- “We watched through binoculars as the slaughter continued along the shore,” Owens wrote in “Cry of the Kalahari.” “Trembling with rage, I pushed the control wheel forward and we plunged toward the lakeshore. The poachers were preoccupied with their butchery and did not see the aircraft until it was at ground level, roaring across the plain toward them at 160 miles an hour.” (page 3)
Maybe- seems dangerous to be so reckless with an aircraft with human lives on the line but also was done out of rage which is understandable
- Later, he orders his scouts, “If you see poachers in the national park with a firearm, you don’t wait for them to shoot at you. You shoot at them first, all right? That means when you see the whites of his eyes, and if he has a firearm, you kill him before he kills you, because if you let him get—if you let him turn on you with an AK-47, he’s going to cut you in two. So go out there and get them. Go get them, O.K.?”’
No – it’s your job to defend your life not get killed
- Over time, the Owenses, raising money in the United States, built a small network of grinding mills, fishponds, and sunflower-oil presses, with the goal of weaning local people from illegal hunting, and from providing help to the battalions of commercial poachers passing through their villages on the way to the park. But one of the scouts assigned to North Luangwa soon informed the Owenses that men from Chishala were serving as meat carriers for poachers based in another village: “ ‘From Chishala!’ I cry out,” Delia wrote. “Those men we gave jobs, and the soccer ball?” Page 9
No – There are helping the local to help stop poachers, but failing.
- “In the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, there was a spike in the killing of Africa’s savanna elephants, caused largely by increased demand in Asia for ivory carvings. In 1979, there were about a million three hundred thousand elephants in Africa; ten years later, the population had fallen by half. By the late eighties, some countries, including Kenya, had found the problem serious enough to institute a shoot-to-kill policy, allowing poachers to be shot on sight. Zambia, which had no such official policy, was heavily afflicted by poaching. Its central government was corrupt in places, and ineffective at policing the country’s distant corners. For poachers, North Luangwa’s isolation made it a favored hunting ground.”
Yes -crossing the line favoring animal over humans
- Onscreen, the scout is shown from behind, running through brush and carrying a rifle. He approaches a man wearing a gray jacket and brown pants, lying prone in a small clearing. The man tries to move, lifting his head a few inches off the ground. The scout, his face blotted out electronically, fires a single shot at him. At this moment, a second figure is seen in the background. His face and upper body are blurred, so that even his race is obscured, but he is dressed in green and appears to be carrying a rifle. The camera turns to the wounded man, and Vieira says, in a voice-over, “The bodies of the poachers are often left where they fall for the animals to eat.” She pauses, and says, “Conservation. Morality. Africa.” Then, from offscreen, come three more shots. The camera stays focussed on the wounded man, lying on the ground. His body jerks at the first and third shots. Then it is still.
- Vieira does not indicate whether she, her producer, and her cameraman tried to learn the identity of the dead man, or whether he was a meat poacher, a commercial poacher, or simply a “trespasser,” as she calls him. The execution of the alleged poacher is not mentioned in the remaining twenty-five minutes of the broadcast.
Who was the trespasser ? No one ever look into who he was.
- Owens answers, “Worth more to whom? The elephant or the person? Ask the elephant. And ask the human. You’ll get two different answers.” In a voice-over, Vieira says, “Mark Owens calls it a ‘hardening of the human spirit,’ the ultimate price he has paid to work here.” The film returns to Owens, who says, “It’s a very dirty game. It’s a measure of the desperation of the situation, I think.”
How does Mark value human and animal lives? Human life doesn’t matter if it in dangers animal life constantly.
- But there is no evidence in “Deadly Game” that the alleged poacher was heavily armed, or armed at all, when he was shot, and it is by no means clear that Zambia tolerated the killing of poachers. The ABC program asserted that Zambia had an unwritten shoot-to-kill policy, and the Owenses later said that a former tourism minister named Christon Tembo visited the North Luangwa area shortly before the ABC crew arrived and told scouts that they could shoot poachers. But Zambia has never had a written shoot-to-kill law, and the government has stridently denied supporting such a policy informally; on occasion scouts who shot poachers have faced punishment.
It look like someone is hidden something from us.
- The American Embassy warned the Owenses not to enter Zambia until the controversy was resolved. In a consular memorandum of December 3, 1996, an official wrote that the Owenses “had better have ironclad assurances that they have been exonerated and that all arrangements are in place for their uneventful return before they consider such a move.” Kuchel told me that Zambia’s justice system was thoroughly corrupt, and he feared that if Mark Owens were held in a Zambian jail, he would be raped and infected with H.I.V.
Who would want to see in jail? Why would they bring up the worst case scenario right away? To draw attention away from the shooting and show the type of country they are working in.
- Forty miles west of the North Luangwa park is Shiwa Ng’andu, the lake of the royal crocodile. It was on these shores that, according to legend, a crocodile ate David Livingstone’s dog, and it was here, fifty years after Livingstone’s early explorations, that an eccentric Englishman named Stewart Gore-Browne decided to build an expansive plantation. Gore-Browne arrived in Northern Rhodesia during the First World War, as a member of a commission drawing the borders of southern Africa. He had dreamed of being the lord of a manor, and by 1926 he had completed the construction of a Tuscan-style mansion on twenty-three thousand acres of farmland. The monocled Gore-Browne lived out his life as the baron of Shiwa Ng’andu, hunting, farming, and building a factory for the processing of tropical oils. Thousands of Zambians depended on the semifeudal Shiwa plantation for their existence, but Gore-Browne became known over time for his advocacy of African self-rule. When he died, in 1967, he was hailed as a Zambian hero.
Why does the author include this in the Article? Because is highlight the moral grey area that Mark is in.
- As Mark Owens assumed more authority over the valley and the game scouts, he extended his campaign against poachers beyond the borders of the national park. The Owenses now had a Bell helicopter as well as the Cessna, and the scouts were highly mobile, thanks to trucks provided to them by the Owenses’ conservation project. In “The Eye of the Elephant,” Delia described the first of a regular series of “village sweeps”: “The scouts raid villages all night—bursting into poachers’ huts while they sleep—and drive back to Mano in the morning, their truck loaded with suspects.”
Why are they using such invasive method? TO catch the poacher off grad.
