Criminals of the illegal wildlife trade

Drive around Tanzania’s safari parks and you may come across a scene all too familiar to guides: a heap of felled elephants, their tusks hacked out of mutilated heads, their bodies rotting and grotesque in the heat.

“It is hard to describe the exact feeling, but my stomach still knots every time I see an elephant carcass. I have seen hundreds over the last three years,” South African wildlife conservationist Wayne Lotter wrote in 2014.

Lotter saw, on average, 14 dead elephants a day: “The meat of elephant bulls, cows, adolescents and even infants lay rotting in the sun - even the scavengers could not keep up,” he recalled. “Poachers would shoot