- Community-led antitrafficking networks are proving pivotal in helping authorities intercept poachers targeting critically endangered and endemic tortoises in southern Madagascar’s fast-disappearing spiny forests.
- Illegal hunting, both for their meat and to supply the pet trade, has decimated the species’ population in recent decades.
- Indigenous people living in the range of the imperiled species are motivated to protect them due to long-standing traditional beliefs that value and respect the tortoises.
- But local efforts can’t solve everything; experts urge more action at national and international levels to step up law enforcement, combat systemic corruption, and crack down on the transnational criminal networks orchestrating the trade.
TAOLAGNARO, Madagascar – Acting on a tip from a village informant, Fabian met a colleague at the edge of the spiny forest reserve just after nightfall. Together, they cycled quietly through the community-managed forest, looking for the poachers. The dry, sandy soil muffled the sound of their tires, and they strained their eyes to see in the dark.
They didn’t have to go far: their bike headlamps lit up several poachers fleeing into the bushes, leaving behind their bicycles and two adult radiated tortoises (Astrochelys radiata), bound together with string. Untying the stressed, critically endangered animals, Fabian released them back into the forest after ensuring they were unharmed.
Fabian isn’t his real name; he asked to use a pseudonym, citing fear of reprisals from poachers. A member of the Tandroy community of southern Madagascar, he works full time in a local mine. He says his commitment to protect the critically endangered tortoises stems from cultural beliefs that portray the species as ancestral rainmakers, capable of safeguarding villages from prolonged droughts known locally as kiri.
“If we can protect the tortoises, then maybe the climate would not be so harsh,” Fabian tells Mongabay during a visit to the region earlier this year.
The antipoaching patrols he participates in are supported by the Turtle Survival Alliance (TSA), an NGO working to secure a future for the imperiled endemic species and its spiny forest habitat. The organization uses intelligence gathered by volunteer patrol teams and village informants to help authorities clamp down on tortoise trafficking.
Vulnerable to trade
Slow-moving and placid, radiated tortoises are appallingly vulnerable to poaching. Adult tortoises, which can weigh as much as 13 kilograms (29 pounds), are targeted for their meat, which is considered a local delicacy. Smaller-bodied juveniles are plucked from the wild to supply the booming international pet trade, prized for the striking radial yellow lines on their dark shells that give them their name.
Numbers across their native range in the unique and arid forests of the Anosy, Androy and Atsimo-Andrefana regions of southern Madagascar have crashed in recent decades due to rampant harvesting. The trade continues despite the species receiving protection within Madagascar under domestic wildlife laws as well as at the highest level of international trade regulation through Appendix I of CITES, the global convention on the wildlife trade.
This is partly due to inadequate resources for law enforcement and surveillance along vast sections of Madagascar’s coastline, as well as systemic corruption that investigations have revealed pave the way for cross-border trade of threatened species from Madagascar.
Recent overseas seizures of illegally sourced Madagascan wildlife underscore the role of transnational criminal networks in driving the trade and its inherent pressure on struggling wild populations.
Faced with the specter of the species’ imminent extinction in the wild, the TSA’s conservation efforts extend beyond antipoaching measures. The group also plans to boost flagging wild numbers by releasing 20,000 tortoises confiscated from poachers back into the wild over the next five years. While this might seem like a huge quantity, studies estimate no fewer than 45,000 radiated tortoises are taken from the wild annually. (The actual number is likely to be much higher due to the paucity of monitoring data.)
Preventing tortoises from being taken from the wild in the first place is a huge part of the challenge, says Hery Razafimamonjiraibe, TSA Madagascar country director. To maximize its success, the TSA focuses its antipoaching support and tortoise release program in suitably intact forests surrounded by communities who embrace long-standing Tandroy and Mahafaly taboos that center around tortoise protection.
“The communities are our eyes and ears in these remote environments,” Razafimamonjiraibe says.
Patrols deter poachers
In an unassuming community center in the Androy region, Fabian and 13 fellow residents of nearby villages are planning their upcoming antipoaching patrol schedule. Full-time farmers, mine workers and schoolteachers, they volunteer their time under the guidance and training of TSA staff. Most have arrived by bicycle, others walked. While their reasons for getting involved vary, all feel bound by the common thread of their Tandroy culture’s reverence for tortoises.
Fabian joined the antipoaching effort after growing concerned about the lack of tortoises in his area. “Twenty or even just 10 years ago, we could find tortoises in lots of places, but now only a few communes still have them,” he says. “We’re happy that an initiative is willing to protect our tradition, even if this volunteer work is very time-consuming.”
Patrolling can entail long and unsociable hours, Fabian says, and can show up resource disparities between the community patrol teams and the poachers. “We have basic mobile phones and bicycles, whereas the poachers often have motorbikes and four-by-fours,” he says, adding that he’s heard of poaching gangs in neighboring districts armed with guns. He tells Mongabay he’s helped catch poachers four times, in the process saving 48 tortoises.
It might perhaps seem foolhardy to release some 20,000 more tortoises back into the wild under these conditions. But there’s little risk of them becoming a generous gift to poachers, according to TSA social organizer Gabriel Andriamanjaka. Widespread awareness of the work to protect the tortoises at release sites has, if anything, deterred poachers in the areas chosen for release.
“Before, no one could protect the tortoises, they couldn’t defend their forests from poachers from other regions who came in and took them,” Andriamanjaka says. “But when they heard an NGO is working with law enforcement [and] with the community … people from outside don’t go into the forest anymore. In fact, they actively avoid it.”
Besides the presence of regular patrols, Andriamanjaka says there are also dedicated tortoise monitoring teams at some sites, as well as farmers checking on beehives and livestock. “Everybody knows that we are monitoring the tortoises, that there are pit tags, GPSs, all sorts of ways for us to keep track of the animals.”
Environmental defenders at risk
While community-based conservation is important in Madagascar, grassroots progress across the country has been overshadowed in recent years by a spate of threats, attacks and legal injustices against environmental defenders.
Antipoaching work is undoubtedly risky, says TSA Madagascar country manager Hery Razafimamonjiraibe, especially given poachers and trafficking middlemen often live among the very communities who are actively protecting the tortoises. Threats have been made against personnel, who are sometimes called upon to be witnesses in poaching-related court cases; and the risks of encountering armed poachers in remote areas are clear. In rare cases, corruption can even see law enforcers take the side of traffickers.
Indeed, just prior to Mongabay’s visit, a TSA staff member received threats from fellow town residents. “We think this happened because our teams have been able to ramp up the number of confiscations lately, so he was threatened,” Razafimamonjiraibe says.
Managing and mitigating such security risks to staff and volunteers is therefore a top priority. The TSA achieves this by fostering close networks of village conservationists, NGO staff and local law enforcement, according to Razafimamonjiraibe. Also, members of the antipoaching patrols are rarely on the frontlines of interventions.
“When it comes to the antipoaching work, the main role of TSA staff and volunteers is to gather information that can then be utilized by law enforcement authorities,” he says. “The aim is to let the law enforcement authorities do the work when poachers are encountered or traffickers are apprehended.”
Strategies to deter poaching
When poachers are arrested on Tandroy land, where tortoise-related taboos are inscribed as a bylaw called “Lilintane i Androy,” they are effectively sentenced twice: once under the traditional bylaw at community level, and then again by a judge in Madagascar’s formal legal system.
Lilintane i Androy prescribes the sacrifice of livestock as a cleansing ritual to undo the harm to the tortoise. “The most important thing for the Tandroy people is when the blood of a tortoise is shed, you need the blood of another animal to purify the soil,” Razafimamonjiraibe says. The latest community case, in August 2024, required a poacher to sacrifice a zebu (a breed of humped cow) and a goat and pay a fine of 140,000 ariary ($30) to the local community. Meanwhile, judicial sentences can carry several years’ imprisonment and fines of up to 3 million ariary ($637).
Yet despite the hefty penalties, poachers from outside these communities still enter Tandroy lands to poach tortoises, Razafimamonjiraibe says.
Thomas Leuteritz, a wildlife trade specialist and former director of the Turtle Conservancy, who studied the ecology and population size of radiated tortoises in southeastern Madagascar from 1997 to 2001, says Mahafaly and Antandroy traditions are slowly shifting, weakening the taboos against harming tortoises. “There were incidences of truck or ox cartloads of tortoises being taken back to larger cities, such as Tulear, Fort Dauphin or Antananarivo, where tortoise meat is especially popular around Easter and Christmas,” he says. “Controlling movement of tortoises between the south and other areas of Madagascar is of primary importance. Laws currently exist, but enforcement does not.”
Leuteritz says road and harbor checkpoints at strategic locations, such as Tulear, Beloha and Ambondro, could go some way to help authorities ensure tortoises aren’t leaving their native habitat region.
Razafimamonjiraibe agrees that a strategic approach is required. “There are the poachers who collect the tortoises in the forests, but then there’s networks of intermediaries,” he says. Closing in on the middlemen who pay poachers to collect tortoises or facilitate transport routes and provide cover to ship tortoises out of the country is key, he says.
The local antitrafficking networks have had some success on this front. In 2022, for instance, village informant networks helped authorities confiscate 900 tortoises destined for trade via coastal transport routes.
Dismantling criminal networks is key
Given the international pet trade is a major driver of radiated tortoise poaching, experts say antitrafficking efforts must extend beyond local arrests and prosecutions.
“The traffickers have a network at national level but also at international levels, so we need to also have this kind of network fighting against them,” Razafimamonjiraibe says. “That’s why the collaboration between governments, NGOs and all the international stakeholders is really helpful.”
Earlier this year, a joint transnational investigation resulted in the seizure in Thailand of 48 lemurs and more than 1,200 critically endangered radiated and spider tortoises (Pyxis arachnoides) illegally sourced from Madagascar and believed to be destined for markets in Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. Many of the tortoises died during the prolonged and cramped transit.
The incident prompted one of the largest ever wildlife repatriation efforts to Madagascar’s shores in November, including the 912 surviving tortoises, which are currently receiving care from TSA specialists in Antananarivo alongside other repatriations from the Comoros.
The international busts have also been a wake-up call for authorities in Madagascar, according to Cynthia Ratsimbazafy, a project manager at international wildlife trade monitoring group TRAFFIC. She says she’s encouraged by a new collaboration agreed between Madagascar and key transit and destination countries in Africa and Asia in the wake of the Thailand seizure. She says enforcement agencies in all countries will need to update their strategies to keep up with the constantly shifting approaches of transnational criminal networks: “Authorities need [to] adjust their law enforcement strategies accordingly. More resources and in-depth investigations are needed to dismantle the networks and expose their corrupt facilitators.”
A 2023 investigation by TRAFFIC showed Southeast Asian countries are both transshipment hubs and end destinations for trafficked Madagascar species. The report also flagged the flourishing legal trade in more than 300 CITES-listed species out of Madagascar. It recommended improved systems for authorities to identify trade-restricted species concealed within legal shipments.
USAID is funding a $10 million initiative to modernize Madagascar’s customs procedures and strengthen the capacity of its law enforcement and justice systems to control the trade in wildlife.
Dignity for people and animals
The TSA and its various partners work hard to overcome massive logistical challenges and exorbitant costs to return animals confiscated from the illegal trade back into the very same habitats from which they were taken. Preventing animals from being stolen from the wild in the first place is the priority for conservation efforts.
For Razafimamonjiraibe, this can be achieved through promoting and respecting the deeply rooted tortoise protection cultures of the people living alongside the species in its spiny forest home. He says even if other people don’t share these belief systems, they shouldn’t come onto land where the tortoises are held as sacred and poach them.
“We envision a planet where tortoises thrive in the wild, [where they] are respected and protected by humans,” Razafimamonjiraibe says.
Tandroy miner and tortoise patroller Fabian holds on to the faith that preserving the tortoises from poachers who don’t share his community’s beliefs can restore balance to land and forests scarred by recent changes: “The rain will return because the creator can listen to the tortoises calling for rain.”
Banner image : Some of the subadult tortoises repatriated to Madagascar from the Comoros Islands. Image courtesy of Turtle Survival Alliance.
Carolyn Cowan is a staff writer for Mongabay.
Massive tortoise rewilding in Madagascar’s spiny forest strives to save fraught species
Citations:
O’Brien, S., Emahalala, E. R., Beard, V., Rakotondrainy, R. M., Reid, A., Raharisoa, V., & Coulson, T. (2003). Decline of the Madagascar radiated tortoise Geochelone radiata due to overexploitation. Oryx, 37(3), 338-343. doi:10.1017/s0030605303000590
Nambinina, A., Sefczek, T. M., Frasier, C. L., Brown, A., Ratrimomanarivo, F. H., Razafiherison, R., … Louis Jr., E. E. (2022). Assessing population density of radiated tortoise (Astrochelys radiata) in Southwest Madagascar. Herpetological Conservation and Biology, 17(2), 370-377. Retrieved from https://www.herpconbio.org/Volume_17/Issue_2/Nambinina_etal_2022.pdf
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