Damien Mander stares into a thicket of gold brush in a remote part of the Zimbabwe savannah. A majestic African buffalo lies still, its back leg caught in a metal eight-strand trap set by poachers. Inching closer with two Zimbabwean park rangers, Mander realises the injured buffalo has ripped her entire pelvis in half in a desperate attempt to break free. He can hear her heavy, pained breaths, the grind of bones as she makes one last attempt at freedom. He sees absolute despair in her liquid brown eyes.

“She’s been lying here for up to three days,” one of the rangers, Orpheus, says softly as he examines her injuries. Orpheus and Mander trade glances, a moment of unspoken shared grief. Orpheus lifts the muzzle of his rifle to the buffalo’s ear and squeezes the trigger. As the life seeps out of the noble beast, she goes into spontaneous labour, giving birth to a stillborn calf.

It’s early 2009, and the battle-hardened Mander – a former Australian soldier who is 190 centimetres of solid brawn – is travelling through South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe as a volunteer with anti-poaching units and national park rangers in those countries.

But he has swiftly recognised that the good guys are being out-gunned by the bad guys. The poachers are no longer subsistence farmers picking off stray beasts who raid their crops; these are gangs armed with AK-47 assault rifles, semi-automatics, machetes, steel traps, night-vision goggles and helicopters, doing the bidding of their Asian overlords cashing in on a voracious black-market demand for ivory, rhino horn and lion bone. These poachers will stop at nothing.

As Mander’s journey broadens from days into weeks, it brings ever more sickening sights – and, often, the distant, disturbing sound of gunfire and helicopters. One afternoon he sees vultures circling above, the portent of death hanging in the air. Ahead, a great bull elephant lies on its side, slowly moving its head. But it has no face: poachers have sliced it away to obtain the tusks.

Mander has been witness to some ghastly things during 12 tours of duty in Iraq, but this open season on voiceless, powerless animals triggers a tectonic shift within his soul. He knows what it feels like to be hunted – by other humans – but these animals are trapped in a war zone not of their own making, pursued by the grubbiest of assassins: global criminal syndicates running a trade in illegal wildlife worth more than $US20 billion annually, the third most profitable illegal business after human trafficking and narcotics.

Fuelled by a massive new class of consumers in China and wealthy, status-conscious business people in countries like Vietnam, Africa’s wildlife has become a commodity, traded like super-expensive furniture. “Does that elephant need its face more than some rich guy in Asia needs a tusk on his desk?” Mander asks himself.

Only months earlier, Mander, to use his own words, didn’t give a shit about the environment or wildlife. From the day he left his family in Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula at the age of 19 to join the Royal Australian Navy as a clearance diver, to when he trained as a sniper for a special operations unit, it was kicks, not consciousness-raising, that he was seeking. He was the young bloke who had “Search and Destroy” tattooed across his chest, who’d pump the accelerator to hit birds on the road.

But by 2008, after multiple deployments to Iraq, the then 28-year-old had seen enough. He disappeared into South America for months in a haze of drugs and alcohol, then headed to Africa for what was to be his next big, adrenalin-charged adventure.

But it is here, on this vast, magnificent continent, witnessing the carnage to wildlife, that he has a moment of electric clarity. He sells his small suite of investment properties, the spoils of his lucrative career as a soldier. He uses the funds to take a lease on a game reserve 30 kilometres from the Zimbabwean tourist town of Victoria Falls. He sets up the non-profit International Anti-Poaching Foundation (IAPF) and spends $100,000 building the Nakavango Ranger Training Academy to instruct wildlife rangers in military tactics. He buys land vehicles and an ultralight, two-seater plane. He secures the legendary primatologist Jane Goodall as an IAPF patron. Knowing how effective unmanned drones can be in war zones, he refits them with night-vision technology to track intruders.

The IAPF is now registered in four separate countries across southern and east Africa, and the rangers Mander and Dean have trained help protect the animals within nearly three million hectares of wilderness every day.

Over the past few years, the news from Africa has become dire. Africa’s most magnificent animals, the iconic “Big Five” – lions, elephants, rhinoceros, leopards and Cape buffalo – are being harvested for their body parts on a scale never seen before. Even worse, their habitat is under mortal threat by slash-and-burn agriculture and human sprawl in a continent that’s expected to be home to two billion people by 2050.

The five surviving species of rhino are in special peril. By weight, rhino horn is now worth more than gold, fetching up to $US300,000 ($420,000) per horn, so valuable that even zoo rhinos are at risk; last year poachers broke into the Thoiry Zoo near Paris, and shot dead a four-year-old rhinoceros called Vince before cutting off his horn with a chainsaw. As a precaution, a zoo in the Czech Republic took the drastic step of dehorning its 21 rhinos.

Once poachers, as well as bush meat hunters and impoverished local farmers, empty the forests of wildlife they move into national parks and other protected areas, which makes the job of being a park ranger a very dangerous one. More than 100 park rangers are murdered every year protecting wildlife, including three drowned in Zimbabwe only weeks ago. “The threat of poachers appears to be getting worse each year,” says a despairing Mander, who married his Siberian-born wife, Maria Udalov, in 2012 and now has a five-year-old son. “But crisis can be good because it kicks our arses into gear,” adds the 37-year-old.

Earlier this year, Australian photojournalist Adrian Steirn, a good mate of Mander, risked his life posing as a Russian gangster to expose one of Zimbabwe’s worst-kept secrets: the former first lady Grace Mugabe’s participation in the plundering of her country’s elephant population to amass huge quantities of ivory to trade for gold and diamonds with an Asian triad. Fariken Madzinga, who headed up ivory poaching and carving for Grace Mugabe, has been arrested and is on bail. “I’m a state witness for the trial,” Steirn tells Good Weekend. “The trial itself is plagued by threats towards me and internal corruption issues. Madzinga is facing 27 years’ jail time for ivory possession.” Grace Mugabe has not been charged as yet.

Nicholas Duncan, who founded SAVE African Rhino Foundation from his Perth home more than 30 years ago, and who has supplied Mander’s rangers with equipment and kit over the past few years, says bribes and corruption are a common problem, with poachers offering rangers $2000 or more (a small fortune to locals) to betray the location of rhinos in national parks. “To many locals, they’re just animals,” explains the 73-year-old Duncan, who has devoted most of his life to saving rhinos and raised more than $9 million for the cause. “Farmers blame them for damaging crops and think nothing of setting traps or poisons.”

It’s a reason Mander has been training a new all-women anti-poaching squad, inspired by a similar group in South Africa, the Black Mambas. Called Akashinga or the “brave ones”, the squad is selected by Mander from disadvantaged women in local communities, such as single mothers, sex workers, victims of sexual abuse, widows; Mander insists they’re less prone to corruption than men, and better at winning the hearts and minds of their people. Initially dismissed by sceptics as a publicity stunt, the Akashinga exercise, a less militant shift in Mander’s strategy, appears to be improving community goodwill. “More guns, bigger fences and helicopters aren’t going to save these wilderness areas in the long term,” he says intensely. “The people who live around them will decide the future.”

Drawing attention to the plight of Africa’s imperilled wildlife isn’t easy, nor is attracting serious dollars to the cause. In 2015 Duncan arranged for Australian rugby star David Pocock to train with the anti-poachers of the Malilangwe Trust, which currently protects 53,000 hectares of wilderness in Zimbabwe. While the photos of a bare-chested, hunky Pocock working out with the anti-poaching squad went viral across Facebook and Twitter, such splashes don’t necessarily translate into a rush of donations to wildlife charities. In most Western countries, animal charities receive a paltry 3 to 7 per cent of the charity dollar, with wildlife causes getting a fraction – less than 0.5 per cent – of that, according to charitynavigator.org.

Yet some Westerners go above and beyond the call of duty. Melbourne resident Donalea Patman sold her home to set up lobbying group For the Love of Wildlife; fellow Melburnian Sean Willmore, founder of The Thin Green Line Foundation – which supports the widows and families of rangers killed on the frontline protecting wildlife – mortgaged his home and sold his car; Duncan sold his business in 1987 to create SAVE African Rhino Foundation. Mander has to make regular fundraising trips to the US, Europe and Australia to keep the IAPF going. “We’re not the solution,” he told an audience at Sydney University two years ago. “We’re like the paramedics of conservation, trying to buy time for those who may have the answers.”

That time may be fast running out: all the signs indicate this is a critical moment in the battle to save Africa’s wildlife. Rhinos? At least one is killed every 11 hours by poachers. Lions? Ninety per cent have been wiped out over the past 50 years. Elephants? At least a 75 per cent loss since 1979. The illegal wildlife trade has rocketed by a staggering 5000 per cent since 2007, according to a recent World Wide Fund for Nature report. Only last month the US media were bristling with stories of a booming trade in luxury products (from pillowcases to handbags) made from giraffe skin and bone, while populations of giraffe in the wild plummet. The US Humane Society has called for an outright ban on the importation of these goods into the US and for the four giraffe species to be listed as endangered.

In Australia, a parliamentary inquiry is considering a complete ban on the sale of ivory and rhino horn, following the UK’s lead last year. At present, ivory and rhino products produced before 1975 are still able to be legally sold here, but determining the exact age of an item can be extremely difficult. Hearings over the past six months have involved evidence of Australians ordering product from Tanzania and Kenya through “kill on demand”.

An investigation led by For the Love of Wildlife provided photographic evidence of ivory and rhino horn being sold through auction rooms across the nation. Its findings are backed up by a 2016 report, Under the Hammer, by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which counted 2772 ivory items for sale at 175 auctions in 21 auction houses across Australia over just a nine-month period. Only 8 per cent of these items had documentation confirming the ivory’s age and legality for sale.

“Do we really believe Australia’s illegal wildlife trade is not significant?” asks Donalea Patman, whose persistent lobbying led to an import ban for lion parts into Australia in 2015. Nicholas Duncan, who has made 90 trips to Africa and studied the trade in Australia, agrees. “The current procedures in place in Australia to restrict the illegal trade in ivory and rhino horn are inadequate.” Melbourne-based Lynn Johnson, who founded conservation group Breaking the Brand and who has studied the international trade in rhino horn in fact-finding missions to Vietnam, says Australia’s trafficking laws aren’t keeping up with a rapidly changing wildlife market.

Federal Liberal MP Jason Wood believes only a total ban on the importation of rhino and ivory into Australia will clear up uncertainty and confusion. “This is about mums and dads buying rhino horn or ivory trinkets and imagining the animals died over 100 years ago,” he explains. Wood was the main political driver behind the ban three years ago on the importation of lion trophies and body parts into Australia, which drew the ire of the Combined Firearms Council of Victoria. Under a provocative heading on its website (“We Take Aim at the Hunting Hater”), the council urged its members in Wood’s Victorian seat of La Trobe to remove him from office. “The ban on lion parts had absolutely nothing to do with shooting feral animals or deer in the Dandenongs, and it wasn’t the thin edge of the wedge,” insists Wood. “It was purely about the importation of lion trophies and body parts into Australia.”

The African poaching crisis and threats to endangered species has put big-game hunters on the defensive. No surveys have been undertaken in Australia, but a Marist poll in the US found 86 per cent of Americans disapprove of big-game hunting, a statistic reflected in a series of high-profile public shamings on social media. Former Australian fast bowler Glenn McGrath felt the wrath of social media in 2015 when pictures emerged of him posing with a number of animals – an elephant, a buffalo, a hyena – he’d killed while on safari in South Africa in 2008, the same year he’d lost his wife, Jane, to breast cancer. After he issued an apology explaining it was an “extremely difficult time in my life and looking back I deeply regret being involved”, social media hit back with quotes from an earlier interview McGrath did with Australian Shooter magazine, in which he declared: “I’m keen to get into trophy hunting ... a big safari in Africa would be great.”

While McGrath seems to have recovered his reputation, others haven’t been so lucky. After photos emerged of Spain’s King Juan Carlos posing with elephants and buffalo he’d shot while on safari in 2012, his popularity tanked, a leading factor in his later abdication. Walter Palmer became the world’s most hated dentist in 2015 when the recreational game hunter from Minnesota struck a magnificent 13-year-old lion called Cecil with an arrow from his cross-bow. Cecil lived in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park but was lured out of the grounds, a not-uncommon tactic by local guides and trackers, by an elephant carcass. Palmer seriously wounded the animal, a leader of its pride and the park’s most popular lion with its grand black-fringed mane, before tracking it down and firing a second arrow 11 hours later, from which the animal perished. The international outrage that followed saw Palmer’s premises vandalised, talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel brand him an “a…hole”, actor Mia Farrow tweet his business address, and leading US conservative politician Newt Gingrich call for him to be put in jail – although neither Palmer, nor his guides, were successfully prosecuted.

In February this year a Canberra property developer, Nick Haridemos, was shamed on social media after he posted pictures on an online hunters’ forum of himself with animals, including an elephant and buffalo, he shot in Namibia. But it was the photo of a smiling Haridemos in a car with a bloodied dead baboon, dressed in a hat and sunglasses, that caused the most outrage, forcing him to resign as vice-president of the Canberra Hellenic Club. In his defence, Haridemos released a statement insisting he’d engaged in a legal hunt, “conducted in a manner that does not pose a threat to any endangered species”. In these cases, social media played a big part in highlighting needless animal deaths.

But while an outraged tweet or Facebook post may make the writer feel better, whether it helps save actual wildlife is another matter. Trophy hunters often argue that the fees from hunts support conservation efforts, against the much bigger threats of habitat loss and conflict with encroaching human populations. While the profits from big-game hunting can be eye-watering for the game-reserve owners, the question is whether this revenue helps their countries as a whole – and if the profits overall exceed that of tourist wildlife viewing. Roderick Campbell, a research director at the Australia Institute think tank who has conducted extensive economic research into lion hunting in a number of African countries, thinks not. “Nature-based tourism can play a significant role in national development, but trophy hunting is insignificant,” he concludes.

On the other hand, a briefing paper for the European Union in 2016 concluded that the “legal, well-regulated trophy hunting programs can – and do – play an important role in delivering benefits for both wildlife conservation and for the livelihoods of indigenous communities living with wildlife”. Which raises the question: do we have to kill animals to save them?

“HUNTING IS in my DNA,” says NSW Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party MP Robert Borsak, sitting in his office in Sydney’s Macquarie Street beside a feral fox with a cockatiel in its mouth. Giving the piece of taxidermy a sideways glance, the 65-year-old explains: “It’s meant to remind people that foxes are terrible destroyers of our native wildlife.” Hanging further up his office wall is the head of a Moluccan Rusa deer he shot in Cape York five years ago; a black National Rifle Association cap hangs from one of its antlers. The former accountant has been hunting in Africa since the early 1980s, and has a billiard room full of trophies in his impressive Sydney home to show for it.

Borsak, who describes himself as a “conservation hunter”, is infuriated that animal rights activists tar legal hunting in Africa with the same brush as poaching and illegal hunting. He only hunts in government-sanctioned, licensed conservation programs, he explains, and donates money to causes that support local indigenous communities in Africa.

“Stopping trophy hunters is not going to stop the poachers,” he insists. This certainly appears to be the case in Botswana, home to the world’s largest remaining elephant population, which banned trophy hunting in 2014 but became the centre of a recent horrifying news story when the carcasses of 87 elephants were found on the fringe of a wildlife sanctuary, killed and stripped of their tusks. Botswana, which previously had a shoot-to-kill policy against poachers, disarmed its anti-poaching unit in May, one month after a new president took office. “I’m shocked,” Mike Chase of Elephants Without Borders told the BBC. “The poachers are now turning their guns to Botswana.”

Borsak drew outrage in 2013 after photos emerged of him posing next to a dead elephant in Zimbabwe, taken during a hunting trip in 2006. He was subjected to death threats via anonymous letters, on social media, and had photos of his home, with its address, published on Facebook. Three years later, when he boasted in a late-night parliamentary speech of shooting an elephant – he’s killed about six in his hunting career, he tells me – Borsak was roundly jeered by Greens MP Jeremy Buckingham, who demanded to know whether he ate the animal’s flesh. “Yes,” replied Borsak, adding later that it would be unethical to waste the animal.

“It’s sick to shoot and kill an elephant for thrills, and it’s revolting Mr Borsak would eat the elephant,” declared Buckingham. The Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party hit back by circulating a photograph of Buckingham wolfing down a venison sausage at a NSW Parliament barbecue, from an animal Borsak had hunted and turned into sausages. “I don’t give a f... what animal rights activists think of me – I’ve got broad shoulders – but there is so much hypocrisy on this issue,” fumes Borsak.

We can all be guilty of selective empathy, as Borsak suggests. The average person buying their steak in cling-wrap packages from Woolies and Coles gives no thought to the long-eyelashed cow from whence it came, much less the gulag-cum-abattoir where it met its end. The city slicker who decries beer-swilling hoons shooting wild boars from the backs of utes will happily tuck into a ham sandwich. The average Australian meat eater consumes 7000 animals in their lifetime, which doesn’t count those slaughtered in the name of luxury shoes and handbags.

But many would argue that hunting an animal with the desperate aura of an endangered species falls into a different moral category. It’s estimated that 25,000 elephants were poached last year in Africa; no more than 2000 are killed a year by legitimate hunters under a quota system. Would Borsak kill another elephant, given their precipitous decline? He thinks for a moment. “For the first time in living memory the number of elephants in Zimbabwe has gone down, and that’s a very worrying trend. If the decline continues to accelerate, we shouldn’t be hunting them anymore.”

The real elephant in the room, according to Borsak, is China, the world’s largest consumer of ivory, used in jewellery and ornaments. “Our politicians need to grow a set of balls and confront China with sponsoring the illegal trade in ivory, which is massive. We should be talking about ivory to China in the same way we talk about whales to Japan. But it’s easier for them to say, ‘Oh, Borsak, he’s an evil man, he hunts elephants.’” (While China’s legal ivory trade ground to a standstill at the end of last year, the black market is huge.)

Old-school wildlife hunters like Borsak tend to take a dim view of captive-bred lion shooting, so-called “canned hunting” in which lions are raised behind wire enclosures from birth to be hunted. “I’ve never shot a lion behind wire, that’s not hunting to me,” says Borsak. “But there are plenty of people prepared to pay $10,000 to $50,000 to collect a trophy for their collection. And whether you like it or not, it guarantees the species’ survival because they’re farmed. But the clowns in Canberra and the bureaucrats who support them say, ‘Oh no, we can’t have that.’”

Perhaps unfortunately for them, the kings of the jungle are one of the few wildlife species who breed readily in captivity, creating a booming industry in South Africa, where between 6000 and 8000 lions, along with a host of other wildlife from cheetahs to zebras, are raised to be sold off like cattle to game parks and wildlife viewing reserves. In the age of instant gratification, canned hunting suits busy American, European and Asian hunters who can click on a wildlife ranch website, select the lion or cheetah they want to shoot from the lodge catalogue – each has its own photo and price tag – and book their fly-in, fly-out tickets knowing they’ll score a kill and trophy. The lions, which have usually lost their fear of humans, are easy targets.

Borsak downplays the incidence of canned hunting within wildlife farms, but multiple investigations by journalists and wildlife commentators have revealed it to be a pervasive – and polarising – practice in South Africa. While a wild lion hunt in the Tanzanian wilderness can last two or three weeks and set a hunter back $US80,000 or more, with no guarantee of a kill, a captive-bred (“canned”) hunt in South Africa costs about $US20,000, with a guaranteed kill and trophy. In South Africa, 70 per cent of wild animals live on private land, and there are nearly 9000 private wildlife ranches, according to the Endangered Wildlife Trust. As a result of these breeding programs, South Africa is about the only country in Africa that has more animals than it did in the 1960s, although with far less roaming in the wild.

Borsak argues that if hunting and breeding programs are abolished in South Africa, their animals will be slaughtered by poachers and locals, a claim backed up by game parks and a couple of conservationists. “At least the lions bred behind the wires can be used to restock wilderness areas depleted of wildlife,” he insists. But wildlife experts will tell you the captive lion population in South Africa is so inbred and genetically tarnished that reintroducing them into the wild would be suicide for the animals.

What traditional and canned hunters share, of course, is a love of the trophy. But herein lies a problem, says Ian Michler, founder of Invent South Africa Safaris and consultant to the documentary Blood Lions. “Trophy hunters shoot lions with the biggest manes, elephants with the longest tusks and buffalo with the widest horns,” he says. “So they’re killing off the best breeding stock … decimating the gene pool.”

It’s estimated that three lions are shot every day in canned-hunting facilities in southern Africa. The Cape Town-born Michler is keen to warn well-intentioned wildlife volunteers from Australia about being duped by lion reserves that boast of their conservation credentials but sell off their adult lions for canned trophy hunting. Such an advertisement by a lion reserve – for feeding lions, cuddling cubs, and walking with these grand beasts – persuaded Melbourne woman Sue Schofield to pay $2500 for a one-week stay in a Zambian game park. Although she was disturbed by the number of lions crammed into enclosures (South African law dictates every lion should have one hectare of space) and less-than-ideal veterinary practices, the 64-year-old was overwhelmed with the joy of spending time with these animals up close. That is, until she found out that most of the adult lions were sold off for the hunter’s bullet.

Good Weekend spoke to at least half a dozen Australians who have been similarly misled. “Because canned hunting is massive in South Africa, thousands of lions in so-called ‘wildlife reserves’ are waiting to be clobbered,” warns Nicholas Duncan. “I fell for it myself for 10 years.” Donalea Patman was so enraged when she found out the lions she petted on a South African reserve were raised for the bullet that she formed For the Love of Wildlife in 2014. But the 54-year-old resents being labelled a “greenie” or radical. “We’re not protesters, we’re protectors.”

If there is one thing that hunters and animal rights activists agree on, it’s that real breakthroughs in the fight against poaching and smuggling won’t be made until demand is quelled. Until ivory products become taboo worldwide, elephants will continue to be killed. Until rhino horn is no longer a status object among the Vietnamese elite, rhinos will be murdered for their horns. Lynn Johnson's organisation, Nature Needs More, launched a campaign, Breaking the Brand, which ran a number of advertisements in Vietnam Airlines in-flight magazines and in the local business press, trying to counter the image of rhino horn as a prestigious product, but it’s no easy task. “They use rhino horns to negotiate business deals,” she tells Good Weekend. “It’s also the millionaire’s detox drink, where they’ll grind a rhino horn into water and rice wine to seal a deal.”

As for big-game hunting, doubts remain as to its effectiveness for wildlife conservation and management. As Damien Mander notes, hunting too often has been used as a be-all business model. “What I don’t like is that too many people have been pushed to accept this without looking at alternatives.”

Photographic eco-tourism is a far more effective land-use option, and allows animals to stay in their natural habitat, insists Ian Michler. “It provides significantly greater job opportunities, greater benefits for the local economies and greater revenue sources to government. And the conservation benefits far outweigh those of trophy hunting.”

But the tragic truth may be that the millennia-long existence of animals being wild and free in Africa is drawing to an end. Asks Donalea Patman: “When will the world wake up to this nightmare?” Damien Mander, who has recently been buying up old trophy-hunting ranges to convert into wildlife reserves, echoes the sentiment with an even more unsettling question. “Can Africa really be Africa without its wildlife?”

Correction: The printed and original online versions of this story had Damien Mander as a former SAS soldier. In fact, Mander worked with a special operations unit. The writer apologises for the error.

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