Between February and March 2009 I had the great privilege to directly work with Mr Keith Roberts, General Manager, and Mr Mike Beckner, anti-poaching coordinator, of the Friedkin Conservation Fund, Arusha, Tanzania in Southeast Africa (www.friedkinfund.org).
Author, Keith and Mike.
This cooperation focused on training anti-poaching units over a three day period (24 hours) in unarmed self defence, tactical control and restraint skills, as well as reasonable force options specifically designed for the challenging requirements of wildlife law enforcement.
It has been a great personal and professional experience for me and I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all members of the Friedkin Conservation Fund and those involved in anti-poaching and community development.
Before coming to the actual course overview, it is necessary to keep in mind that these anti-poaching units work on the sharp end of wildlife law enforcement. This includes patrolling extremely vast areas over extended periods (2-3 months) with a constant risk of being confronted with threats ranging from blunt and edged weapon attacks to firearms such as AK47s. Even rather exotic sounding attacks with poisoned arrows needed to be addressed. Besides these visually detectable risks, there is the constant danger of infections including HIV and Hepatitis, to name only two extremely dangerous examples. Keep in mind that in an environment where first aid and medical supply is hardly existent a minor cut can easily result in a fatal sepsis.
Common threat examples:
Machete-inflicted wound (left); arrows poisoned with Acokanthera sp. (right)
Consequently, the aim of this course was to equip anti-poaching teams with the necessary technical as well as tactical skills for dealing with job-specific violence management requirements and implementing the necessary awareness for the before-mentioned risks.
In general, all instructions regarding use of force and arrest techniques were based on internationally recognized safety standards in order to avoid unnecessary risks for all parties involved in the arrest process. Thus, course participants were permanently reminded that planning, practice and preparation avoid a pretty poor performance in the field. As a result, all the anti-poaching teams that were trained throughout this period learned how to minimize potential risks of unnecessary bodily harm to themselves as well as to the poachers.
With most poaching acts being an outcome of poverty and desperation, anti-poaching represents an important aspect of community development by offering employment opportunities to the local population. In this respect, tactically correct training and use of reasonable force becomes a dominant issue in order to avoid unnecessary liabilities stemming from positional asphyxia and the well-known coup-and-counter-coup syndrome.
Talking about the challenges and difficulties of anti-poaching as an instrument of community development, the teaching side of such specialized courses needs to be addressed. Firstly, there is the obvious language barrier and the differing use of terminology in the West and Africa. This challenge could be remedied thanks to the great support which I received from FCF staff member Capt. George Mhagama (ret) Tanzania Peoples Defence Forces (see picture below).
Author and Capt. George Mhagama
Secondly, there is the issue of teaching and learning patterns due to illiteracy. As a consequence, presenting and outlining training contents had to be a permanent visualization process. This I have to admit resulted in a lot of rather funny incidents.
Thirdly, there is the challenge of differnt anatomical responses to transport an darrest procedures. Africans in contrast to most Westerners are far more flexible and resilient when it comes to physically resisting arrests. Pain compliance and widely taught martial arts skills simply do not work in this environment. As a consequence, the skills were drawn from proven combative applications based on European unarmed combat which have stood the test of time in a wide range of different theatres.
Fourthly, training benefited from the fact that quite a few anti-poaching team members had been poachers themselves. This provided an intimate insight into the tactics and procedures of the adversarys side and contributed tremendously to the scenario training aspects of this course. Finally, since poaching has been increasing over the last years due to increasing numbers of humanitarian crises in sub-Saharan Africa, anti-poaching operators face a constant danger of being confronted with highly armed poachers from refugee camps (especially from conflict zones such as Rwanda and Somalia).
Poached elephant in Ugalla Game Reserve (left);
meat poaching in Maswa Game Reserve (right)
Bearing in mind that possession of an automatic weapon such as an AK47 automatically results in a 30 year jail sentence in Tanzania, it is rather obvious that the enemy party has nothing to lose and the threat potential for the anti-poaching operator suddenly becomes a matter of life and death. This is why training focused on the proven concepts and primary options of the TODD System (toddgroup.com).
Coming to the course structure itself, training started with a detailed outline of unarmed self defence options based on the primary options of the TODD Specialist Close Combat System. These contents had been chosen by Mr Keith Roberts based on his extensive background in anti-poaching operations throughout Africa, due to its functionality and usability for the challenges of wildlife law enforcement after repeated training visits to the United Kingdom. Normal martial arts based self defence systems can simply not meet the requirements of wildlife law enforcement.
Training then progressed to context-specific and situational skills regarding tactically correct control and restraint options. These skills also meet international law enforcement standards.
The course culminated in analyzing and working out statistically verifiable and documented scenarios in order to provide the required stress inoculation training for wildlife law enforcement. This included ambush scenarios and chasing down poachers in a wide variety of environments with all sorts of additional dangers.
The risk of getting injured by poisoned arrows played a major role in structuring these scenarios training phase. In the following I would like to give a brief outline of the course content.
Safety, for rangers as well as poachers, always comes first. Therefore all course participants received training in all aspects of safety procedures with special focus on human anatomy and tactical ground recovery aimed at reducing risks for life and limb.
Training safety procedures
Based on the before-mentioned risks the unarmed self defence training phase focused on targeting the lower limbs as a proven means of preventing poachers from escaping the crime scene as well as minimizing the infection risks. Control of the lower quadrons was then transferred into the edged weapon disarming phase and applied against a multitude of threats including knives, machetes (panga) and other trauma transport systems.
Long range attacks / primary options
Tactical Control and restraint procedures primarily focused on head controls that could be used for a wide variety of different scenarios, including quick take downs and thorough search positions on the ground without risking bodily harm or death resulting from positional asphyxia.
Head control (left); shoulder-pin (right)
take-downs
Lower leg controls as well as detainee handling procedures (both unarmed and armed with the traditional stick, which all rangers carry as a vital piece of equipment) completed the tactical control and restraint training phase.
Where it all started
As I have stated in the beginning, I feel very privileged of having the opportunity to support the dangerous and challenging work of these anti-poaching teams and I am looking forward to continue this cooperation in the future. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to my instructors in New Zealand, the United States of America and the United Kingdom.
Mr Ron Evans deserves special mention since he has been most helpful and supportive in every respect. Without him this successful training and education operation would not have been possible.
