Tigers: Hunting The Traffickers

Published: 25 February 2020

The anti-poaching teams in Malaysia's Teman Nagara National Park patrol a jungle thought to date back as long as 130 million years. They might never see one of the wild tigers they are prepared to protect with their lives. Their camera traps provide the occasional glimpse of the Nagara's few glorious big cats and their cubs. They also capture chilling snapshots of the poachers hunting tigers by setting lethal snares in the jungle undergrowth. Given the value of a wild tiger on the black market, this is a war it's very hard for the rangers to win.

When Aldo Kane, a former Royal Marine, did his military jungle training in the same forests of Malaysia, an encounter with a wild tiger was a real and thrilling possibility. Twenty years later, there are fewer than 200 tigers remaining in Teman Nagara National Park, and fewer than 4000 wild tigers remaining across the world. Poaching, along with habitat loss, have driven wild tigers to the brink of extinction.

After leaving the Marines, Aldo trained anti-poaching teams in the military skills needed on the front line of the conservation war, but he wanted to do more to help the cause of protecting wild tigers. Grain's Orlando van Einsiedel, Creative Director of Grain and Academy Award-winning director of Virunga, and Head of Development Anna Murphy, working with the BBC’s Natural World team developed a film that would allow Aldo to investigate the growing demand for illegal tiger products across South East Asia.

The world is horrified by pictures of rhinos and elephants left for dead by poachers on Africa's grasslands. But across most Tiger Range countries, tigers are vanishing in a hidden apocalypse, killed and smuggled out of dense jungle. Tiger bones are then processed into hugely valuable products with a greater street value than cocaine, and consumed behind closed doors in Vietnam and China, where they are thought to have aphrodisiac qualities.

A life-long fan of the films of the BBC's Natural History Unit, I was thrilled to be involved, but knew this would not be a normal nature film, as we were planning to expose cruelty and criminal activity. We put together a crack investigative team around Aldo, led by Laura Warner, a talented self-shooting producer/director with a long track record of filming in hostile environments. Aldo used his skills as a former Marine to conduct surveillance, break into illegal tiger facilities, and gather video evidence. And everywhere Aldo went, Laura went too, scaling walls with her camera rig.

We were lucky enough to collaborate with some of the region's outstanding investigative journalists specialising in wildlife crime. Some we can't name for their own safety; another, Chau Doan, one of Vietnam's most prominent investigators, not only went undercover to film dangerous Vietnamese tiger traffickers but spoke on the record about what he'd uncovered.

Just as the poaching of wild tigers happens out of sight, the cruel confinement and butchery of tigers bred for their parts in illegal tiger farms has rarely been exposed. We now have startling video evidence which we hope will alert the world to the dreadful phenomenon of tiger farms, and help provoke action.

Monica Garnsey, Executive Producer