started seven years ago with one man’s empathy for chimps – those little guys with DNA 98 percent like our own. (When I broke my thumb once, the doctor said, “Now you are one percent closer to being a chimp,” but that was another story.)
Ofir Drori, Israeli eccentric and transplant, fell in love with Cameroon and all things African, and took a do-gooder approach of saving chimps, even as the humans needed a ton of saving as well. The result was LAGA—the Last Great Ape Organization—based in Yaoundé.
Drawing fully on the only interdiction tool he had—chutzpah—Ofir engaged brain and proceeded. He improvised his own plea bargains, confronting big contraband gangsters with partial details of their misdeeds, and getting them to rat on one another. How he got past the doors of the padrinos, or why he has been left unmolested to this day, kneecaps intact, is a secret best known by him. In countries with the best justice money can buy—Cameroon, Chad, Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon—Ofir got an 83 percent incarceration rate from those he went after. Clang-clang, case closed. It’s a miracle.
Wait, though – just picking at the scabs of ape abuse, and by the way, illegal ivory harvesting, LAGA found huge additional sores underneath: the same networks that shipped tons of contraband ivory to unscrupulous buyers in Taiwan often slipped arms, narcotics, and cash into the containers for delivery. NGO private wildlife law enforcement began doing for governments what governments were not positioned to do themselves. It turns out that needlessly torturing apes is unsettlingly akin to other forms of personal gain which can do in the humans as well. Who would have thought? The UN, World Wildlife Fund, and U.S. Fisheries and Wildlife Service all took notice. A lone individual cracked a code, and by the way, got awards from the Secretary General of the UN Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).
With Ofir’s brainy methodology even child trafficking gets on the agenda, with Catholic Relief Services now picking up on his model. Transparency International also followed his approach, and set up an anti-corruption hotline to flush out corrupt judges and officials who are more part of the problem than the solution.
In seven years, LAGA has appeared in 366 media pieces and gotten 59,000 views on YouTube. With no government authority (but with cooperation from the latter), LAGA has conducted 244 investigations, and in one case nabbed 21 major dealers in five days. Prosecution? LAGA gives full documentation in 85 percent of the cases, and gets 83 percent in jail.
Abducting an African grey parrot, or a sea turtle, leads in a more or less direct line to contraband and the corruption that robs African people of 25-50 percent of their wealth per year. You don’t have to love chimps, but it helps. Corrupt regimes even turn state’s evidence, caught up in the exhilaration of the process. Most people don’t really prefer to be enemies of humanity, as long as it’s rewarding and fun to join the Other Side.
LAGA puts out a press release every day – that would make over 2,000 to date. They have maintained a stable rate of one arrest per week for the past six years, and have put over 350 dealers behind bars. LAGA has documented that in over 80 percent of its cases, bribing attempts would have averted justice if LAGA had not intervened.
Ofir is still basically a one-man operation, and yes, he needs money in order to keep going. Have a look at his website www.laga-enforcement.org.
The Bark is Worse
April 28, 2011
I swear I did not pass this picture through Photoshop or any other type of trompe-l’oeil process.
Do dogs read English? If they did, would they follow the dictates of messages directed to them? Papua New Guinea has 0.01 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world’s languages. Could it be that American dogs are conversant in one or more of the latter?
My point here is that someone argued a case and came to a resolution. The bark lobbyists met the anti-barks, and a town hall process came up with a consensus, allowing all parties some measure of comfort.
I won’t say, “We are a litigious nation.” That is a commonplace. But it seems we reserve our rage and passions for trivia. Could this be a dark scheme to distract us from the real threats to our species, like climate change, children trafficked, Stinger missiles in the hands of drugged prepubescent boys, and intractable ethnic conflict?
I don’t begrudge people’s need to argue and find common solutions. I’m even glad that the town hall meeting has replaced, mostly, the use of the shotgun as a way of settling disputes. Neighbors within view of the sign in the photograph, however, have actually said to dog owners, “The value of my property is going down!” As well it might. Enmities remain and bitter feelings infiltrate the neighborhood. Man’s Best Friend poops recklessly in the space provided to do so. People reach new paradigms in finding things to differ over.
Humans are split into dualities: male-female, nomadic-sedentary, anima-animus... The one we deal with here, however, is...how to say...those who would live and let live, versus those who would tell us (and dogs) how and when to do their business, and at what decibel level. Call them orthodox versus laissez-faire, I guess.
For me, the orthodox are the enemy, but I would never say so to one of them, as I know I’d go straight to the wheel for breaking, or to the stake. I’m not saying they break and burn just for pleasure – surely they do so as a last resort after exhausting other means of convincing us to be like them.
But don’t they realize that a thousand girls a minute are being impressed into slavery world-wide, and that we will all die?
I would say they are stupid, but what do I know? I only know one to see one, and always try to step aside when they come after us laissez-faire people with a cleaver.
Is There a Fool in the House?
April 28, 2011
April 7 of this year the Aspen Institute pulled together a remarkable feat, assembling three former Secretaries of State—Baker, Albright, and Powell—to reflect in the National Cathedral about the meeting point of personal conviction and national interest. Aspen’s president, Walter Isaacson, maybe the only person who could measure up to moderating such a thing, kept the dialogue at a brisk pace, admirably drawing out each former SecState in roughly equal amounts.
Imagine, personal values on the same playbill as national interest. And in a cathedral.
On one point Isaacson, invoking the absent Donald Rumsfeld, baited Powell: “Rumsfeld says you are wrong on this.” Toro, toro!
It seemed scripted: after less than a five-second delay, Powell said of the former SecDef, “Rumsfeld’s memoirs are something between deceptive and illusory.” Those were his exact words. Lots of people wrote them down.
Astonishment filled the expansive hall, and 2,000 listeners stirred, exclaimed, howled, laughed. A few started to applaud, but then stopped in mid-clap. This was, after all, the venue where George W. Bush declared war on September 14, 2001. Imams weren’t supposed to use mosques for this purpose, but cathedrals must be different.
On the April 7 incident, I know you might not believe this happened, since no news source reported it. But I assure you it did, and on the record. Powell finally got to say in public what had been on his mind for eight years. Maybe it was even pre-arranged with moderator Isaacson, who looked pretty pleased to have set off a sulfurous chain reaction.
Now skip to April 22, when the Associated Press got hold of an advance copy of UN Chief Nuclear Inspector Mohamed El Baradei’s new book, The Age of Deception. Nobel Peace Prize winner El Baradei picks out the period 2002-2003 as one of the “shame of a needless war.” During this period, of course, all the world knew the tensions between Rumsfeld and Powell, and their rivalry. Notwithstanding, the team pulled together and claimed or feigned threat of WMD from