The extreme conservationist who hunts ILLEGAL TIGER FARMS
Karl Ammann has spent years in an obsessive, expensive and dangerous quest to track the people who are surrepetitiously breeding big cats for butchering. But is anyone listening?
THA BAK, LAOS— He was up there somewhere, at the top of the hill, the man Karl Ammann had come to see. It would soon be night. The forest was all shadows and sounds. Ammann had driven across the country to reach this remote river village, and now he was finally here, looking to the top of the hill, ready to confront the person he believed had murdered more tigers than anyone in Laos. In the distance, he could hear them: dozens of tigers roaring.
For nearly five years, Ammann, 70, a Swiss counter-trafficking conservationist, had tracked the tiger butcher, a man named Nikhom Keovised. He had placed hidden cameras inside what had once been the largest tiger farm in Southeast Asia, an illegal operation where tigers had been raised to one end — slaughter — and where the man doing the slaughtering had been Nikhom. And he had listened to Nikhom describe it all in his own words: “Use the anesthetic,” he had said. “Then just cut the neck.” Then “peel its skin.”
Now, Nikhom had established himself here, in this half-splash of civilization near the Vietnam border, where he’d just opened what his boss — considered one of the country’s biggest wildlife traffickers — described as a zoo, but what Ammann suspected was a front for selling tigers.
Ammann knew the risks. He was in the country without permission to investigate its wildlife practices. He was unarmed. Neither Nikhom nor his boss, who didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment, had ever been charged with anything, let alone arrested. If discovered, the equipment Ammann had with him — the drone, the hidden cameras, the satellite images of the country’s tiger farms — would immediately unravel his cover story, that he was a tourist here on a lark.
But he could already feel the familiar intensity. It had driven him to undertake dozens of risky, self-funded investigations, pushed him to the fringes of the conservation community and caused even friends to describe him as obsessive, if not a little crazy. He couldn’t stop. Those responsible had to be held to account. Species by species, the world is rapidly undergoing an ecological transformation, becoming barely recognizable from the planet it was a few centuries ago. It is a world reckoning with an end of wildness, where humanity and domesticated animals account for almost all mammal biomass, and the tiger, whose captive population now dwarfs its numbers in the wild, is on the verge of becoming a fully industrialized commodity.
For 10 days late last year, I joined Ammann on an undercover journey to the core of the modern tiger economy to determine whether Laos, a global hub of wildlife trafficking, had fulfilled its promises since 2016 to stamp out the wildlife trade. The trip had been dangerous from the beginning, and then gotten riskier, and now we’d arrived to this hill, where, above, the tigers were becoming louder. They were hungry, Ammann announced. It would soon be time to feed them. He slung his camera over his shoulder and started up the hill, in search of tigers and their warden.
Over the past century or so, the tiger population has plunged in the wild, dropping from an estimated 100,000 to fewer than 4,000, while the number in captivity had exploded to more than 12,500. Nowhere else was the animal’s commodification more complete than in tiger farming, where it is raised, butchered for parts and sold for tens of thousands of dollars. And nowhere else had these farms operated with greater impunity than in Laos, an obscure communist nation whose own wild tigers have nearly all been killed. Ammann was one of the few people who’d seen inside the country’s farms.
When I’d first spoken to him in June of last year, I’d expected to find someone who was, if not optimistic, then at least hopeful. In a smattering of countries in South Asia, the tiger’s population appeared to be stabilizing, even as it cratered elsewhere. And since 2016, international authorities and some conservationists had applauded Laos, home to some of Asia’s biggest wildlife traffickers, as it announced overhauls to finally clean up the trade.
Shops trading in bones and wildlife merchandise were to cease. All three of the country’s illegal tiger farms, which stored 700 tigers, were ordered to stop farming and convert into zoos and conservation centres. No new facilities breeding endangered wildlife for commercial purposes would open. From the outside, things seemed to be getting a bit better. Even Britain’s Prince William had reportedly taken up the cause.
But Ammann was neither optimistic nor hopeful.
“They all want hope and happy endings,” he said of producers and audiences who ignored his documentaries, despite their findings. “And I don’t see any happy endings.”
We ended the phone call, with him