Greg Warchol presents his book Exploiting the Wilderness: An Analysis of Wildlife Crime as a culmination of a decade of on-the-ground research in southern Africa. The book provides a number of interesting personal anecdotes and descriptions, and Warchol’s in-depth personal experience in southern Africa and knowledge of criminological theory offer important context to a book focused on efforts to combat wildlife trafficking. Unfortunately, however, the book relies too heavily on Warchol’s qualitative research, which is too limited to provide an adequate basis for the book’s ambitious objectives. Although Warchol also draws on the research and writings of others in the field of wildlife crime, the book misstates or glosses over several important legal concepts and treaties. The book also draws conclusions that could misinform a lay person and that an expert might call into question, given the fast-developing, multi-disciplinary study of wildlife crime. Thus, while the book includes engaging anecdotes and some important observations, it fails to deliver on its promise to introduce the reader to the full scope and the dynamics of contemporary wildlife trafficking.

The book is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter presents a broad overview of wildlife crime, focusing on descriptions of trade in several species or categories of species. The second chapter describes some international and domestic wildlife laws. Chapter 3 attempts to categorize and describe different classes of wildlife offenders, and Chapter 4 attempts to explain the motivations of such offenders. Chapter 5 categorizes and describes wildlife consumers. Chapter 6 provides an overview of enforcement tactics and initiatives in the context of wildlife crime. Finally, in Chapter 7, Warchol draws his conclusions and presents his solutions.

After a succinct overview of wildlife crime in Chapter 1, the second chapter lays out the groundwork for the discussion of criminal enforcement by providing summaries of conservation-related international agreements and descriptions of national legislation. In at least two key areas, however, the book falls short. Firstly, the provided explanations of the laws are sometimes inaccurate. For example, in explaining the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES),Footnote ¹ the author incorrectly suggests that the parties to the treaty have established sustainable harvest quotas for listed species. While parties have established quotas for the sport-hunt of the most protected species – such as leopards, black rhinoceros, and markhor – approximately 36,000 species are listed in the CITES Appendices, and it is ultimately up to exporting countries to establish export quotas for the remainder of these species.Footnote ² A reader of the book would therefore potentially end up misinformed. Secondly, Chapter 2 ignores the increasing role that non-conservation treaties play in the fight against wildlife crime. For example, both the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC)Footnote ³ and the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC)Footnote ⁴ are widely recognized to be critical in combating wildlife trafficking.Footnote ⁵ To overlook these treaties is surprising, given that Warchol emphasizes in other chapters the role that organized crime and corruption increasingly play in the current typology of wildlife crime. In short, Chapter 2, while aiming to establish the legal foundation for the rest of the book’s discussion of wildlife criminal activity and enforcement, instead provides an incomplete overview of relevant law.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 introduce the reader to wildlife offenders and the motivations that drive them. Surprisingly, Warchol defines only the poachers – and not the consumers – as the ‘offenders’, even though the ensuing discussion covers motivations of both poachers and consumers. This false dichotomy causes his explanation of wildlife crime in Chapter 4 to fall short. For example, in Chapter 3, which establishes a typology of the poacher, Warchol states that medicinal use and personal collection motivate wildlife crime, but he fails to clarify that these are motivations of the consumer, not necessarily the poacher. The poacher’s motivation is likely to be income generation from selling products in domestic or international markets. Warchol’s analysis would arguably have been stronger if he had clearly distinguished and considered motivations from both the supply and the demand sides.

The last two chapters of the book aim to offer solutions to wildlife crimes. Chapter 6 focuses on enforcement; Chapter 7 focuses largely on policy-based solutions and also touches on enhanced enforcement efforts. In the area of enforcement, Warchol brings field-based experience, but the information provided in the chapter is framed descriptively rather than analytically. For example, he details the recruitment and training of rangers in southern Africa, but does not relate these to the effectiveness of rangers or address corruption among rangers. The author also spends significant space discussing enforcement efforts in the United States (US), reflections which are offered for the sake of comparison. In one interesting section, Warchol describes the militarization of rangers throughout Africa. This is an important topic that deserves consideration, and Warchol is to be commended for noting concern.

Throughout the chapters, Warchol weaves personal anecdotes and his own understandings drawn from his extensive qualitative research. This is the strength of the book. Warchol has clearly spent significant time exploring southern African parks and game reserves and interviewing key stakeholders, which include wildlife managers, law enforcement, and local communities. The stories Warchol tells will surely engage anyone interested in wildlife crime; they present compelling pictures of the many factors and actors that drive such crime. Warchol has the ability to particularize general understandings and facts about wildlife crime for those who are unable to take a field-based approach to their work in this area. For example, while it has been broadly reported that regional terrorist organizations and rebel groups have been involved in large-scale elephant poaching and trading to fund their operations, Warchol tells these stories in detail, sharing the perspectives of rangers, government officials, and local communities.

However, the book suffers from three shortcomings that significantly distract from its contribution to the literature on wildlife crime. Firstly, the book is insufficiently analytically rigorous. For example, as already noted, Warchol uses US-based examples throughout the book, including summaries of US legislation, descriptions of studies that have analyzed the motivations of US hunters and poachers, and overviews of US enforcement techniques. Regrettably, he stops short of building on these examples to provide either a comparative analysis or lessons that can be learned, leaving the reader to question the relevance of the US-focused material to wildlife crime in Africa. The same is largely true of the portions of the book that Warchol spends on Asia-specific issues. Warchol offers a basic snapshot of Asia-specific issues but does not fully explore or explain the relationship of this material to the work he has done in Africa. Hence, important questions such as whether the anatomy of a wildlife crime is the same on both continents, or whether organized crime is as much an element in Asia as it is in Africa, go unanswered.

Secondly, Warchol relies heavily on materials, case studies and examples that pre-date 2010, which limits his ability to deliver a comprehensively up-to-date picture of wildlife crime and current efforts to address it. There is much to explore in the recent peer-reviewed literature on the subject of wildlife crime, including the activity of transnational organized criminal networks. Similarly, some of the examples Warchol presents do not necessarily present current understandings of the landscape of wildlife trafficking. For instance, Warchol discusses in detail Singapore’s seizure of 6.2 tonnes of ivory in 2002. Although the Singapore seizure taught much about smuggling routes used in the 1990s to move ivory from Malawi and Zambia to Japan, China, and Hong Kong, there have been many large-scale seizures since then that could be included in order to present a fuller contemporary understanding regarding the evolution of trade routes, the involvement of organized criminal networks, evasion tactics, and the sophistication of the middlemen involved in wildlife crime. Warchol concludes from the scale of the 2002 Singapore seizure that wildlife traffickers feel a sense of impunity, and while this was certainly true in 2002, recent observations also suggest that increased rates of seizures may be influencing traffickers to employ more diffuse methodologies.Footnote ⁶ Another factor in this trend away from large-scale shipments may be the development of Chinese-run processing and carving shops in Africa, so that worked ivory is now also trafficked in significant quantities and may be more difficult to stop.Footnote ⁷ Wildlife trafficking trends may evolve quickly as criminals adapt to increased enforcement efforts; Warchol’s reliance on singular events and older material lead him to draw conclusions that may not necessarily reflect current trends in wildlife crime.

Thirdly, the book conflates several types of wildlife use, including trophy hunting with criminal poaching and subsistence use with commercial use of wildlife. Warchol rightly suggests that each type of use raises varying levels of conservation concern and has been the subject of much study, analysis, and intervention across Africa. However, by not handling the topics discretely, the book at times seems to lose focus. For example, Warchol discusses subsistence meat poaching and the poaching of abalone in the same section, distinguishing these activities from poaching ‘high-value’ species for commercial markets, yet abalone is a highly valued species in illegal, international commercial trade.Footnote ⁸ Warchol also references trophy hunting in the context of criminal poaching, without building a compelling case that trophy hunting is a major conduit of illegal wildlife trade.

These challenges limit the persuasiveness and impact of the conclusions in the final chapter of the book. In particular, Warchol’s focus on trophy hunting throughout the book seems to drive the conclusion that efforts to tackle wildlife crime should focus on community-based natural resource management (CBNRM). Warchol spends significant time in the book discussing CAMPFIRE, a CBNRM programme in Zimbabwe, and he ultimately concludes that CAMPFIRE is a model solution. The basic premise of CBNRM is the devolution of natural resource management decisions to local communities and profit-sharing when the use of wildlife generates income. The picture Warchol paints of CAMPFIRE might seem a compelling solution to a novice in the field, but Warchol fails to present the whole story.

While CAMPFIRE was touted as a success in the early 2000s, when Warchol was touring southern Africa, more recent research suggests that it has failed to achieve its promise and has largely disbanded.Footnote ⁹ Perhaps a better example of CBNRM comes from Namibia, which is widely viewed as having some of the most successful programmes. Yet, even in Namibia, poaching appears to be on the rise. In fact, this year, as of April 2018, a rhino per week was being poached in Namibia.Footnote ¹⁰ Exploration of the role of CBNRM in wildlife crime driven by organized criminals and an expanding Chinese diaspora is a worthy exercise and could be the subject of future writings. However, here, Warchol is remiss in not presenting a fuller picture of CBNRM, and his conclusion that CAMPFIRE in particular offers a solution to the current poaching crisis seems ill informed.

The current poaching crisis is unprecedented, and Warchol stands to offer significant contributions to activists, practitioners, students, academics, and policy-makers working to reverse the flow of wildlife out of Africa. While this attempt falls short in several key ways, it does tee up several topics for further analysis and reflection. By tackling the topic from a more narrowly construed perspective, his in-depth personal experience and his knowledge of criminological theory and enforcement techniques could inform future efforts to combat wildlife trafficking.