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Wildlife criminal or wildlife savior?

Unsurprisingly, British customs police noticed Jeffrey Lendrum’s strange looking gut the other day after he disembarked from an international flight. Upon further inspection, the naturally slender Lendrum was caught with a bunch of rare falcon eggs nested against his warm midriff in a fluffy swaddling. The eggs were kept warm and alive by Lendrum’s body heat and the lumpy material, like a mother bird would do while sitting on her nest.

Lendrum is no stranger to doing this, it turns out. For at least three decades, the guy has made some kind of living smuggling rare birds and, unbelievably, their fragile eggs, out of remote countries and from the really super remote, roadless places deep inside them. He has sold the wildlife and eggs to collectors and falconers around the world, but principally in the Muslim Arab countries, where (to their credit) falconry and horsemanship are both highly valued manly skills.

In a way Lendrum is a cross between Indiana Jones, the Pink Panther diamond thief, and James Bond 007, at one time rappelling from a hovering helicopter to steal rare eggs from a raptor’s nest high in a tree in the rain forest. As a result, he has had all kinds of legal run-ins and wild law enforcement encounters throughout his career and literally all around the world.

Brazil has demanded that Britain extradite Lendrum to answer for his latest alleged crime. In a typical British understatement, Lendrum’s lawyer has responded that Brazil’s notorious prisons are in fact violent drug gang headquarters, that the nation has no real rule of law, and that Lendrum’s life would be measured in the half-second were he to be returned there.

And oh, the irony of a nation that cannot stop people from daily executing each other in the streets, that is bargain selling its own rare natural resources and wild areas at break-neck speed to every international nuclear and hydroelectric dam concession, that cannot conserve a chicken let alone a falcon, now demanding some sort of home-grown justice for a white guy who actually values some birds that now live in a place that next year will be a coffee plantation with no bird habitat left.

I am a wilderness hunter and trapper, and I hate wildlife crime. But Lendrum is probably helping ensure the survival of some of these rare bird species who, otherwise left to their own devices in these shithole countries, will be eaten by naked savages for dinner.

Texas has become the home to a dozen rare and otherwise wild species from India and Africa that have been market hunted (not recreationally hunted) into extinction in their native habitat. This is not just because the Texas climate is suitable to these animals, but because hunters pay a boatload of money to hunt these naturally reproducing animals in Texas. A market incentive has kept these endangered species alive and well, if not in the actual ecosystem from whence they evolved.

I am unconvinced that Lendrum is a wildlife criminal. Like the role of zoos has changed from wild animal freak show full of gawkers to sole breeding repository of rare and endangered animals who could never survive in their own home countries, Lendrum is in actuality seeding dying species’ DNA around the planet in the expectation that placing high commercial value on it will lead to people paying to conserve it.

That is, by placing a value on the birds that is much higher than a dinner take-out by a jungle dwelling Indian, Lendum is creating a market-based incentive to keep these species alive and breeding.

Jeffrey Lendrum, wildlife conservationist.

Jeffrey Lendrum, mother hen

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