Those who want to protect elephants and rhinoceroses in Africa often face dangerous criminal traffickers who are bold, enterprising and well-equipped, leaders said at the US-Africa summit this week. "In the last decade we have seen an alarming trend of increasingly organized, well-equipped and violent criminals turning to wildlife crime," said President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon. "Today rhinos are often poached from helicopters by teams with sophisticated communications," he said at a panel discussion with the leaders of Tanzania, Namibia and Togo, along with US Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. The four African leaders, while not necessarily at the epicenter of the poaching crisis, swapped stories about how they had become engaged in a problem that is only getting worse.
Protecting wildlife goes hi-tech, and gets harder
