DON’T MENTION THE WAR: Ivan Carter seeks to expose animal truth in Africa.
War, what is it good for? If you’re Ivan Carter, absolutely everything.
The hunter-cum-conservationist — and he argues there is no oxymoron in that job description — has traded his high-calibre rifle for a high-definition camera as he sets out to shoot the dwindling wildlife of his native Africa.
The result is Carter’s W.A.R, a new television series which premiered in Thailand on Thursday, looking to expose the ugly but often very complex truths about the increasingly violent intersection of human and natural worlds in Africa.
Although the “war” in the show’s title is in fact an acronym — it stands for Wild Animal Response — the show takes on a decidedly militaristic theme. And Carter says this is deliberate: there is a conflict raging in his homeland, he says, and nature is losing badly.
On the winning side are the heavily armed hordes of poachers butchering elephants for their tusks and rhinos for their horns — often sold to Thailand and other parts of Asia — while the continent’s exploding human population is also being squeezed into conflict with dangerous animals as they encroach deeper in their natural habitats.
Carter says the realities of this conflict, and potential solutions, are too often glossed over, misrepresented or outright ignored in favour of peddling a stereotypical portrait of Africa.
“When you look on the common media, you basically see droughts, bullets and starvation [in Africa],” he tells Brunch.
“And when you look at the wildlife channels, what you’re going to find is the beauty of the sunset behind a baby cheetah. And if you look at History Channel … you’re going to see the Maasai or whatever.
“But the reality is that no one is telling the stories of where the human element and the wildlife element are clashing.”
DEEP SQUEEZE
In one episode of Carter’s show, he travels to a community on a stretch of the Zambezi River. The area is home to a large population of humans and hippos; interactions between the two are often violent.
Carter is implored by one local woman: “Please shoot this hippo. This hippo is killing us.” When he refuses, she is visibly upset.
It’s a confronting image, and one Carter says is important to make people understand that it is not only poachers who are driving African wildlife’s precipitous decline — it is ordinary people, pushed to the fringes of society by poverty and hunger and whose lives are in danger as they encroach deeper into the wilderness.
“The wildlife is getting squeezed,” Carter says, “and the wildlife is squeezing back.”
The human encroachment not only puts people at risk of attack, but is driving a surge in the bush meat trade which Carter says is the single greatest threat to Africa’s biodiversity.
“In 2014, more bush meat came out of the Congo basin than the entire beef production of Brazil,” he says.
“Now, that’s not an easy thing to solve. Appreciating the beauty of wildlife is a concept that can only be understood if you have a full belly. If not, you and I are sitting in a national park, we’re hungry, our children are starving, and then a giraffe walks past, and you’re going to think, ‘Wow, I wonder how we can kill and eat that thing.’ “
Carter, a native of Zimbabwe, said his local knowledge and contacts help him get closer to communities that may have been apprehensive about speaking with foreign film crews.
“And you realise when you get embedded with those kinds of people that no one is doing a very god job of telling their stories,” he says.
“Very often we don’t look at these things from the perspective of the local communities or the wildlife itself. And holistically speaking, if we don’t involve the communities in the solution, then the solutions will be very short-lived.”
ENTERTAINING THE THOUGHT
Carter says a lot of effort went into balancing the show’s educational message with a concerted push to make it engaging for viewers. “In the days of fast media and smartphones, it’s got to be high impact.”
But he still wants viewers to come out feeling informed and “not just flip the channel when it’s over”.
He attempts this delicate balance by eschewing formal sit-down interviews in favour of gleaning information from experts in the field as they work.
“There is nothing that’s not entertaining about chasing a rhino to try and dart it and put a collar on it … or capturing a giraffe for range expansion of the species,” he says.
“But I’ll never have an interview with the giraffe research guy. I’m going to dart and collar a giraffe, and while we’re racing after this thing in a truck, after the dart’s gone in, I’ll be saying to him, ‘Man, this keeps you busy doesn’t it’, and he’ll be saying, ‘Well, actually, believe it or not I’ve got 13 collared giraffes around Africa, and I followed them and we found the furthest one goes this distance’.
“I could deliver that in a very dry informational way. But delivering it as we bounce around in a truck in the badlands desert of Namibia chasing a giraffe with a dart in its bum, everybody’s going to watch that, and everybody is going to learn from that.”
Part of showing that modern reality means, for Carter, not shying away from the graphic violence that is an inevitable product of illegal poaching. That means it’s a show best not watched over dinner, but Carter is aiming for maximum impact.
“If we are showing a rhino that’s standing there with its face chopped off, people are going to go. ‘Oh my goodness that’s terrible. What can I do to stop this?’ “
HARD TARGET
Carter’s views and methods are not without controversy — his endorsement of hunting in particular tends to stir emotional debates about conservation.
But Carter believes the answer to protecting Africa’s wildlife is to suspend our emotions and be pragmatic.
“I think that the most important thing is for us to recognise that there’s right ways to manage wildlife, and there’s wrong ways to manage wildlife. And that’s not an opinion, that’s a reality,” he says.
“The right way to manage wildlife to have a community that is well fed and getting money, and the wildlife population is increasing every year. If you’ve got a formula where that is happening, then how could that possibly be wrong?”
It comes back, he says, to the divide between Western sensitivities and the reality of life on the ground in Africa. He says emotion often clouds rational judgement — in the Cecil the lion case last year — in which an American dentist was pilloried in the media for shooting a famous lion in Zimbabwe — the emotional backlash in the West has meant millions of dollars have stopped flowing into many different corners of Africa.
Carter is quick to stress that he was against the Cecil hunt since it was illegal and he is “violently opposed to wildlife crime”.
But he says the West should not be so quick to impose emotion on an issue that demands a rational response.
“If it is in the badlands of Africa such as western Tanzania, northern Kenya or northern Cameroon, often the only way that wildlife has value is through people who will pay large amounts of money to come and pursue that wildlife from a hunting perspective,” Carter says.
“Now I’m not asking anyone to pick up a gun and go and hunt. What I am asking them to do is to recognise the value of that hunter’s money. It’s all about giving wildlife value, however you do that.”
INSIDE AND OUT
Aligning those Western perceptions with the realities of life on the ground can also mean breaking other taboos.
“Nobody wants to go into Maasai land and say these amazing majestic people are the downfall of the lions,” he says.
“But if you go in there … and you embed with the Maasai and you talk to a guy who’s physically killed one with his hands and a spear — I mean a 500 pound cat — then you understand the value they place on their livestock, and how the lions threaten their livestock.”
But then Carter jumps across to the lions’ perspective. He interviews a Maasai working at a wildlife research station and asks him why his brothers are trying to kill lions while he is trying to save them.
“And he looks right at the camera and he says, ‘Because of education. I understand the value the value of these lions to our community through the tourist dollars that flow through a lion.’ “
Ultimately, Carter says, this is what this war boils down to: money and education. With enough of both, there is no reason both sides cannot coexist peacefully.
“As soon as the first world steps in and starts going, ‘Well, we don’t think this should happen because emotionally we like lions or we like elephants or whatever’, then all of a sudden doing the right thing becomes secondary to making everybody happy,” he says.
“There are three things that eliminate wildlife: greed as a result of very valuable body parts; loss of habitat; or it’s simply people eating it.
And so based on the fact there are only three reasons for the decline of wildlife, there can’t be too many different solutions. Because humans are always the problem, but humans are also the solution.”
This source first appeared on Bangkok Post Lifestyle.