The illegal poaching and trafficking of African wildlife has become a multi-billion-dollar industry and is the third most valuable illicit trade in the world. Veterans Empowered To Protect African Wildlife (VETPAW) successfully helps combat this by training and educating park rangers and local villagers.
Since 2014 Veterans Empowered to Protect African Wildlife (VETPAW) has been taking action against the illegal African poaching trade, using an 80+ member team of post 9/11-Veterans from across the world, that is highly trained in anti-terrorism and counterinsurgency. For more information about VETPAW, visit https://vetpaw.org.
VETPAW was created by U.S. Marine veteran Ryan Tate after watching a poaching documentary on TV. The film featured troubling scenes of innocent animals being hunted down and killed by illegal poachers for their horns and tusks.
“The sad, but true story is, every day nearly 100 elephants are butchered for their tusks, and every eight hours a rhino is shot dead for its valuable horns” said Ryan Tate, CEO of VETPAW. “The illegal poaching and trafficking of African wildlife has become a multi-billion-dollar industry and is the third most valuable illicit trade in the world. On top of that, poaching is also highly organized and militarized”.
VETPAW teaches park rangers and local law enforcement how to patrol correctly, including how to cover huge areas with a small number of rangers. Some rangers have to cover 100,000 acres with mountains, cliffs, and rivers, so they quickly realized, that efficient patrolling was the safest tactic for the animals as well as for the rangers.
Today, some VETPAW members fight side-by-side with rangers, armed with night vision scopes and military equipment, while others educate people in the local villages about the dangers of participating in wildlife poaching and trafficking. VETPAW also continues to offer training in firearms, safety, de-escalation, operational advisement and more.
In eight years of service, the VETPAW team has encountered zero animals suffering from poaching on the 57,000 acres the organization oversees. VETPAW has trained more than 1,000 rangers in Sub-Saharan Africa to enhance the patrolling of their wildlife parks and keep poachers out of the area.
With the help of VETPAW, local law enforcement’s intelligence-based strategies are now breaking down the illegal poaching supply chain every day.
Veterans Empowered To Protect African Wildlife is a conservation organization, that empowers highly trained combat veterans by utilizing their skills to train, advise, and assist Africa’s park rangers fighting to protect endangered wildlife from poaching conducted by militarized criminal networks. Their goal is to ensure the survival of critically threatened wildlife while serving the men and women who’ve served their country. For the latest updates and newsletters, please visit https://vetpaw.org/news
