Two years ago, after surviving 12 tours of duty in Iraq, former Australian Special Forces soldier Damien Mander was searching for a fresh challenge.
He found it in an unlikely place.
?A week before I arrived in Zimbabwe, I couldn?t have shown you where it was on a map. My visit to the country was just part of an adventure, really. Sitting in Melbourne after Iraq, I had an idea to visit Africa, as I?d never been there before,? Mander explained.
While traveling through Zimbabwe, though, he witnessed something that he said ?flipped a switch? in his mind.
?We saw an elephant that had been poached in a national park and for me that was the catalyst,? said the tall, burly man, whose work in Iraq for an elite military squad included the protection of politicians, foreign diplomats and other VIPs.
Mander had come to Africa to escape the death and destruction he?d seen in the Middle East. Instead, he found himself staring at more horror ? in the form of the bloodied, rotting carcass of an elephant, riddled with bullets and its tusks hacked off.
He told VOA, ?I know what it feels like to be hunted by humans and so I?m able to sympathize with animals that are hunted by poachers.?
Mander began gathering information about the poaching scourge that?s swept southern Africa in recent years. The ex-soldier heard that sophisticated international criminal networks are targeting rhinos, in particular, for their horns. The slaughter is driven by a scientifically disproven belief in some parts of Asia that ground rhino horn cures cancer. Rhino horn now costs about $57,000 a kilogram on the black market, according to the International Rhino Foundation.
The enemies of wildlife in southern Africa are no less ruthless than the guerilla insurgents he faced in Iraq, said Mander. The poachers are using military equipment, such as night vision goggles, assault rifles and helicopters, to target rhinos more efficiently in their efforts to claim massive profits. They either shoot the rhinos dead or dart them with high doses of veterinary drugs before hacking their horns off and leaving them to bleed to death.
In the past few years, poachers have butchered more than 1,300 of the rare creatures in southern Africa. Most of them were killed in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
During his tour of the region, Mander became increasingly convinced that his specialized military skills could contribute significantly to efforts to prevent poaching.
?One of the things I noticed the most when traveling through Africa?is that rangers just are not trained to do their jobs properly,? he said. ?And these guys are going out and putting their lives on the line every day, and they deserve to have the training that?s going to give them their best chance of survival and their best chance of achieving in their job.?
Mander offered to provide this training, free of charge, to wildlife rangers throughout southern Africa. ?I knocked on doors in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Zambia, but I couldn?t get a start with an anti-poaching unit,? he said.
Mander now acknowledges that the suspicion with which he was treated by regional wildlife authorities in 2010 was ?justifiable.? He said, ?I mean, you?ve got some guy from Australia coming and knocking on doors in Africa and saying, ?I want to help you with your problems? ? a white guy with a Special Forces background trying to run around the bush in Africa.?
But Mander refused to give up ? his desire to help to save Africa?s rhinos. Because no game reserve would take a chance on allowing a person with no previous experience in the wildlife industry to train their staff, he made what he now calls a ?crazy but correct? decision. He sold his assets in Australia and used all the money he?d earned in Iraq to fund the establishment of his own ranger training center. After talks with Zimbabwean authorities, he based it at Victoria Falls and named it the International Anti-Poaching Foundation.
Some of the wildlife parks that initially didn?t trust the Iraq War veteran now send their rangers to him to be trained to use military tactics against the poachers.
Mander explained, ?We haven?t got the funding to purchase helicopters and other aircraft that would enable us to meet the (poaching) threat head on in terms of force, so we have to rely on the way we prepare ourselves for this fight. It comes down to skills and training to enable us to stop the poachers.?
In Iraq, he was also project manager for the Iraq Special Police Training Academy in northern Baghdad, where he helped train hundreds of paramilitary police officers.