatest lengths to kill.
When we develop and implement strategies that look after rhino,
everything else in that ecosystem is being looked after.
When you weigh this against big global issues
such as global warming, deforestation, human population growth,
the most immediate thing we can do here, today,
is to protect what we have left.
That's why the rhino is so important.
My name is Damian Mander.
I served as a Royal Australian Navy Clearance Diver
before changing over after September 11th
to a new unit the Australian Government formed,
the Tactical Assault Group East, where I became a sniper.
2005, I left the Australian military and went to Iraq
to use the skills that I had
to make the money that I wanted as a private contractor,
so I worked there.
I did 12 tours into Iraq, making money.
Probably the most notable job I had
was as project manager
for the Iraq special police training academy, in northern Baghdad,
where we would recruit people from the local communities,
- rural communities, often with low literacy -
train them up and redeploy them back out into the face of war.
The lessons I was learning at that time would carry me through to an insurgency
that I would be facing a decade later in Mozambique.
I left Iraq and I found myself pretty lost in life,
as a lot of people coming back from war are,
or coming out of the military with those types of backgrounds.
I went to southern Africa.
I wanted to get involved with anti-poaching,
with conservation in some sort of capacity.
It was initially for adventure.
I got over there,
started traveling around South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia,
eventually Zimbabwe,
living with rangers out in the field,
seeing what these guys go through on a day-to-day basis,
seeing the sacrifices they make.
And I realized there's more to life
than running around looking for an adventure.
The catalyst moment for me
was seeing a buffalo caught in a wire snare,
that had been struggling for so long
it had ripped its pelvis in half trying to get its leg out.
And when we destroyed it, it gave birth to a stillborn calf.
That, for me, was a catalyst.
I realized,
animals don't want too much on this planet.
They don't want a fancy job,
they don't want a fancy car,
they don't want a bigger house,
they don't have egos.
Animals want one thing.
They want to survive, and we as a species continually take that away from them.
So I decided there and then, that I had two things;
I had skills, and I had money, and I had a problem.
If I put the skills and money together, I could start solving this problem.
It was basic.
We used the basic principles that were used in Iraq
to start getting on top of the problems
in the local areas where we tackled them.
I formed the International Anti-Poaching Foundation.
IAPF is a direct action law enforcement organization.
We're now registered in six countries
and have the likes of Dr.Jane Goodall sitting on our advisory committee.
We operate alongside governments and local stakeholders
and within the laws of the country where we operate.
In 2013, I heard about rhinos that had gone extinct
in a country called Mozambique in southern Africa.
You can see over here.
This is Mozambique here.
Mozambique shares a 355 km border with a national park in South Africa,
and that national park is called Kruger National Park.
And in Kruger National Park is 40% of the world's remaining rhino,
so I couldn't figure out how
on one side of the border, there's 10,000 of these rhino
and on the other side, they're extinct.
We started to look a bit deeper.
In the bottom half of Kruger National Park
- you can see Kruger here;
it's the border down the middle between South Africa and Mozambique.
This bottom third of Kruger National Park,
70% of Kruger's rhino
is the biggest population of rhino in the world.
To put things in perspective, there's more rhino in this section here
then there are in all of South Africa's 450 private game reserves
that have rhino.
Last year, Kruger National Park accounted for 68%
of the 1,215 rhino that were killed in South Africa.
South Africa has 75% of the world's remaining rhino.
80% of the people that did the poaching
came from Mozambique.
They came from across the border.
Seven years into a losing war, there's over 400 rhino NGOs
focusing on the problem within South African borders.
Inside the GLC, people going in there to try and support these landowners here,
there was nothing.
Nothing on the ground to try and support these guys.
It's the most critical piece of land on the planet for rhino conservation.
It's all that stands between most of the world's rhino,
and most of the world's rhino poachers;
it's the piece of land that had the least amount of support
but stood to benefit the greatest amount of rhinos.
We spent 18 months working with local stakeholders there,
pulling together a strategy for them,
working with government, approvals from government.
We put together a very basic strategy.
This is the point I want to make today; go back to basics in conservation.
At the time when we first started going in there,
a rhino wandering across that border into Mozambique
had a life expectancy of between 12 and 24 hours.
This is what we're up against.
We're going into the eye of the storm here.
Going in there, supporting local stakeholders,
we started in Sabi Game Park.
It's an area that shares 45 km with Kruger National Park.
This collective area, the lower Greater Lubombo Conservancy,
has a 70-mile border with Kruger National Park.
We started in Sabi Game Park,
and working with the local stakeholders there,
after four months I can tell you
there are 25 rhino back inside that country now,
and the population is growing every day.
(Applause)
We have helped create a viable population of rhino
in a country where they were previously declared extinct,
and this is growing.
We are now expanding.
The mission here is to raise the capital
to expand and replicate success across this whole area,
and shut down the most critical piece of border
guarding the biggest population of rhino in the world,
the hardest animal in the world to protect.
That's our mission, and when we protect that,
all biodiversity in this area is being looked after.
Now I know that what we do, anti-poaching,
we're the guys that deal with the problem at the coalface.
We're very focused in what we do.
We work alongside community initiatives.
I understand that what I do is not the answer.
The big answer lies in this age-old cliche
of trying to get the hearts and minds of the communities on side.
It's a discussion we've been having for decades.
I don't know what the answer is, and I'm not your guy for that.
There's people a lot smarter than me trying to figure that out.
There's whole government departments working on that around the world.
I'm the guy that stops the hemorrhaging.
I'm the guy, with our rangers that buy the time,
and that's what we have to do: protect what we have left.
And that's why this project is so important,
what it represents, and what this species represents.
There's a group of people in this world, it's one of the most resilient people,
but one of the most least appreciated people.
Whether you're involved with an environmental NGO,
whether you like taking pictures in nature,
whether you want to go on a safari, whether you're a hunter,
whether you have a lodge in Africa,
whether you like breathing the fresh air,
or drinking the fresh water that comes from nature,
it all comes back to one group of people.
It's a group of people that go out for up to 14 days at a time,
risking their life,
not so much from the poachers they're trying to stop,
but from the animals they're trying to protect.
This group of people is game rangers.
Their job is to protect the heart and lungs of the planet.
The most important thing to remember is that rangers are the best weapon.
A motivated ranger, someone who believes in what they do,
someone who has the right training, the right basic equipment,
someone who has face-to-face contact with a manager every day,
not someone you dump in the bush and tell him to go do a 14-day patrol.
Someone you care about, someone you believe in,
because if you give a ranger that, they will be your best weapon.
They will get up at any hour of the day,
and they will go and walk 20 miles in a dangerous environment.
When they're walking 20 miles in a dangerous environment,
putting boot prints in the dirt, they're going to find tracks of poachers.
When they find tracks of poachers, they're going to follow up,
and they're going to arrest poachers, and it's going to send a message
to the next group that's lining up at your fence, waiting to come in
and exploit elephant, and exploit rhino, and everything those animals represent.
There's never been a more critical time in history
to demonstrate, as a species, as a generation,
we have what it takes to protect what we have left.
The best way to protect what we have left
is to support those that defend it with their lives.
We've got to stop looking for a silver bullet in conservation,
thinking that it's going to solve everything.
The silver bullet already exists.
It's a game ranger.
The brave, courageous, resilient game ranger.
And while we're sitting here tonight,
these men and women are out there, struggling, bleeding, but persevering.
They are mother nature's green army.
Please, don't ever forget their sacrifice.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)