Reisner, Marc. Game Wars: The Undercover Pursuit of Wildlife Poachers. New York: Viking, 1991.
The illegal worldwide trade in wildlife and animal parts is second only to drug trafficking in the lucrative profit with which it rewards criminal activity. In Game Wars, the relentless author of Cadillac Desert follows the hazardous and unrewarding career of Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Dave Hall, an undercover conservation officer with the United States Fish & Wildlife Service, in his covert journeys from his home base in Louisiana to deep-cover stings in Alaska, New Jersey, and Mississippi. Along the way Hall assumes the identities of “Charles Strickland, alligator poacher, alligator and reptile [sic] tanner, and all-purpose journeyman hoodlum...; Dave Hayes, a small-time New Orleans gangster... (who) launders a lucrative sideline in illegal furs, ivory, scrimshaw, marijuana, and cocaine ...; and Big Jim Pridgen, a Mississippi good old boy who runs a catering business specializing in illegal wild game—ducks, geese, sacalait (crappie), redfish, deer, your choice....” SAC Hall is also a husband and father when he is home in Slidell, which, the author observes, is not very often. Reisner’s detailed book offers a real-life look at a side of governmental wildlife resource protection that most urban environmentalists have never heard of, and he does a fine job of exposing the dedication, frustrations, and occasional quiet triumphs of these underpaid and unappreciated professionals.
Working in a world saturated with corruption, greed, violence and desperation, Officer Hall has accumulated some outstanding credits to his agency, but all too often he has seen these successful operations drained of meaning in the face of sympathetic local courts, outlandishly minuscule fines, and the continuing deterioration, despite his all-consuming efforts, of the American wild heritage. Reisner pulls some interesting insights from Hall in an effort to get into the mind of someone who can daily risk his family, his friends, his career (through corrupt agency heads), and his life for a few ducks over the legal limit or for a poached alligator. “If he were King, [Reisner says of Hall] he would crank this country back a hundred eighty years to where we weren’t all fast-food managers and accountants and lawnmower salesmen and goddamned public-relations men. He’d take America and make it wild again. When we lost our wilderness, our right to hunt and fish freely, we lost something American at the core. We lost our ties to nature and the land. We lost a freedom as essential as democracy. But we will never regain it so long as we have greedy fools cleaning out wildlife as if there were no tomorrow.”
Hall’s favored method of reaching the hearts and minds of the poaching class is to bust them in high-profile arrests, imprison them, and then wait for panic to set in. As in Africa, the working poacher is usually a poor native who is just doing what his daddy and granddaddy did, and long prison terms mean no food on the table at home. Also as in Africa, it is recognized that the local Cajun, redneck, or hillbilly who is supplying the organized international cabal that feeds the enormous world demand for illegal wildlife is well-versed in all facets of his aboriginal environment, including where to jacklight deer, where to seine bass or hammer a hundred ducks on the water, and, most importantly, how to contact the higher-ups in the hazy, paranoid world of poaching. Hall recognizes that the wildlife knowledge of “converted” poachers, accumulated by generations of subsistence hunting, is invaluable for saving what’s left of the resource.
To glimpse the bad guys one meets in Reisner’s travels is to encapsulate the tone followed throughout the entire book. In Game Wars we encounter nouveau riche Texans who eat beluga caviar with tortilla chips and lust after genuwine walrus-ivory billiard balls; wealthy Asian merchants whose cultures have become “a strange muddle of hypermodernism and atavism,” demanding rhinoceros horn, bear galls, and elk antlers over cellular phones for arcane folk remedies; hair-trigger New Jersey junkies who run everything from ivory to crack cocaine according to the shifting demand; ignorant rednecks with an unthinking disregard for the future of the wildlife that sustains their cultures; debased state game agencies and court systems in the pay of the poaching rings; utterly corrupted Eskimos who offer ten walrus head mounts, with tusks, for one ounce of marijuana; and a group of Alaskan Hell’s Angels who trade in mastodon tusks, heroin, and white sex slaves, and whose trailer park headquarters is adorned with the peeled skulls of former “squealers.”
Perhaps the most poignant picture in Game Wars is that painted of the misery and squalor surrounding modern Eskimo (Aleut) life in Alaska [see also Joe McGinnis’ illuminating Going to Extremes]. For Reisner, encountering a typical village “is like touring a graveyard of wildlife.”
“The outer walls of many homes are layered with collections of hides, skulls, tusks, antlers, and whalebone. These bleaching remains are hung in such profusion that it is difficult to fathom their utility. Hundreds of reindeer hides are rotting all over the village. A pile of about thirty decaying pelts have been dumped on the beach for the tide to take away. Several fresh polar bear hides are hanging out to dry, and I spot three more scattered about going to rot. Outside one house I count the skulls of six polar bears—the great ursine teeth bright against the dark flesh clinging to the bone.”
Like the Indians to their immediate south, the Eskimos’ hunting-based culture refuses to die in the face of European-American technology, booze, money, and drugs; it instead becomes perverted into a crude hybrid tradition where whales are hunted for “subsistence” with outboard motors and high-powered rifles, the great majority of the animals sinking dead beneath the waves, unretrieved. Reisner sees this new Eskimo culture as a twisted shadow of the old ways, with families gathering around the TV to gobble Cheetos while watching old Dallas reruns before hopping on their snowmobiles to blast away at the bears and the birthing caribou with automatic shotguns. Government-sponsored “subsistence hunting” allowances are being used to finance the degradation both of native ecosystems and of the natives themselves. “‘Subsistence,’” says Dave Hall, “is a joke.”
“Buying drugs and buying into the white man’s culture through walrus hunting is not subsistence … There’s so much game-playing going on … You arrest a bunch of Eskimos and that’s heat, man, that’s serious heat. Discrimination! Racism!”
Like the hungry Cajuns and rednecks down South, like the lean, skulking hillbillies of Appalachia, the Eskimos Hall encountered in Alaska are merely pawns in the global poaching conspiracy. The big fish, Reisner observed, were always a step ahead, operating out of towering fortifications in New York, Seattle, Anchorage, Dubai, Hong Kong, and Lagos. “If we don’t stop these kinds of people,” says Dave Hall, “there wouldn’t be anything left. They’d rape the last resource and leave the bleached bones and just shrug.” Reisner poignantly makes the reader feel Hall’s frustration, outrage, and hopelessness:
“Our problem in this modern world is a total estrangement from nature. The indigenous cultures we got left can’t survive without nature and wildlife. Cajun culture is about the only one we got left in this country, besides the Indians and Eskimos, and they’re hurtin' bad; I don’t know how long these cultures can survive all the insidiousness that our culture does to them.”
By delving seriously into a decidedly unglamorous corner of the environmental struggle, Marc Reisner presents us with a stark portrait of unrestrained governmental corruption, public apathy, insufficient funding, the grinding strains on family and psyche, and the intertwining downspiral of traditional cultures tied to the land with the failing populations of wildlife they depend upon, all sacrificed to the merciless demands of industrial society. We are privileged throughout this book to get to know a man of uncommon courage and commitment, one who sacrifices much in what even he acknowledges is a useless, one-sided battle against those most omnipotent and tyrannical of gods, Supply and Demand.
The illegal worldwide trade in wildlife and animal parts is second only to drug trafficking in the lucrative profit with which it rewards criminal activity. In Game Wars, the relentless author of Cadillac Desert follows the hazardous and unrewarding career of Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Dave Hall, an undercover conservation officer with the United States Fish & Wildlife Service, in his covert journeys from his home base in Louisiana to deep-cover stings in Alaska, New Jersey, and Mississippi. Along the way Hall assumes the identities of “Charles Strickland, alligator poacher, alligator and reptile [sic] tanner, and all-purpose journeyman hoodlum...; Dave Hayes, a small-time New Orleans gangster... (who) launders a lucrative sideline in illegal furs, ivory, scrimshaw, marijuana, and cocaine ...; and Big Jim Pridgen, a Mississippi good old boy who runs a catering business specializing in illegal wild game—ducks, geese, sacalait (crappie), redfish, deer, your choice....” SAC Hall is also a husband and father when he is home in Slidell, which, the author observes, is not very often. Reisner’s detailed book offers a real-life look at a side of governmental wildlife resource protection that most urban environmentalists have never heard of, and he does a fine job of exposing the dedication, frustrations, and occasional quiet triumphs of these underpaid and unappreciated professionals.
Working in a world saturated with corruption, greed, violence and desperation, Officer Hall has accumulated some outstanding credits to his agency, but all too often he has seen these successful operations drained of meaning in the face of sympathetic local courts, outlandishly minuscule fines, and the continuing deterioration, despite his all-consuming efforts, of the American wild heritage. Reisner pulls some interesting insights from Hall in an effort to get into the mind of someone who can daily risk his family, his friends, his career (through corrupt agency heads), and his life for a few ducks over the legal limit or for a poached alligator. “If he were King, [Reisner says of Hall] he would crank this country back a hundred eighty years to where we weren’t all fast-food managers and accountants and lawnmower salesmen and goddamned public-relations men. He’d take America and make it wild again. When we lost our wilderness, our right to hunt and fish freely, we lost something American at the core. We lost our ties to nature and the land. We lost a freedom as essential as democracy. But we will never regain it so long as we have greedy fools cleaning out wildlife as if there were no tomorrow.”
Hall’s favored method of reaching the hearts and minds of the poaching class is to bust them in high-profile arrests, imprison them, and then wait for panic to set in. As in Africa, the working poacher is usually a poor native who is just doing what his daddy and granddaddy did, and long prison terms mean no food on the table at home. Also as in Africa, it is recognized that the local Cajun, redneck, or hillbilly who is supplying the organized international cabal that feeds the enormous world demand for illegal wildlife is well-versed in all facets of his aboriginal environment, including where to jacklight deer, where to seine bass or hammer a hundred ducks on the water, and, most importantly, how to contact the higher-ups in the hazy, paranoid world of poaching. Hall recognizes that the wildlife knowledge of “converted” poachers, accumulated by generations of subsistence hunting, is invaluable for saving what’s left of the resource.
To glimpse the bad guys one meets in Reisner’s travels is to encapsulate the tone followed throughout the entire book. In Game Wars we encounter nouveau riche Texans who eat beluga caviar with tortilla chips and lust after genuwine walrus-ivory billiard balls; wealthy Asian merchants whose cultures have become “a strange muddle of hypermodernism and atavism,” demanding rhinoceros horn, bear galls, and elk antlers over cellular phones for arcane folk remedies; hair-trigger New Jersey junkies who run everything from ivory to crack cocaine according to the shifting demand; ignorant rednecks with an unthinking disregard for the future of the wildlife that sustains their cultures; debased state game agencies and court systems in the pay of the poaching rings; utterly corrupted Eskimos who offer ten walrus head mounts, with tusks, for one ounce of marijuana; and a group of Alaskan Hell’s Angels who trade in mastodon tusks, heroin, and white sex slaves, and whose trailer park headquarters is adorned with the peeled skulls of former “squealers.”
Perhaps the most poignant picture in Game Wars is that painted of the misery and squalor surrounding modern Eskimo (Aleut) life in Alaska [see also Joe McGinnis’ illuminating Going to Extremes]. For Reisner, encountering a typical village “is like touring a graveyard of wildlife.”
“The outer walls of many homes are layered with collections of hides, skulls, tusks, antlers, and whalebone. These bleaching remains are hung in such profusion that it is difficult to fathom their utility. Hundreds of reindeer hides are rotting all over the village. A pile of about thirty decaying pelts have been dumped on the beach for the tide to take away. Several fresh polar bear hides are hanging out to dry, and I spot three more scattered about going to rot. Outside one house I count the skulls of six polar bears—the great ursine teeth bright against the dark flesh clinging to the bone.”
Like the Indians to their immediate south, the Eskimos’ hunting-based culture refuses to die in the face of European-American technology, booze, money, and drugs; it instead becomes perverted into a crude hybrid tradition where whales are hunted for “subsistence” with outboard motors and high-powered rifles, the great majority of the animals sinking dead beneath the waves, unretrieved. Reisner sees this new Eskimo culture as a twisted shadow of the old ways, with families gathering around the TV to gobble Cheetos while watching old Dallas reruns before hopping on their snowmobiles to blast away at the bears and the birthing caribou with automatic shotguns. Government-sponsored “subsistence hunting” allowances are being used to finance the degradation both of native ecosystems and of the natives themselves. “‘Subsistence,’” says Dave Hall, “is a joke.”
“Buying drugs and buying into the white man’s culture through walrus hunting is not subsistence … There’s so much game-playing going on … You arrest a bunch of Eskimos and that’s heat, man, that’s serious heat. Discrimination! Racism!”
Like the hungry Cajuns and rednecks down South, like the lean, skulking hillbillies of Appalachia, the Eskimos Hall encountered in Alaska are merely pawns in the global poaching conspiracy. The big fish, Reisner observed, were always a step ahead, operating out of towering fortifications in New York, Seattle, Anchorage, Dubai, Hong Kong, and Lagos. “If we don’t stop these kinds of people,” says Dave Hall, “there wouldn’t be anything left. They’d rape the last resource and leave the bleached bones and just shrug.” Reisner poignantly makes the reader feel Hall’s frustration, outrage, and hopelessness:
“Our problem in this modern world is a total estrangement from nature. The indigenous cultures we got left can’t survive without nature and wildlife. Cajun culture is about the only one we got left in this country, besides the Indians and Eskimos, and they’re hurtin' bad; I don’t know how long these cultures can survive all the insidiousness that our culture does to them.”
By delving seriously into a decidedly unglamorous corner of the environmental struggle, Marc Reisner presents us with a stark portrait of unrestrained governmental corruption, public apathy, insufficient funding, the grinding strains on family and psyche, and the intertwining downspiral of traditional cultures tied to the land with the failing populations of wildlife they depend upon, all sacrificed to the merciless demands of industrial society. We are privileged throughout this book to get to know a man of uncommon courage and commitment, one who sacrifices much in what even he acknowledges is a useless, one-sided battle against those most omnipotent and tyrannical of gods, Supply and Demand.
