I’ve been present two times when poachers were encountered and it got ‘western’. The first was in 1986, we were hunting in Northwest Zimbabwe, on Charara. One evening we were walking along the shore of Lake Kariba, following a set of buffalo tracks. Unexpectedly, a poacher came walking out of the bush up ahead of us and started running as soon as he noticed us. The game scout called out to him to stop, and when the guy kept running the game scout cut loose with several shots in his direction. I wasn’t expecting that! We never saw the guy again and I don’t recall seeing any blood. But that was one hell of a surprise. I’d never heard an AK firing in person until then.
The 2nd time was 1989 in northern Botswana, up near the Kwando River and Caprivi Strip. We were on the truck, following the tracks of a big herd of Buffalo that had passed the night before when we saw vultures circling less than half a mile away. Since our main quarry was a lion we thought that perhaps lions had killed a buffalo and were feeding on the kill. We parked the truck, loaded up and started toward all the vultures. There were dozens of vultures in the trees instead of the ground, so we naturally thought there were lions on the kill. We snuck in carefully, ready to shoot if there was a good male at the kill site. Instead of a good male lion we found two elephant bulls that had been shot by poachers. They had meat grilling on sticks over a small fire, the tusks had been chopped out and the poachers had taken off in a hurry with the ivory. My PH, Cecil Riggs, asked how many rounds of ammo I had on me and I asked why. His response was that as a PH, he was also a game officer and we were going to hunt these poachers down and kill all of them. He instructed me that as soon as we saw them that I should get behind a tree, then pick out a poacher and start shooting alongside him until we killed all of them. He said they’d be spraying AK fire back at us but they wouldn’t be aiming so I’d be fine as long as I had a tree to shield me. THAT WAS NOT WHAT I’D SIGNED UP FOR!!! I had a wife and 18 month old son back at home. As it turned out the poachers got to the river and crossed the border into Namibia before we caught up to them so I never had to find out what it was like to be shot at. That was a big relief.
About 18 months ago, Mayo Oldiri’s anti-poaching team got into a gun battle with poachers on the same block, Mayo Nduel, where I’d hunted Lord Derby Eland the year before. Juan, Mayo Oldiri’s general manager, was shot & killed while Melo, the head of anti-poaching, was shot in the face & chest but survived. I spent several evenings with both of them when I was hunting there. They were damn good men, doing important work when this tragedy happened.
On a related vein, I’ve been meaning to start a thread on here about one of Africa’s most successful anti-poaching programs ever - Operation Stronghold; of which I had a tangential role back in the late 1980’s. Now that this current thread has come about I’ll have to write about that endeavor. It was very successful, so much so that it had to be shut down by Zim Parks. For now I’ll just say that there has probably never been a more successful anti-poaching campaign in history as, from 1987-1990, it rendered well over 200 poachers to a status where they never poached another rhino or elephant.
