About this episode:
Recorded on the outskirts of Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, this episode drops David into the high-stakes reality of animal conservation. Guided by Peter Blinston and his team at Painted Dog Conservation, David joins the people whose work keeps Lycaon pictus alive in the buffer zone:
Belinda Ncube, PDC’s first female ranger, whose story runs from childhood bush camp to leading a unit of women in a landscape still shaped by patriarchal assumptions;
Adraino Sitole, who began as a community volunteer after a Painted dog was killed in a snare just moments from his village, and now tracks poachers with trained sniffer dogs while helping remove thousands of wire traps from the bush;
and David Kuvawoga, PDC’s Director of Operations, who literally takes Oakes from patrol to rapid response – explaining how the team uses radio alerts and 24/7 tracking to push packs away from snares, highways and other anthropogenic threats, and why, in this context, the low risk of ‘…a habituated wild dog is better than a dead wild dog.’
Painted Dogs may be Africa’s most effective large hunter, but they cannot outrun snares, disease spillover from domestic animals, a barage of road vehicles, or the human economics that drive bushmeat poaching in the first place. In this episode, David wrestles, in real time, with the moral knot at the heart of modern conservation: when drought, food insecurity and job scarcity push people towards the wild, removing snares is urgent, life-saving triage – yet it’s also only a sticking plaster if the conditions that put the wire in the bush remain unchanged. What emerges is the logic of PDC’s approach: conservation that extends beyond tracking collars and snare patrols into community investment – education, employment, youth programmes, and practical alternatives – because long-term ecological security in Hwange doesn’t begin with the dogs. It begins with the people who share their land.
David's thoughts:
I first met Peter Blinston a few years ago, when I hosted a fundraiser for David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation at Arundel Castle. In preparation, I read about the ecology of painted dogs and the work Peter and his colleagues were carrying out in Zimbabwe. I absorbed a “lite” version of life in the buffer zone of Hwange National Park: the pressures on communities, the prevalence of snaring, and the constant collision between human need and wildlife survival.
What I did not realise then was how often I would return to this same case study in the years that followed. Again and again, painted dogs have become the lens through which I find myself thinking about conservation more broadly — and about the far from unique threats faced by wildlife across the world. (I’ll explain why this is a case in a later blog entry, I’m sure.)
What makes the story of Hwange’s buffer zone so compelling is that, despite appearances, it is not really a story about wildlife. It is a story about us.
The more time I have spent visiting conservation sites and working alongside rangers on the ground, the clearer it has become that the underlying crisis is human before it is ecological. Across countries and contexts, poaching is rarely driven by cruelty alone. More often, it traces back to familiar pressures: poverty, food insecurity, lack of access to water, limited education, and the absence of stable employment.
At a local level, conservation can feel tangible. Invest in infrastructure, apprenticeships, agricultural support, boreholes, education, community employment, etc.. and many of the immediate pressures on wildlife can be reduced. Organisations on the ground prove – and try to prove – this every day. But the wider solution is harder, because it requires something larger than just project funding (which in itself is now far harder given the heartless deconstruction of USAID – which I’ll resist ranting about for now). Conservation success on a national or global scale requires governments to address the social and economic conditions that make exploitation of the natural world inevitable.
That link cannot be ignored. Where poverty and instability persist, wildlife will continue to be persecuted. If we are serious about protecting species such as painted dogs, conservation cannot stop at the boundary of a reserve. It has to extend into national policy, and arguably into international systems of finance, trade, security, and development.
Encouragingly, organisations such as Painted Dog Conservation, Save the Rhino Trust Namibia and Wildlife Trust of India – to name just a few I have covered on TAC – show that solutions do exist. Their work with local communities, through employment, education, outreach, and habitat protection, demonstrates that conservation succeeds when it supports the people living alongside wildlife. The challenge is not whether these models work. The challenge is whether governments are willing to scale them.
This is where the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore. Governments often frame biodiversity collapse as a distant or abstract threat, yet their own assessments suggest otherwise. The UK government’s recent Nature Security Assessment on global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security, released only after a freedom of information request, makes clear that biodiversity loss is not a future concern. It is a present and immediate risk, and one we are still failing to address meaningfully.
At the same time, official responses often imply that solutions remain uncertain, gesturing towards mechanisms such as carbon or biodiversity credits while acknowledging the lack of scalable answers.
But the answers are not absent.
They are already visible in the field: in Hwange, in Palmwag, in Kaziranga, and in countless other landscapes where conservationists and communities are doing the work governments too often describe only in theory. Effective conservation is not a mystery. We know that protecting wildlife means investing in people. We know that local models can work. What remains missing is not evidence, but political will.
LINKS:
Painted Dog Conservation – https://www.painteddog.org/
