Word: tigers
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...tiger-poaching crisis also showed the degree to which Russians can control an environmental problem when they have the resources. Russia has many dedicated game rangers who were thrown out of work by the collapse of the U.S.S.R. A group of international organizations led by American environmental investigator Steven Galster cobbled together the funding to put rangers back to work, and the newly formed patrols have been in the field since January 1994. The so-called Amba patrols have been working to disrupt poachers and their trade networks. Amba was given a boost this summer when Prime Minister Chernomyrdin issued...
...SITTING IN THE SPARSELY FURNISHED LIVING ROOM OF AN UDEGE house in southeastern Siberia while the owner tries to sell me a tiger skin and bones. My cover is that I am part of a group of American businessmen here for a week of bird watching. The other "bird watchers" consist of Steven Galster, an environmental investigator, Anthony Suau, a TIME photographer, and Sergei Shaitarov, a Russian environmentalist who works with Galster. My ludicrously rudimentary disguise consists of a borrowed pair of binoculars. If the tiger trader asks me to name one species of local bird, we are sunk...
...private environmental-security organization called the Investigative Network, which helps fund the antipoaching team. Seeing a group of Americans in Krasny Yar, Leonid, the poacher/trader, had approached Sergei and offered his services as a hunting guide. After a short conversation it turned out that Leonid had a tiger skin and bones he wanted to sell. Sergei arranged for us to see the skin later...
...months later, again pretending to be buyers, the two followed a trail of tiger and bear parts from Vladivostok, Russia, to Harbin, China. Using a camera concealed in the buttonhole of a gaudy sport jacket, Galster had the pleasure of videotaping the bandits as they told him they had to be careful because they had read about an American man and Chinese woman who had busted a rhino-horn ring in Wuchuan...
...poacher Leonid was not in the same league as the Chinese syndicates. Preparing to meet the tiger seller in Krasny Yar, Galster had taken the precaution of taping over the recording indicator on his video camera so that he could film even when the camera appeared to be off. This turned out to be unnecessary, since the poacher even offered to pose with the skin of the year-old tiger he was selling. As we chatted, Leonid remarked that killing a tiger was a very bad thing among the Udege, but that it was O.K. for him to sell...