Investigating true crime in the animal kingdom

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I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading from TED and npr. I'm Minouche Zumarodi, and this is the story of of a murder that couldn't be solved by humans alone. Just a warning. There are some graphic descriptions that may be hard to hear for some people. It all starts with a man who'd gone missing in Wynn Parish, Louisiana.

It was in the summer of 2013. I was called in the evening hours.

This is Bradley Marr. He was the lead detective on the case.

There was a possible kidnapping. That's how it came in. And that's how I first got involved.

Detective Marr soon learned that the victim's roommate had evidence.

He had a video camera system at his house. So he reviewed the video camera and saw the victim getting taken from the house at gunpoint. At that point, all hands on deck, I was the detective on call. So I got called and immediately went to the scene.

Thanks to that video surveillance, the detective and his team quickly tracked down the alleged kidnapper. But the victim, he was nowhere to be found.

We were searching hard. You know, we're sending out teams and basically just looking, looking for tire tracks, looking for evidence, looking for anything. And we're talking about an area here that was miles and miles and miles across.

No clues, nothing. By now, Detective Marr felt pretty sure that the victim. But he refused to let the trail grow cold.

We were desperate. We were looking for a body. We had a family that wanted some closure. So at that point in time, I said, what the heck, let's call her. And she making tell us something.

Detective Marr called on the one person who. Whom he thought might be able to help him find the body.

Hi, yes, my name is Lauren Parks and I am a forensic scientist, but specialize in avian scavenging, especially vultures.

Okay, basically you are an expert on vultures and crime. Is that fair to Say yes. Vultures feed on decaying animals and humans, which is why they can help lead people to a crime scene. Or so Detective Maher had heard.

You know, you watch the old western movies of the guy, Atlanta, the desert, and the vulture circuit.

Here's the email he wrote to Lauren.

Lauren, I'm a detective with the Sabine Parish Sheriff's Department. I'm wondering how many species of vultures we have in Louisiana. Of those, will all the species eat human remains? We are working a kidnapping and haven't found the body of the victim. He has been missing since Tuesday morning at 10am we have the suspect in jail on the kidnapping charge. Thank you, Detective Mar.

And so how did you respond to the detective?

So he's thinking that the victim is dead. But I told him, you know, don't be looking for vultures that are circling, per se.

She explained to me, stop looking for vultures riding on air currents.

When you see a circling vulture, they are typically riding a thermal because they are so big. They are too big to flap their wings like normal birds, so they use thermals to soar around. So you're gonna be looking for vultures sitting in a tree, sitting on the.

Ground, sitting on fence post, whatever.

And if they have scavenged the body, they're going to leave feathers at the scene. If the body's exposed, they'll often leave the spinal column intact.

So we did put that word out to every single person that was searching. This is what we're looking for. As far as vulture activity.

Detective Marr's unorthodox idea was exactly what this case needed. And it's exactly what we love about true crime. Some of us can't get enough of thrillers and mysteries, cold cases gone hot again, and whodunits. But what if humans can't sniff out the clues? What if the suspect has claws? On this episode, we're giving true crime a wild twist with stories about animals who perpetrate, solve, or are victims of various crimes, like vultures who can act as winged coroners, the first to arrive at the site of a murder. So Detective Marr needed to find a.

Body, a very wooded area.

And soon he did.

It was a shallow grave that was located in a lake bed.

But sure enough, vultures had beat him to the crime scene.

There was a portion of a hand exposed from that grave, and that's where the scavenging had occurred with the vultures.

There was a skeletonized arm sticking up out of the grave, but it was defleshed. And then when they dug up the Body. The head of the victim was in pieces, but the body itself was. It had still all the flesh on it. So just the arm had been pulled out of the grave and scavenged.

We thought we could see a faint drag mark, but, you know, five days has passed, and I start taking photos and then kind of start trying to put everything together. And I send Lauren those photos that we had taken, and she was like, whoa, wait a minute. That's a vulture feather.

40 yards away, they had found feathers and a bloody pine cone and a bloody stick 40 yards from where the body was found in the grave.

Okay, so a bloody pinecone, and there were feathers at the crime scene.

Right.

But they. They were 40 yards away from where the body was found, you said. Correct.

And that didn't mean anything to the detective at the time, but that meant a lot to me. And it meant a lot in the sense that it didn't add up. And by that I mean that 40 yards, that's a tremendous distance for a vulture. And they. They're not attracted to blood.

Lauren Farr Parks picks up the case from the TED stage.

There appeared to be a problem because the feathers were located 40 yards from where the body was found. The feathers were next to a bloody pine cone. The vultures aren't attracted to blood, and they typically don't wander. They might wander 40ft, but they're not going to wander 40 yards. That would be a waste of energy for a bird that doesn't know when it will get its next meal. So why in the world would a vulture wander 40 yards? One of the reasons I love vultures is because they tend to operate in a manner that can be explained by biology and physics. I started mentally going through the numerous baiting experiments I had conducted at a body farm in Texas. A body farm is a place where you can donate your body to science. Next, I brought up my field notes and had an aha moment. I knew of two things that would lure a vulture 40 yards from a body. Guts and brain matter.

Guts and brain matter were the clues. How did that help them figure out what the heck happened to this poor guy?

So they came to the conclusion that the victim was led into the forest at gunpoint. Then, rather than shooting the victim, the victim was bludgeoned with a baseball bat. And then the victim was once deceased, dragged 40 yards to a grave. And the thought was that a baseball bat was used so that no one would hear the gunshot.

We got the autopsy report and knew that we had a blunt force trauma to the head and she was able to actually pretty much narrow down the actual scene of the homicide and show this body had not been here longer than five days. We put together the timeline, and then immediately we were able to secure an arrest for the suspect for first degree murder here in the state of Louisiana, which can carry the death penalty.

It's an awful story, Lauren, but kind of fascinating to think that understanding vulture behavior helped them solve the case.

Yes, I think I was very helpful in being able to say that. Their theory is supported by the avian evidence. So they thought that maybe this individual had been hit over the head elsewhere. And the avian evidence definitely supported the theories of the detectives.

I've always been that police officer that says, every time I can put another piece of that puzzle together, that helps me when I go before a jury. So if you take what Lauren had given me, it made perfect sense. Everything lined up, and it just kind of was that last piece of the puzzle that really tied everything together.

Did they ever find out the motive?

Yes, it was over a woman. So there was jealousy.

It was a crime of passion.

It was a crime of passion, yes.

Do you ever think, like, there must be so many cases out there where the detectives never considered that vultures might have a. A role in helping them piece together a crime?

Oh, I do. I think there's a tremendous number of skeletal cases. Some probably may have gone unsolved because the timeline is off. Because animals, and especially vultures, were not considered as a factor in the decomposition, Detectives are starting to become aware of the role that animals have in forensic science. And I think that if detectives can just know, hey, let's look for, like, a feather or if there's exposed bone, but there's also tissue, and maybe an animal was here. They don't always leave the gnaw marks on the body or the bloody image that you see on tv, so sometimes it can be a lot more subtle.

Than what you might expect.

Lauren, I have to ask you, when you tell people what you do, like, you know, how do they respond or react?

Usually some people ask questions like, how did you get into that? Or, oh, my goodness. And then some people just looked at me, like, look at me with a confused face.

They're like, wait, are you like Agatha Christie meets Hitchcock's the Birds? Essentially, Those are the things that come to mind for me.

Yes. And then, you know, I want to tell people about what I do, but I've seen it so much that I forget that this is usually a shocker to other individuals. And so I have to be careful to not scare people away.

Yeah. That was forensic scientist Lauren Farr Parks. You can see her full talk@ted.com we also heard from Bradley Mar, the lead detective on the case today on the show Crimes in the Wild. I'm Anoush Zamorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr. Stay with us.

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It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zumarodi. And on the show today, crimes in the wild. Which brings us to our next case, a burglary in Aspen, Colorado.

We're up in the hills above the town, prime real estate, nice houses. This was a house that kind of spilled down the hillside three stories. And from a couple days observations, it appeared that it was an empty house. Now, each story had a deck, so the bottom deck was Right off of a bedroom, and there's a big window. And when we arrived, the screen was still lying on the floor. It was bent as though hit with some force. Lying on the carpeting. Wall to wall carpeting, white carpeting. No mud on the carpeting. Nothing in the bedroom is disturbed or stolen. And then we get to the kitchen, and it is chaos all over the floor. The contents of the refrigerator and the freezer. We have ice cream cartons. We have cottage cheese. We have a broken bottle of honey. We have eggs. Everything on the floor definitely knew what he was going for.

Oh, and definitely blew his cover.

Yes. Unless it was a ravenously hungry burglar. All signs indicated it was a bear.

A bear who got away with the crime. And there, surveying the detritus was author Mary Roach.

I write nonfiction books, and the latest one is called Fuzz When Nature Breaks the Law.

This latest book is about animals who commit crimes. And bears feature heavily because they're just so darn hungry.

They're omnivores in the truest sense of the word.

Everything is honey.

Do they really go for the honey?

They go after honey. They go after beer. They like craft beer. They do not like the cheap stuff. They don't eat crappy ice cream. There's a brand called Western Family that bears will eschew in favor of Ben and Jerry's or Haagen Dazs. Curtis Tesh, the wildlife officer who had come with me to the site of this break in, he said that a bear had unwrapped the foil on a Hershey's Kiss and eaten the kiss. This.

Wait, with his bear claws.

Oh, yeah. Maybe he did it in his mouth. Kind of like the way people with very dexterous tongues can tie a cherry stem. Who knows?

These bears are good at getting what they want, huh?

Yeah. There have been instances also where a family will be sitting down to dinner. The food is all on the table. The bear comes through either the window or the door, grabs something off the table and leaves.

Don't want to stay for dinner?

Okay, bye. Can you imagine? You know, you're sitting down to a meal with your family. The bear's like, I'll take that chicken, thank you.

And then just takes it to go.

It just takes it to go.

So, Mary, Bare human conflict. I mean, this is not exactly new. We have been asking animals to abide by our rules for a very long time.

That's right. The 1800s. Manifest Destiny. This sense that the land belongs to us. It is ours to take and is ours to use and the wild animals were perceived either as vulnerable varmints or they were something that you could profit off of. And there was really a cultural consensus. Use them or just kill them. There were bounties on all of the large carnivores, bears, wolves, coyotes, mountain lions. You would show up with a pair of ears or a scalp at the local wildlife agency and collect your pay. And that knocked back the numbers tremendously. And that persisted through around the middle of the 1900s. There were two forces for conservation earlier on. It was hunters setting aside land for parks and preserves so there would always be wild lands to hunt in. And then moving forward, the animal welfare and the environmental movement, which really caused a shift in how we perceive these animals and how we feel they should be treated.

And you write that that shift, I mean, essentially it worked. Conservation efforts worked. Wild animals like bears are back.

Yeah, these animals, these large mammals made a terrific comeback since, you know, the middle of the last century through now to the extent that now they're. So the populations are thriving. And now we're starting to have a lot of conflict. We, and we are moving into their territory. You know, suburbs and exurbs keep expanding, so you're getting more and more human wildlife conflict. And then people's tolerance starts to erode and their attitudes start to shift back a bit and they start to see these animals as either a threat to their pets or to their comfort. So things are kind of moving back the other way a bit.

So let's go back to Aspen then. How is that playing out in this one city in particular?

Right. Aspen is a well to do city with a lot of very good restaurants in a dense area downtown. And I was traveling with Stuart Breck, who works for the National Wildlife Research Center. And I said, stuart, can we both set our alarms for 3am and let's see what's going on in the alleys behind the restaurants. We get in his truck, we drive down. We, we just looked down the first alleyway and there's a large white hefty sack split open with all of this food coming. Pretty good looking food too, spilled out. And I was like, oh, we just missed them. And he said, just, let's just stand over here. And within three minutes, here comes one bear. It's kind of a boom, boom, coming down the alley, heading back to the bag. And then five minutes later, a second bear. And so we, we had just shown up. It wasn't like we spent the whole night waiting in hiding. We're like, oh, we might catch a glimpse of a bear. It's like you just turned down an alley. The first one we turned down, bear party.

Late night party scene.

Late night party scene. Absolutely, absolutely.

Yeah.

And it was so surreal because it's a very upscale town. This one bear, when they were kind of done with what they were doing, we sort of followed along and. And this last glimpse of this bear was in front of the Louis Vuitton window. It's just the weirdest, most surreal sight. This little bear who had a little bit of burrata on his snout. He's kind of standing in front of the. As though window shopping at Louis Vuitton.

Celebrity bear. What? Bears. They're just like us.

The bears are. They're just like us.

All right, so, Mary, we would love to have you read a particularly wild section from your book.

Sure.

You have the book right there, right?

Yeah, absolutely. The lighter colored bear is working a crab leg while its colleague noses through cabbage leaves. What have these bears just learned? Stuart Brecht is saying, I can eat garbage with people standing and watching me and nothing bad happens. We've just given these two a little less reason to worry about humans. As a result, they may start coming into the alley earlier or standing their ground longer. Odds are they'll end up like the bear that dined out at the dumpster behind steakhouse316. One night not long ago, the restaurant's manager, Roy, came out to roust the animal. Because the dumpster was set in an alcove, the bear's escape was blocked on three sides. On the fourth side was Roy. With only one way out. The bear lunged and, quoting Charlie, bit Roy in the ass. According to University of Calgary professor emeritus and bear attack researcher Stephen Herrero, 90% of black bears that injure humans are bears that have habituated to them that is accustomed to their presence and lost their fear and developed a taste for their foods. Based on the description of the bear that Roy provided, the animal was found trapped and because it had injured someone, put down what the description said. Beyond dark hair and heavyset, I can't imagine. However, DNA from saliva on Roy's pants was a match with the bear's. Roy and his staff could have been more careful about keeping the dumpster locked, and that too bit him in the ass. Townspeople picketed the steakhouse following the bear's death. People don't want bears destroyed because of other people's neglect. If anything, they want them hazed or relocated. The two non lethal approaches you hear about most with conflict bears. There's also electric fencing, but the prison camp look, doesn't play well in residential areas.

You mentioned that if they hurt a human, the bear is put down. But. But what about these other problem bears?

In most cases, the bear is put down. As they say. You can translocate a bear. Sometimes that's done. Particularly in cases where there's a lot of media attention.

Yeah. I can't imagine that moving a bear tens of miles away is an easy thing to do.

Well, it's not so much that it's difficult, it's that it doesn't. Often it doesn't solve the problem. Bears have made their way home. I think the record is something like 140 miles. They're very good at finding their way back to where they've been hanging out. The other thing, a bear that's used to eating human sourced food will make its way to the closest human community and start doing the same thing. Depending on the study, between 40 and almost 70% of bears will be involved in a quote unquote nuisance event within two years. So there's a lot of recidivism.

There is another, a third thing that we humans try to do to keep bears away. Right. And it sounds kind of funny to me. You use the word hazing.

Yes.

Talk to me about what they're trying to do.

Sure. Hazing is just to create an unpleasant but not harmful situation. Hopefully they'll run off and won't come back. They'll associate that behavior and that place with negative consequences. So it may be rubber bullets, it may be pepper spray, it may be there's a certain kind of dog called a bear dog and they do work to scare the animal away. But there was a study in Nevada. 62 bears were hazed with rubber bullets and pepper spray, and all but five out of 62 came back. So there's too much gain for the bear in a place like an alley in Aspen, or people are routinely leaving bags of restaurant food scraps in an unsecured dumpster. That bear is going to go, you know, those rubber bullets, they're kind of smart, but the food is so good, I don't care.

I mean, it seems like a lot of us wouldn't have enough experience in the wilderness or dealing with wild animals to even know to follow the rules. Like, the bears that I know best are like Yogi and Pooh and I guess, Baloo. You know, like the entertainment industry has really changed our perception of wildlife. And for a lot of people who live in dense areas, wildlife are the mice that they find in their kitchen or the roaches.

Yes, I think that's really true. And a large part of preventing human wildlife conflict situations is education. Also making people aware that their resources, the places that they can turn to to get helpful information about what to do without just calling an exterminator. But, yeah, I mean, there's. There's, there's Yogi Bear, but the other side of that is anytime there's a person that's killed by a bear, it's major headline news in the sense that. And the word attack is always used, even if it's a defensive scenario that has created this sense of bears is these monstrous kind of killers. So people have a. You know, some people are scared to death of them. Other people think they're kind of bumbling and cute and they'll walk up and take a selfie. And in both cases, this is like, no, no, no, no. Somewhere in between is where you want to land, folks.

All right, so where is that in between, Mary, Give us the bare basics.

Oh, people, the best thing that could happen with bears in America is for people to understand that as cute as they are and as much as you want to get close to them, do not feed them. Do not leave out birdseed or dog food. Just do not encourage them in any way just to come into your yard and your home. Because that's a situation that's going to progress to the point where somebody's going to get hurt. And usually it's the bear.

That's author Mary Roach. Her book is when nature breaks the law. You can watch Mary's talk about her previous book, bonk@ted.com. Today on the show Crimes in the Wild. This is Maple, and Maple is a very sweet dog with a very loud, never ending bark. Maple's human. Is my producer Katie Maple.

What are you eating?

And sometimes Katie feels like Maple is a bad dog.

No, no.

Which is why she hired dog trainer Avi Israeli.

Don't be as shy to also interrupt some of these behaviors.

As long as you know, Avi thinks Maple is a good girl. She just needs to learn some commands. Hey, knock it off.

Watch me instead.

So maybe start, you know, And Katie needs to have some patience.

Maple, let's go.

She lags behind.

We're moving forward, but there are some dogs who can't adapt and do not make good pets. Those dogs often end up in shelters, and they're the ones that Megan Parker is looking for.

It's not just the bad qualities we look for. We look for, like, high energy, but the ability to really focus. And this incredible, incredible compulsive need for a toy.

Megan uses that compulsive need to transform these naughty pups into. Into working dogs, highly skilled detection dogs.

In the case of detection dogs, that energy can be directed into work, and all of that discipline and training becomes this incredibly joyful activity for a dog that will do just about anything for a toy.

So what kind of detection are these dogs doing? One in particular?

Oh, that's a great question, because it probably is becoming an infinite answer. I think we're all more used to seeing those dogs in the airport. But really, the detection part of it is a formal training of a dog to find something that you ask it to find and ignore all the other background distractions that dogs might be more interested in. So you can ask a dog to detect a bomb in a very distracting environment, or in other law enforcement applications, drug detection, or finding a prisoner that's run away, or in search and rescue, or finding a body underwater. So all of these detection disciplines have expanded from the idea of, like, oh, wow, dogs can find something, and they can find it in all these crazy places, like up in trees or underwater or in the snow or in the desert. And so their sense of smell is what makes them so good at finding things, and that's what we ask them to do.

I mean, that's amazing. It's like they have a superpower. But you have to figure out how to channel that superpower in order to solve these really serious crimes. How do you do that?

Well, it's kind of easy because the dogs I look for have this, you know, this crazy attachment to a toy, right? So if I've got the toy, I basically have the dog. So it's really simple in a lot of ways. You can reward that dog to find something with a ball or with a tug toy.

He's on scent, and I can tell.

Because he's very diligent. So, you know, like, dogs have no reasons to find accelerants in the world. They're not going to get any sort of emotional reward from finding drugs or an invasive plant. But if you pair that scent with a toy that they are so obsessed with, then that's where all of this training happens.

And this is his paycheck.

He just gets to tug, where you.

Can reward them with something they love so much that they'll do all these crazy, repetitive tasks to get to it.

In a minute, we'll hear about one of the naughtiest dogs that Megan Parker ever worked with and how she trained him to root out poachers and animal traffickers on the show today, crimes in the Wild. I'm Anoush Zamorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr. We'll be right back.

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It's the TED Radio Hour from npr. I'm Anoush Zamarodi. Today on the show, crimes in the Wild. Before the break, dog trainer Megan Parker was telling us how she takes crazy toy obsessed dogs, trains them to become highly focused, highly skilled detection dogs. Here she is on the TED stage. I'd like to tell you a little.

Bit about this particular dog. His name is Ruger. He's the first anti poaching dog in Zambia, lives right next to a national park where animals are being poached and snared and trafficked out of the park and even elephant ivory from the Congo Basin is moving through Tanzania and through Zambia out to port style to be shipped abroad. And this dog is trained to find ivory and rhino horn, bushmeat, other wildlife contraband and guns and ammunition. I trained him and I found him to be a horrible dog. He bit and snapped at people. He was scary to approach. He was everything you fear in a dog. And it turns out he was going blind. So I take the stock to Zambia and I pair him with these scouts who don't have any history of having pets or being with dogs, and they learn to think of this dog as a colleague.

They thought of him as a colleague. That's so fascinating when you describe Brugger as being unruly when you first started working with him.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, these guys, the Scouts with Conservation South Dalangua, I mean, seriously, some of them are the best handlers I've ever seen. They have this. They wanted these dogs. They saw them as work partners right from the beginning instead of pets. They had a tremendous respect for the dogs. And I think sometimes.

Those of us.

Who have dogs as pets and grew up with dogs, we kind of lose sometimes this respect for what dogs can do. And they just met Ruger and was like, well, yeah, this is what Ruger needs. He needs this, you know, he needs us to talk to him when we come up to him. So he, you know, absolutely knows where we are and where we're coming from. And we need to build trust slowly over time. And as the. As the Scout's skills built as handlers, Ruger got to know them and got to know how to work with them, and he was this rock solid detection dog.

After four months of intensive training, they started setting up roadblocks and looking for illegal contraband being trafficked in vehicles along.

The roads outside this park.

And they checked vehicles and by a human doing it, it can take hours, especially for a bus loaded with luggage and food. And Ruger just checked it in a few minutes. This is their first practice training on a roadblock. And he alerted, which means he sat and he stared at his handler. And the handler was like, oh, dear. They searched it, they looked through, and they found nothing. And so they're just.

Their spirits dropped.

But they unloaded that minivan, and they have luggage out. And again, Ruger picked a piece of luggage, and he sat, and they searched through it, and they found nothing. And Ruger insisted, and they went back. And then Ruger hid on a tiny matchbox wrapped in a plastic bag inside clothes. And inside that matchbox was a primer cap, which is an illegal firing pin for a handmade rifle. And so everyone, all the passengers on that bus, all the Scouts, they suddenly believed.

And so suddenly, like, they have this magic instrument, which is a dog that can find darn near anything, you know, like. And. And word goes around really fast. Like, you know, like, if you eat bush meat, do they. Does the dog find it in your stomach? And there's, like, all of this, you know, this sort of lore goes out, which is an amazing deterrent for wildlife trafficking in a local region. So even having a dog in many places in the world makes people think about either committing a crime or moving something around, because dogs are good. And so just the mere presence of a dog can slow down trafficking.

And so we should say we are not talking about training these dogs for intimidation tactics.

Yeah.

Okay, So I do want to ask you about the dog's perspective. You know, like with Ruger, is this work fun for them? Do they know if they've done a good job and their handlers are pleased with them? Do they feel satisfied? I guess is the question.

Yes. And I think that there's so much that goes on once the dog is trained and is working. And in the field, the relationship training changes again, when the dog is really accomplished, when the dog is like, I got this. I know what you want me to do. And there is. During the training process, there's a point where, you know, you reward them when they. When they smell what you want them to smell, and when they tell you about it, which is like, sitting down and staring at you and waiting for the toy to come. And then there is something about the dog looking and searching for something. And I swear that that is, like, another part of their brain gets lit up as, oh, yeah, now this is really fun. And so as you train them, as the searching gets more complicated, as you hide things in more difficult places, you hide more objects, whatever it is out there, you make the dog lead the search instead of you knowing where it is all the time. Once they realize they're in charge and they're searching and when they find it, I mean, they are completely awash in confidence and accomplishment, and it's like they don't even need the praise. You know, how happy they are to accomplish this thing.

It is.

It's the most brilliant thing ever.

This whole episode is about crime in the animal world. And clearly, dogs have this incredible ability to help us fight crime. But it only works if we stop asking them to abide by our household rules and it sounds like. And treat them as partners. What is it about dogs that even makes this partnership possible?

Yeah, I think we have evolved with dogs, and I do think we're bound to dogs in a way that we're not bound to other species. They're not very closely related to us. So it does seem unusual that we have this partnership with dogs. You know, they've been. We've selected them to work with us for, like, herding our animals and helping us hunt, and we tapped into their willingness to talk to us, to communicate with their eyes. So we you know, when we look into our dog's eyes, we both get this rush of oxytocin, which is crazy because we've evolved to do that with our children or our mates. But to have that across a species is pretty cool. And they're willing to do all these things for us, just as we're willing to do all these crazy things for them.

That's Megan Parker. She's a dog trainer and the co founder of Working Dogs for Conservation. You can see her full talk@ted.com. oh, and special thanks to Maple, the dachshund job.

You're so smart. You're so cute.

So to wrap up our show about wild crimes, we want to reference one of the most popular TV programs ever, one that portrayed taking down organized crime.

Give you a walk through the garden.

Now, I know you don't want to hear this, Lieutenant, but the money. Money is real, and it's everywhere.

Yep, the wire.

And more than the drugs, it's the money that matters.

It's what many of us civilians think of when we hear about corruption or a big sting operation. On tv. We usually see crimes involving drugs or arms or human trafficking. So you might be surprised to hear that animal trafficking is the fourth largest industry for organized crime. This is sound from an undercover video of a sting called Operation Pluto. Traders in Vietnam are rummaging through large green sacks filled with thousands of pangolin scales.

So pangolins are really endangered in the wild and hugely threatened and not permitted for trade at all at any level.

This is Sarah Stoner. She's the director of intelligence at the Wildlife Justice Commission. The traders in the video think they're bargaining with potential buyers, but they're really talking to Sarah's undercover colleagues because pangolins are the most trafficked mammal in the world.

Unfortunately, over the last few years, there's been this upsurge in a demand for their scale, which is often used for traditional Chinese medicine. They're being trafficked in huge numbers.

Now. If you've never seen a pangolin, well, they're quite extraordinary. Here's Sarah Stoner describing them from the TED stage.

They're often referred to as scaly anteaters, with ants being their primary diet. And because of this, they play a really critical role in the ecosystem as pest controllers, where it is estimated they can consume as much as 200,000 insects per day.

Before pangolins became popular for use in Chinese medicine, they were also hunted for their meat, a delicacy.

But pangolins are really difficult to see in the wild. They're known to be shy and elusive creatures. They're also nocturnal. And when pangolins are under threat, they roll into a ball where they are protected by an outer layer of skin scales. But it's actually these scales that are.

To their detriment, because these scales can make smugglers rich. Police eventually seized 780 kilos of dried pangolin scales in that warehouse in Vietnam, which means that around 2,000 pangolins were killed.

I still find it unbelievable, even though I work on this problem every day.

It can take Sarah and her team years to uncover a pangolin trafficking network to that actually leads to arrests. And it all starts by. Yup, following the money.

What's really important to remember is that every step that the pangolin moves through the supply chain, the pangolin becomes more valuable. So the poacher on the ground won't receive much. A few dollars, maybe, maybe a little bit more, but really not much. The pangolin will then be passed on to a middleman. Often they will go to a facility where they will be processed, and by process, I mean the scales are removed, and there they will then be moved into sacs, and then the sacs will then move finally to their consolidation point where they will be smuggled out of Africa, let's say somewhere like Nigeria, for example. So we often see pangolin scales hidden in shipments of peanuts or coffee or beans. That's type of thing. So all of the paperwork is all legal. It's estimated around only about 10% of shipments are discovered, and likely much more go undetected, of course.

So we are talking about figuring out a vast global network of people, all with different jobs along the way.

Yeah. And there may be 20 or 30 or 40 individuals in that network.

Okay, so then what do you, as an intelligence analyst, do you.

So what analysts try to do is say, okay, so if you want to have the most impact on disrupting this criminal network, you need to target these three individuals, because these three individuals have a really important facilitating role. So if we think about poachers, for example, they might be part of the network, but they will very easily be replaced by someone else.

Sarah, maybe I watched too many movies, but I'm wondering, like, is there a godfather of pangolin scales? Is there someone sort of rich and tucked away who doesn't do any of the dirty work? The puppeteer, as it were, of the entire crime network.

Yep, there often are. Yeah. So we call those individual level five targets.

Level five. Okay.

So a poacher would be level one, the kingpins. Those top guys are level Five level two would be the guys that perhaps takes the pangolins from the poachers and then connects the next level, level three. So they're kind of brokers. They're the ones that are really well connected quite often. And their level fours, they're usually the ones that are most connected to the level fives. So it's important to identify the level fours so we can get more understanding about the level fives. But generally the level fives are completely removed from daily operation. They're usually very clean individuals. They pay their taxes and on the surface, they may have several legitimate businesses and look very clean. And they often have very influential roles, sometimes in really high level government positions as well.

When there's a big bust, what happens to the people and what happens to all those pangolin scales?

So those scales will be sent off the DNA tests. And that's really important actually, when we're thinking about understanding, understanding supply chains. So where geographically they have originated from in Africa. So that's great for mapping out where a lot of these pangolins are coming from. And that's great intel as well. Going forward in terms of the suspects, they will go through the judiciary process. And sometimes that process can take a long time. Other times in other countries in Asia, for example, that can be quite quick and people can be sent to jail quite quickly.

Of course, it's not just pangolins that are being trafficked and that you are investigating. There are lots of animals, elephants, rhinos, exotic reptiles, big cats. Do you get to see a lot of sting operations?

We do, yeah, we do. We had a case a few years ago. We had a live camera feed that was of a hotel room in Malaysia and there was a trafficker there and he was trying to sell some turtles and he had them in these suitcases and the turtles were climbing all over the couch and the bed in the hotel room. Yeah, and we saw the police come in and arrest him. So yeah, we do get to see like. And that really spurs us on and really motivates us. But most of the analysts like being behind computers and we're often very data people. So we quite like trawling through lots of information. But it gives us great insight and also makes that's real experts in what we do as well.

I just want to end on the pangolin. It's a really sad situation for these animals. But I just wonder, you know, with each cache that you do hunt down, with each bus that happens, it must feel like a drop in the bucket. But does it give you any hope at all.

Yeah, I do think that we are moving in the right direction. So we had a case last year in Nigeria where a network of individuals were trying to organize the shipment of pangolin scales from Nigeria to Vietnam, and we were able to support the Nigerian Customs Service to identify where that warehouse was, and they conducted a raid and they found 7 tons of pangolin scales there. I'm confident that they will receive a conviction, but time will tell. But I really try and accept that it's often, you know, two steps forward and one back and that we have to just try and channel that frustration and emotion to try and do the best work that we can because we're all in this job because we do love wildlife and we want to end this sort of horrific activity.

That was Sarah Stoner. She's director of intelligence at the Wildlife Justice Commission. You can see her full talk@ted.com whether you love animals or you love the true crime podcasting genre, or maybe you love both, we hope that you enjoyed our show this week about crimes in the wild. Our episode was produced by Katie Monteleone, Fiona Guerin, and Matthew Cloutier. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour and Rachel Faulkner White. Our production staff at NPR also includes James Delahousy and Catherine Cipher, and I want to mention that we have had several additions to our team in the past months. Congratulations to James and Sanaz for bringing Emmett and little Cena into the world, respectively. And congratulations to Rachel, who is now called Rachel Faulkner White. Congratulations, Rachel and Kellen. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineers were Anisha Hyness, Joby Tanseco, and Patrick Murray. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Phelan, Michelle Quint, Jimmy Gutierrez, and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Anoush Zamorodi and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr.

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