In the center of Zambia, Africa, lies Kafue National Park, an abundant wilderness area where elephants, rhinoceroses, pangolins, and other animals run free but face extinction due to international poaching, a $20 billion dollar industry. Mirra Bank’s challenging film highlights the beauty of the region, its wildlife inhabitants, and the heroic efforts by several organizations and communities to thwart illegal trafficking.
Sport Beattie, founder, and CEO of Game Range International is working hard with the Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA), the Nature Conservancy, and local communities to preserve and protect the animals. As Sport explains it, poaching occurs by poor villagers residing next to the preserve who simply seek to make a living. Sport believes efforts to turn the money back to the community through conservation of habitat and animals can help alleviate the need to poach. One way to engage the community is to recruit former or potential poachers by offering them jobs as scouts for the purpose of developing intelligence on poaching activities. Kingsley is a former poacher and tells his story of how he was arrested and then offered a job working for ZAWA’s special anti-poaching unit. Anety Milimo, wildlife police officer, supervises Kingsley and describes how she became involved with intelligence work and policing Zambia’s wildlife preserve.
Another promising strategy to fund conservation is to promote more wildlife photographic tourism; visitors can come, pay park fees to view the wild animals, and funds can be used for local employment. When elephants are killed for their tusks, the young elephants are left behind. To help the orphaned elephants, injured pangolins, and other animals, the Wildlife Rescue Veterinary Unit has a nursery to take care of animals; Camp Phoenix sits close to the wilderness area where the orphaned elephants can be fostered and reintroduced to the wild.
In the southwest corner of Kafue National Park, Moomba is awarded the first community license to manage and protect its own timber in a large teak forest containing 76 villages. Here, The Nature Conservancy hires native Zambian, Patricia Mupeta, to be a strategy director and develop a local conservation program. At a Moomba Council meeting, Patricia discusses conservation plans; villagers are concerned as communities are expanding and pressing up against the parks. It can be dangerous to get water, so equipment is installed to obtain water from the river for villagers. Learning from Namibia, where tourism is promoted as well as tactics for protecting villages from stampeding elephants and prowling lions, the village employs elephant scare tactics, electric fences, and warning towers to alert everyone of approaching lions. Zambia is making strides towards sustaining wild habitats and supporting villages.
With superb photography, compelling narration by a number of individuals making a difference for conservation, No Fear, No Favor makes a convincing case for protection of habitat, plants, and animals in Africa’s wilderness areas. Recommended. Aud: J, H, C, P.